This is not a fully formed idea. I don’t have a good succinct question by which we can rally around. That said:
I’m watching a guy tour the most remote part of the CONUS, round about Glasgow Montana. And there’s a disctinct air of ‘Born here, been here my whole life…people come here and last a winter or two and then move.’
Which is weird because my inlaws live in Rural Coastal Virginia and there’s a distinct Come Here vs. Born here mentality. It kinda bugs Dad because he’s been there about 30 years and the locals still exclude him from stuff…he’s still a Come Here.
Turn the time machine back to 1988 and my Dad was complaining about all the Californians that were moving to Denver. In my mind I’m thinking ‘we came here from California in 1970’. And it’s cute, as in the timeframe between there and now, the population has more than doubled…and people haven’t been having kids at quite the rate it would take to make 'em all native.
So…what is this thing that makes certain people really upset at the people that move in from elsewhere? Is it an American thing or a Global phenomena? (I seem to recall Americans in Japan run into career/financial brick walls…is it because they’re Come heres?..Likewise, the whole Expat thing where people retire to where their money goes farther seems like another application of Born Here vs. Come Here
Tribalism. Also, some people are so small that their only claim to “greatness” is where they’re from. Having never lived anywhere else themselves, the possibility that someone, much less just about anyone, could show up one day from anywhere else and do just fine living there—like it’s nothing special—is too much for them to handle.
I can see familiarity, too…We’ve lived in this house for 26 years…and the neighborhood has plots with land, the houses have different set-backs, so it doesn’t look quite as crowded…whereas in other parts of denver, the houses are rectangular, 3-4 stories rather than 2, and they’re shoulder to shoulder.
Not a fan of that kind of change…guess I’ve gotta blame all them Come-Heres.
It’s pretty universal that people who “Come Here” shake things up for the natives. And it’s also pretty universal that the people who were “Born Here” like the way things are enough to become “Stayed Here.”
Not to mention that people who come from different areas often expect that everything they had in the old place should be available in the new place. That often means wanting stuff that has to be paid for, and the natives have gotten along just fine without it. There’s quite a culture clash when people who move to a small town discover that they have gravel roads, wells and septic tanks instead of a municipal water supply, and a 40-mile trip to the nearest emergency room and everything else that goes with a low cost of living.
Humans are innately tribalistic and territorial. We evolved in small bands that cooperated and held territory. Outsiders were seen as useless at best or competition for territory, resources and mates at worst, if not outright hostile and dangerous. We take these unconscious attitudes that out-groups are useless as best or a threat at worst into our daily lives and its very easy to see ‘those people’ as coming here and taking all the jobs.
Then you have the real world ramifications of people moving to a new area. Their politics may be different, which changes the political system. A lot of people in texas hate people who move from California due to this. They feel they move to texas and vote for politicians who do not represent the values of native texans. The population increase can drive up the cost of housing (another thing people moving out of California and nearby states are guilty of too).
Controversial take, but the whole ‘born here vs come here’ philosophy is a big part of why arab muslim nations are so hostile to Israel. They feel they came in, took their land and imposed a foreign culture by foreign people in their arab, muslim backyard.
There is probably a big divide east coast vs west coast. No one on the west coast has been here that long to be considered serious old money like a Rockefeller, or some such.
Another possibility, is that Born Here folks in nice places are understandably not happy about being priced out by someone selling off their 1950’s 1200 sq ft Silicon Valley bungalow, and then buying a big ass house with money in the bank in Bend Oregon.
I saw one of the more bizarre “Born Here” speeches at a local school board meeting. A long-time resident explained how they didn’t think the school district should try to be so good (by various metrics) because it was just “attracting outsiders” by being a “destination school district”.
When you are actively undermining your own schools, it’s clearly something pretty deep-seated.
Did other long-time residents then stand to congratulate him on expressing his concerns in “authentic frontier gibberish” with “a courage little seen in this day and age”?
You’ll even see resentment among certain Born-Here’s against other Born-Heres because their parents were Come-Heres. (A.k.a. “A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that doesn’t make ’em biscuits!”)
Possibly the oldest phrase in human language is “There goes the neighborhood.”. I would argue that taken as a whole it is the people who don’t think that way that are outliers.
It’s pretty much a universal human thing particularly in smaller communities with their own sense of culture. I’m not completely unsympathetic to it when the community is fairly poor but the out of towners moving in are rich. I’m totally all for it when “coming here” doesn’t actually mean moving to the community and being part of it but just buying a holiday home and staying their a few weeks a year.
It’s certainly a universal theme and not confined to the US. I’ve met it often in the UK, particularly in smaller communities. It’s one of the things I loved about living in London, where everyone is from everywhere and where you were born doesn’t really matter.
When I loved from London to Bristol, I encountered the phrase ‘DFLs’ - Down From Londoners - basically people moving out of the capital for a better quality of life, and pushing up the house prices. I do have some sympathy, but also some frustration, because places naturally change with de-industialisation and it’s not all the fault of people with different jobs and accents. So I’m a DFL, and try not to let it bother me.
One of the weird things about San Francisco is it was a complete cosmopolitan world city where everyone seemed to be from somewhere else (and different country as likely as a different part of the US) but it still had a teeny bit of that. The few actual locals were very proud of being “born here” and that was required for membership of the true SF local club, no number of decades living there was good enough.
You’ve raised a huge point that nobody else has directly spoken about: “Born here” versus “stayed here”. "Stay here"s are people who actively avoid change. And a lot of that goes with rural or small town thinking. Places where “time stands still” and Andy would still recognize Mayberry. And places where like the OP’s in-laws, the headcount is so small that you can really feel the opinions of others.
Conversely, I live in a 6M-person metroblob. One famous for the large percentage of "come here"s. The "born here"s might or might not like me, but how could I tell? Their opinion and whisperings are lost in the cacophony of 6M people doing their own thing. Not the 25 people in Bumfuque VA whose every utterance is heard by (or passed along to) the other 24.
Of everyone who’s born in any particular small town, most will move away. It’s a self-selecting small percentage (10? 20?) that choose to stay. And they are the ones maintaining that “born here” vs. “come here” distinction. Because to them it matter hugely as part and parcel of their “stay here” mentality. All their contemporaries who left and went elsewhere by definition were happy enough to be "come here"s to someplace else instead.
I get the general concept. Of course those who have been somewhere a while would not feel so connected to those who just came here. But, when you’ve been here long enough and become a part of the culture, it doesn’t continue to make sense to me.
It would be like me in high school treating the kids who moved here in second grade the same way as the kid who just showed up last year. Nah, the second grade kid is gonna be treated like everyone else.
(Though, of course, I always tried to get to know the new kids. You get to help them out and learn new things. People need friends.)
In the Cleveland area I get the sense that people are very happy to have others come here. I’m guessing that is from the city’s history of being a huge boom town (some of America’s richest people lived here in the 20s, and its population was 900k in the 30s) to a bit of a ghost town (now under 400k). We need warm bodies, and people choosing to come here is an indicator of something positive.
Plus most of us are descendants of the European come-heres of the 20s and 30s, so we’re not trying to gate keep an area that was open to our grandparents. And Clevelanders love to try all sorts of new foods.
That’s not to say that some of the suburbs don’t suffer from “come here vs born here” mentality. Which is kind of crazy with the “white flight” migration - the inner-ring suburbs were all white Clevelanders and immigrants post-war then Black families moved in so all of the white people moved out to the outer-ring suburbs (where I am) which was just all farms and stuff, and they suburbanized the farmland so there’s a lot of crying about “how things used to be” and poo-pooing new development but I’m old enough to remember when their development used to be a farm so I get tired of their bitching.
But also, I absolutely love it when people move to my area, especially from far-flung places, so I guess I’ve got that Clevelander mentality. I like when we’re chosen.
That may be harmless in some communities, but it is generally viewed as a negative in Hawai’i - there is a real housing shortage. Although, if people want to buy a home and rent it out at fair market rates, that’s less objectionable. (Though still there is a fair bit of resentment over wealthy haole outsiders owning land that was basically stolen from the Native Hawaiians.)
As for me, I have never had the option of being a “born here” as we moved constantly while I was growing up so I have no roots anywhere. Technically, I was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, but it’s not like I have ever lived there, have relatives there, or know anything about the place. The “born heres” in Hawaii are generally very kind, but if anyone were ever to tell me “Yankee go home,” my response would be “I have no home - should I be unwelcome anywhere?”
