Are you a native Oregonian?

If so, you are a rare duck.  Or beaver.  

 When I grouse about how much the state has changed, and not in a good way, I reach for the Californication movement that began in the 70s.  Governor Tom McCall’s most famous quote was “please visit, but don’t stay.”  We had seen the sprawl, the rebellion and the madness that was beginning to overtake California and didn’t want their problems to migrate north.  People joked about barricading I-5 at the border, but sadly, nothing ever came of that idea.  

I think it was our live-and-let-live nature - the desire to be left alone to do your own thing that attracted disaffected outsiders who turned into the intolerant progressives we now have who want to tell us how to live.  We were too nice.  Too open.  Too accepting.  We were patsies, ripe to be taken advantage of and having our culture destroyed. 

I stumbled on this map from 2014, and though it is now 8 years old, it explains how the Oregon identity of independence and ruggedness has been undermined. 

Oregon Office of Economic Analysis

Nationally, 67% of Americans currently live in the state in which they were born (this is excluding foreign born and naturalized citizens), however in Oregon only about 50% of our population was born in the state and its even lower in our southern counties. I color coordinated the map to the national average. Yellow indicates the local share of residents born in the same state is comparable to the national share, while counties in shades of green have an above average share of same state residents. Counties that are orange and red have a below average share, indicating a larger presence of migrants.

Overall, Oregon’s population growth is heavily reliant upon migration. During the 90s and through the mid-2000s, nearly 3/4 of our population growth was due to net migration.