A growing migration to the American South is reshaping culture, higher education and industry, a Vox podcast guest said, as students, filmmakers and musicians help carry Southern aesthetics into the national mainstream.
College enrollment patterns offer an early signal of the shift. The number of students leaving the North to attend Southern schools rose about 30 percent between 2018 and 2022, with large state campuses known for football and Greek life — such as the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi — reporting increased numbers of out-of-region enrollees. Reasons cited for the movement include the draw of campus life, lower overall costs, relaxed COVID-19 restrictions at some Southern institutions and the social visibility of recruitment and Greek-life culture on platforms such as #RushTok.
The trend on college campuses is one piece of a broader transformation Amanda Mull, identified on Vox’s weekly call-in podcast Explain It to Me. Mull, a senior reporter, said the South’s cultural ascendancy is rooted in decades-long economic and technological changes that began to accelerate in the mid-20th century.
Mull cited three developments in the 1950s and 1960s that changed how the South fit into the national economy and imagination: the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act, expanded highway infrastructure and the widespread adoption of air conditioning. Those changes made Southern cities more accessible, more hospitable to outside business and more attractive as places to live and work.
“Political evolution, logistical evolution, and technological evolution” converged, Mull said, reshaping political possibilities and commercial calculations and helping spur population growth that has continued for decades.
Southern state governments also actively courted businesses, offering tax incentives and other packages to attract manufacturing and media production. Mull pointed to the auto industry’s shift as a clear example. Southern states marketed themselves as more favorable environments for car manufacturing, in part by presenting a union-weaker labor climate than the Midwest and Northeast, drawing both foreign and domestic manufacturers.
The entertainment industry has followed a related playbook. Georgia and Louisiana, among other states, have offered substantial tax incentives to lure television and film production. Atlanta has become a production hub, hosting a Netflix complex and serving as a filming location for numerous Marvel projects and other major releases. State officials have emphasized the region’s variety of landscapes — cities, mountains, coastline and forests — which can double for many locations on screen.
Those industrial and production shifts have cultural consequences. Mull argued that the South’s influence is evident in music, where the rise of Southern hip-hop and a renewed commercial embrace of country music have helped reshape mainstream tastes. She described the growth of country’s mass-market appeal as partly a response to the widespread popularity of Black Southern musical creativity.
“You look at someone like Morgan Wallen, who is enormously popular among listeners and has also been in the news for doing explicitly racist things, it’s hard to look at that and go, ‘Okay, this has to be at least part a reaction against Black dominance in music,’ ” Mull said on the podcast. At the same time, she noted, other country artists such as Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile are positioned as challengers to reactionary strains, while artists like Beyoncé have engaged Southern musical forms from different perspectives. Mull pointed to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter project as an example of a Black Southern artist reworking and re-embracing aspects of country music.
Mull emphasized the long-standing cultural overlaps in the region, arguing that it is difficult to cleanly separate “white Southern culture” from “Black Southern culture” because of shared history and mutual influence over time.
The broad embrace of Southern aesthetics, however, carries complexities for people who live in the region. Mull said she felt ambivalent about the national fascination with Southern style and symbolism. It can be positive when it leads to greater recognition of the South as a legitimate part of the country, she said, but it can also be troubling when people adopt the region’s aesthetics without reckoning with its history.
“It’s strange. It’s really uncanny to see people embrace the aesthetics of the South without contending with what the South is and what it has been and what it means,” Mull said. She added that many Southerners confront the region’s history directly in ways that outsiders who adopt Southern imagery often do not.
Economic incentives and cultural production have intertwined to create a feedback loop: states offer favorable conditions for businesses and productions, those industries bring attention and jobs, and cultural exports amplify Southern styles and sound. That loop has helped push everything from college recruitment to streaming content toward the region.
Observers say the pattern has policy and social implications. The relocation of industry and population affects local labor markets, housing and political dynamics. The expansion of film and television production brings jobs but also raises questions about long-term benefits for local communities and the extent to which incentives reward outside companies more than resident workers.
Mull’s assessment frames the Southern surge as neither sudden nor monolithic. It is the product of decades of demographic shifts, infrastructure changes and deliberate policy decisions, and it plays out unevenly across music, higher education and media. As the South’s cultural footprint grows, the region’s history, economic strategies and artistic output remain central to understanding what that influence means for the rest of the country.