Did you know people were leaving Britain in droves? I don’t have a strong editorial opinion about this, but it seems like something worth discussing. It’s kind of like the American mass-migration to the Sunbelt, only in this case the “sunbelt” is in other countries, notably Spain and Australia.

I lived in Britain from 2000-2002 and I can tell you, it’s probably not what you think. England is terribly crowded, though Wales and Scotland less so (and I’ve never been to Northern Ireland). Litter is awful. Petty crime, especially car and home burglaries, is terrible. Admittedly, your odds of being shot there are way, way lower than here. But when my wife left her laptop in the backseat of the car and had her window smashed out, the universal response was “oh, you shouldn’t have left it there.”

Then there’s the weather. It’s terrible. They’ve had no summer at all this year, global warming notwithstanding. And by straddling the line between an American market economy and a European full service/high tax one, Britain has made sure some residents feel their taxes are too high compared to the US and the rest feel their services are too poor compared to the Continent.

Their healthcare is universally available, but there is a steady, constant drumbeat of complaint. Wealthy Britons either buy their own medical care there or, quite often, go elsewhere to get top-of-the-line treatment. The very best doctors wouldn’t gravitate toward, or stay in, Britain because the centrally-controlled pay is too low.

Of course, only some people are leaving. Others are ENTERING Britain in droves. Mostly these are immigrants from countries where things are much worse. So in the last two years Britain saw 574,000 new folks come in while 385,000 left, the most since they started keeping count this way in 1991. That’s a net gain of a bout 190,000. That’s quite few when you figure there were 59 million in the last census (more than 50 million of whom live in England).

My point? Globalization is redrawing the population map in ways most of us never think about. Living in central Indiana, we can feel acutely the immigration of Latinos drawn here for better wages. More subtle is the feel of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of people each of us know who have moved to Florida, Georgia, Arizona or California.

America’s a big country—we do a lot of our in- and out-migration internally. For others, the “sunbelt” is outside their borders. We probably need to readjust our sense that demographic change is only about non U.S. citizens coming here for jobs. It is about that, and it would be senseless to deny it, but it is also about multiple forces pushing and pulling people away from their birthplace.

For a lot of people, those forces—whether money, quality of life, opportunity, repression, convenience—override the traditional commitments to extended family, ethnic/religious ties, or patriotism. As I say, I don’t have a strong editorial opinion about this, but it seems worth a moment to stop and consider.

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