There’s constant carping about people streaming across the U.S. southern border, giving the word immigration a bad name. Here in Nevada we have people migrating to the Silver State from the west and local leaders couldn’t be happier.
According to Redfin, 5,000 moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in August, down from last August when 6,800 Los Angelinos moved to Sin City. In total, Las Vegas is adding approximately 115 residents to its population base every day according to the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research data projections, reports the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Tech millionaires and billionaires — mostly from California — were being pitched the idea of moving to Las Vegas at a recent event at the swanky Summit which overlooks Las Vegas. Billionaire Andrew Cherng, the co-founder of Panda Express, who moved to Las Vegas in 2014, said it’s a simple dollar-and- cents, or shall we say tax-and-theft, decision. “I didn’t like the idea of people voting to pay higher taxes in California,” he said as to what precipitated his move east. “That is such a really important idea to me, and I didn’t like that. And that’s why I decided to make the move.”
So, the haves are leaving California, leaving behind the have-nots, high taxes, plus high violent and property crime rates. The LVRJ’s Patrick Blennerhassett explains, “Many California transplants to Las Vegas, including Cherng, point to the political slant of the state as their main grievance, in which politicians have been voted in under the idea of higher tax rates offering more government programs and social services, however California has both the highest rate of poverty and the state’s opioid death rate has steadily increased since Covid.”
The typical working Joe and Jane in Vegas worries that these liberal Californians will vote for the same policies that are ruining the state they are running from. “I think the people that are leaving California are leaving for specific reasons,” Teddy Liaw, the founder of NexRep, who moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas close to three years ago, told the LVRJ. “None of us are here to recreate what we left, we left it for a reason.”
“I don’t think one’s political views will change, I will probably continue to be a liberal,” David Chao, the co-founder and general partner at DCM, a multibillion dollar venture capital firm, who moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas in 2021, said. “But if you don’t understand the other side, you’re forever going to have that chasm. And if you look at today’s America, if you don’t understand the other side, you’re just going to get more apart, and I don’t think that’s good for the country.”
Jason Lin, managing partner for Super Capital Group, a technology venture capital firm, said an important function of the government is law and order, and part of the reason he left California.
Law and order and low taxes attract wealth. Sounds simple, but can Las Vegas hold on to it?
