On the front page of yesterday's Wheeling News-Register, editor Mike Myer wants to “Bring the Kids Back Home.” Last January, Myer wrote a similar column. (No link – it wasn’t posted. I wrote about it here.) Like that earlier column, Myer has still not done any research into that age group or what they believe is important. Instead, the column relies on his own baby boomer perspective:

Why do they leave? Because they can’t find the jobs they want here, partly. And — let’s be honest — what we have to offer here doesn’t satisfy quite a few young people. The bright lights and city sights draw them away.

Here’s his solution:

Here’s a thought: Let’s stop trying to keep the fresh high school and college graduates from leaving. That’s a losing battle. They’re not going to believe the grass isn’t greener elsewhere until they see for themselves.

It’s the late 20s and early 30s crowd we need to lure back. They’ve been to the big city, so to speak, and found that in many ways, it really is a concrete jungle. A substantial number of them are yearning to come home.

(A “substantial number” want to come back? Does he supply any proof? No, not even an anecdote.)

In that earlier post, I quoted from extensive research done by Pew Research that compared the attitudes of millennials (the group Myer want to return home) to generation X, baby boomers, and the silent generation. The graphs in my original post, for example, show very significant differences between millennials and the other groups on the issues of immigration and climate change. (On these issues and others, they are much more liberal than any of the other groups.) On immigration, it is hard for me to fathom how most millennials not living in WV would react to the near-paranoid fear of immigrants that is so much a part of our state politics. (See, for example, our local Republican state senate candidate’s Facebook ads in the last election in which he vowed to protect us from those marching hordes from Central America or the WV delegate who wanted to donate part of WV’s budget surplus to building Trump’s wall.) *

If you check the Pew study, climate change is another major concern of millennials. That’s not exactly a worry of West Virginia’s dominant political party, the Republicans, most of whose members are politically located somewhere between an outright denial of climate change and a let’s-do-something-about-climate-change-only-if-it-includes-coal position.

Beyond Pew’s polling, West Virginia is Trump country. As I previously wrote:

While millennials are mostly liberal, West Virginians overwhelmingly voted for Trump and a high percentage continues to support his policies. If West Virginia is not the most conservative state in the nation, we are certainly close. West Virginia is Trump's sanctuary state -- the place where he can safely return to again and again knowing he'll be uncritically accepted by supporters. It's also the state in which the largest newspaper chain is the very conservative Ogden Newspapers and where the default setting on all public TVs is set to Fox News (I think there's a law to that effect). If not for a job, why would a politically aware millennial choose to move to West Virginia?

I know there are lots of exceptions, but the research clearly suggests that millennials are the age group least likely to support the current president. Despite this antipathy, Myer’s answer to my question is the same as U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey who is interviewed in the opinion section:

Bailey is right, though. Much of West Virginia, including our area, is a wonderful place to raise children.

That’s a baby-boomer’s response. If you care about the air your family breathes, why would you risk their health as CO2 emissions will rise significantly in this state (especially in this area) due to the EPA’s recent changes in emission standards? If you want your kids to grow-up tolerant and prejudice-free, why would you move back to a state where its majority party gave space to a poster that suggests that a Muslim congresswoman may cause another 911 or where another Republican legislator went unpunished for comparing LGBTQ’s to the KKK while calling them a terrorist group. It may not be a fair picture of the state, but our worsening air, our unwillingness to do anything about it, and our leader’s lack of tolerance are stories that made national news that were probably read by our former millennials. Yes, West Virginia was a great place to raise a family in the 1950s and 1960s. However, that might not be a winning argument for those who have left the state.

*Similarly, here’s the LA Times last week citing similar research on millennials:

Their careful research suggests that the generation’s outsized impact on the U.S. becoming simultaneously more accepting of what older groups considered extreme views (support for homosexuals, for instance) and much less accepting of racist commentary reflects a deep-seated belief in tolerance and inclusivity. As the nation’s most diverse adult generation (two out of five millennials are non-white), it is not hard to understand why this cohort would be hostile to negative comments about people like themselves or their family and friends.