There is a constant refrain among conservative citizens in conservative states: “Not another bunch from California!” and “Bet they vote for the same stuff that got them in trouble back there.” Liberals from liberal states are fleeing the product of their own ideas- but they aren’t fleeing the ideas, we think. Now, many a Californian or New Yorker is coming to a conservative state in order to be conservative, in order to regain America-as-it-should-be (in great imperfection, but not utterly ruined), as with this excellent ex-NY resident. Too many aren’t, though; they’re leaving the land they burned to a crisp and waving around the matches, working to light their new state too. How do we stop that?

Straight up stopping immigration from other states is legally impossible, for all sorts of reasons, barring outright secession. Thankfully, the nuclear option isn’t the only choice we have. People move to conservative states for many reasons. Some move for family, some for business, some for freedom. The first we can only do so much about, and there’s no reason to say they’re all bad. Those who move here for freedom, well, they’ve got potential at least- and possibly they’ll even assimilate to the local culture, grow affection for their new state.

So the real problem we have are those who move to conservative states because they want the economic benefits of relative sanity, because the effects of liberal policies have made liberal states unlivable to them. Removing this incentive isn’t an option, though; we don’t want to tank our economy purely to keep out California, and most of the measures we could take to do so are liberal measures. Besides, we should not do evil that good might come (Rom. 3:8).

What we can do is make the state better in ways that repel liberals, that make the state less likable to those we like less. Now, this is in large part a cultural thing, a matter of public morals and constant hostility to sin (constant willingness to forgive the repentant). However, culture’s not all of it. Government has a role to play as well, though policies of omission and restriction.

Policies of omission are the weaker of the two. The prime example here is gun law. A state with Constitutional gun laws is good; a state with moral gun laws is even better, being less restricted still. Liberals will be less likely to move into a state where open-carry and concealed carry are legal, where self defense is maximally robust, where men are encouraged to carry their weaponry openly into public functions, including government affairs, where the state refuses to aid any overreach by federal government or other state governments against the self-defense rights of its citizens. Unfortunately, they’ll probably also be attracted by the reduced crime rates; besides, they don’t have to get guns. They can move in, vote liberal, protest against guns, and use their political opinions as victim-status fodder.

The same goes for salutary deregulation and the resulting economic-industrial boom (accompanied, if we’re smart, by cleaning up the court system and providing robust means to hold companies accountable for harm they cause through malice or neglect, in jury trials), a boom that would, I warrant, massively reduce drug problems. It’s a good conservative (not neo-con) policy, one worth working toward, but it’s not particularly repulsive to liberals. Liberalism has a long history of coopting economic success into elitism, corporatism, and socialism; this need be no different.

Policies of restriction I define as those policies which don’t just hold back from banning what liberals want banned but actually restrict them from engaging in the full breadth of their ideology. These, more than omissive policies, will make the conservative state inhospitable to the liberal who wants to purple-and-blue it. Let’s consider a few of them.

Perhaps the most effective policy of restriction I can think of is a thorough crack-down on abortion. Specifically, ban abortion and abortifacients (with life-of-the-mother exceptions requiring affidavits reviewable by jury if suspected of being unjustified). Explicitly define the unborn infant as a human being for purposes of murder prosecutions and actually prosecute the murderers. Enact laws which consider in-state conspiracy to abort as conspiracy to commit murder, even if the actual abortion is out-of-state and therefore not within jurisdiction. All these constitute a comprehensive and effective criminalization of a central rite of the liberal religion, a ban on the human sacrifice which is part of that lifestyle whether in theory or practice. It also disincentivizes casual sex massively, which is similarly a disincentive for liberals (and those who are liberal by lifestyle if not as a conscious ideology).¹

Restrictions on homosexual marriage and un-Biblically easy divorce are probably a little harder to get through, legally, given Obergefell and the legal problems of how a state deals with massively differing marriage regulations in other states, to recognize marriages and divorces or not. I can’t profess to be a legal expert here (not yet, at least, wait till I’ve gone through law school). Nevertheless, with divorce, at least, the state can require proof of adultery, desertion, or abuse to allow it, and it can enact more stringent laws against adultery. Whether it can enforce this recognition against the rules of other states, I do not know. As for homosexuality, I recommend each state undertake to nullify the absolute absurdity that is saying it’s Constitutionally protected and get rid of homosexual marriage immediately; if possible, it should like abortion become illegal. This should include crackdowns on homosexual ‘adoption’ and surrogacy. How these two policies would counteract liberal (and liberal-flavored ‘conservatives’) is obvious.

States can alter their approach to public schooling. Public schooling is, of course, an establishment of religion (education being inherently religious), and so the state that engage in it should ensure that the religion they teach is straight-up Christianity- or stop doing public schooling. Secular schooling is the square circle of politics; either teach God’s true or don’t teach at all. Both would serve admirably to drive off liberals, and the reduction in taxes would be nice.² At the very least liberal ideologies should be illegal to teach in schools, whether because they’re the wrong religion or because they’re religious (hypocritical as the second would be).

Speaking of kids: make castration illegal, particularly child-castration, except on grounds of necessity to medical treatment. Psychological demands must be entirely insufficient to permanently mutilate adults, let alone children. Even more than that adults have no right to destroy the bodies given them by God, parents do not have the right to destroy their children’s bodies. It should, in fact, be criminalized under similar terms to the criminalization of abortion, including conspiracy-to-commit (this second must always have a high burden of proof, however, to ensure justice and ward of injustice). Removing the transsexual sacrament of leftism is, again, an effective way to ward off many, many liberal voters.

This isn’t a comprehensive plan. There are more possible policies; there are undoubtedly refinements needed to my recommendations. They are suggestions, after all, not proposed legislation. Too many of them are years and possibly decades off, too contrary to the current cultural milieu to be tolerable even to conservative states. Nevertheless, this is a course of action which can ward off liberal immigration from conservative states- by making them want to stay out. It’s not going to stop all of it, of course, but each policy will reduce it. What remains is the job of the receiving state’s cultural fabric to absorb and transmute, to change without being tainted by. It’s not an easy task, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

God bless.

Footnotes

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1. There’s a reason liberal men have at times been more in favor of abortion than the women. ↩︎
2. If you say that public school is necessary to educate all the ‘poor kids’…. First, libraries and other resources exist, not to mention most ‘poor’ people in America have at least some internet access, so education is possible, if not precisely easy. Second, ‘no education’ is better than educating them towards Hell. Third, I don’t believe that education is the salvific institution many Americans consider it, following that great liberal Rousseau; education is undoubtedly good, but it’s not everything. Fourth, it is my belief that private and church efforts would more than replace the government if the culture wanted them to- and do much better than the state. See this article. ↩︎