[echotango]

If this article had been published in 1992 when NAFTA, free trade and immigration were actually being debated, it would have been ridiculed by the establishment as backwards and probably racist anti-globalization propaganda. Even now, questioning the govenment economic policies that directly resulted in this mess lands you on a professional blacklist at 'respected' publications.

[wahern]

It wouldn't have been written in 1992 because interstate net migration rates were near their historical highs. See, e.g., Figure 1, page 41 in https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130p...

[echotango]

That's not what the article is about. Its about whole cities becoming unemployed as a result of factories moving overseas, and unfair trade deals signed in the early 1990's. The people in that figue moved because they found work somewhere else, not because their entire community was terminated overnight.

[wahern]

The decline of the Rust belt began in the 1970s, and by the 1980s you already had movies like Gung Ho

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film)

dramatizing existential crises of factory towns in the face of manufacturing off-shoring.

Factory towns are nothing new, and neither are factory towns disappearing overnight. What's relatively recent in modern American history is the reticence of Americans to move, thus the title of the article. But this reticence is probably a regression to the mean, much like everything else about the post-post-WWII economy.