The State Nobody Wants to Leave, Until They Do

America has spent years engaged in a heated debate over immigration. How do we secure the border? How does immigration affect our job market? What should we do about the millions of illegal immigrants already living here? These are important questions, and they deserve serious discussion. But if we set them aside for just a moment to examine an equally important issue, I believe it would do Louisiana more immediate good than continuing the same exhausted debate we have been having for years.

While Washington, and the states more broadly, debate who is coming into America, Louisiana ought to be asking why so many of our own people are leaving it.

It's graduation day at LSU. A long line of America's future rises one by one to shake the hand of the university president. They walk across the stage, accept their degree, smile for the cameras, celebrate with their families, and then pack their bags for Texas, Florida, or just about anywhere but the place they call home.

Why are Louisiana graduates leaving the state in an Oregon Trail style caravan? Despite attempts to downplay the issue and pretend it is not really happening, the trend is impossible to ignore, and the reasons are not a mystery. We can point to several key factors that continue driving talented Louisianans elsewhere and, more importantly, begin asking what it would take to slow the steady march out of our state.

First, we have to state the obvious. People leave for career opportunities. Plain and simple.

Louisiana offers some of the finest careers in petrochemicals, shipping, energy, and manufacturing. Those industries have long been the backbone of our economy and have provided generations of Louisianans with stable, rewarding careers, whether they hold advanced degrees or not. The problem arises when a graduate's ambitions lie elsewhere. If you want to work in finance, entertainment, major media, aerospace technology, or any number of specialized professions, you simply aren't going to find the same abundance of opportunity here that you will in places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, or Nashville. Those cities are home to industries that hire entry level talent by the hundreds, giving young professionals a chance to establish themselves and grow.

That does not mean these careers do not exist in Louisiana. They do. They are simply fewer in number, making them far more competitive and often requiring graduates to wait for opportunities that may never come or, as I have experienced firsthand, pursue advanced degrees beyond the increasingly common bachelor's degree to remain competitive. Faced with that reality, many decide it makes more sense to move than to wait.

So what is the answer?

It's not to convince our graduates to lower their ambitions. It is to create a Louisiana where those ambitions can be pursued without crossing state lines. That means attracting new industries, encouraging entrepreneurship, and expanding sectors of our economy that have historically been underrepresented. If we want our graduates to stay, we must give them a reason beyond sentimentality.

I experienced this firsthand.

I graduated from Southeastern Louisiana University with a degree in Television and Multimedia Journalism. I won my Senior Capstone award of Distinction, I had phenomenal recommendations from my professors, it seemed I would walk out of the halls of academia and onto the writing floor of a newsroom. However, in reality, that degree simply prepared me for an entry level position at any television station in the country. In practice, I found that southeast Louisiana's media market offered relatively few opportunities for someone trying to break into the industry. A handful of large ownership groups serve much of the region, and with limited stations comes limited hiring.

The easier path would have been to pack my bags and head for Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, or one of the growing media markets in Florida or Tennessee. Instead, I chose to stay home. That decision led me to continue building the small business I had been running while I enrolled in law school to broaden my opportunities here in Louisiana. I do not regret staying, but I understand completely why so many others choose differently.

As usual, the solution lies within the problem itself. If Louisiana does not have enough entry level careers to retain its graduates, then we must work to create them. We cannot expect to educate talented young people, hand them a diploma, wish them luck, and then act surprised when they leave to find opportunities that never existed here in the first place.

Louisiana's greatest export should be our products, our ideas, and our culture. It should not be the young men and women we worked so hard to educate.

Secondly, Louisiana enjoys a significant boon in its relatively low cost of living. For many families, that has long been one of the state's greatest selling points. Unfortunately, that benefit is often offset by the obvious antonymic bane: lower wages. An attorney entering the profession in Louisiana, for example, can often earn 15 to 30 percent more by accepting a similar position in Texas. While the cost of living may be higher there, the increase in salary frequently outweighs the additional expenses.

Many graduates are willing to make that trade. They find affordable housing in surrounding communities, manage their expenses wisely, and still come out ahead financially because of the higher earning potential. As a result, Louisiana's lower cost of living is not always enough to overcome the pull of larger paychecks and greater opportunities elsewhere.

Thirdly, jobs don't appear out of thin air. Though the state is doing things to rectify this with AI data centers (wow is that going swimmingly with the public) and the Hyundai steel mill in Donaldsonville, it falls in the same vein of manufacturing and niche job opportunities we already have within the state. If we want to encourage a population growth like Texas, Florida, and our other Gulf states are seeing, then new business must be encouraged.

Louisiana has spent decades competing with other states to lure large corporations through tax incentives such as the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP for those who go crazy over acronyms). Those incentives have undoubtedly attracted investment and jobs, but they also come at a cost in foregone tax revenue. Perhaps it is time to ask whether a portion of that investment would produce greater long term returns if it were tightened and it's dividends directed toward Louisiana's own entrepreneurs.

Imagine a Louisiana Enterprise Fund dedicated exclusively to helping Louisiana residents build Louisiana businesses.

Rather than relying solely on traditional lending standards, aspiring business owners would submit a business plan to a panel of experienced small business advisors. Applicants with promising ideas but limited credit histories could receive startup financing, mentorship, and technical assistance to help launch their companies.

In exchange, recipients would agree to hire Louisiana residents, maintain their principal operations within the state for the duration of the loan, and repay the funds under terms that allow the program to become self sustaining as loans are repaid and reinvested into the next generation of entrepreneurs.

No economic development strategy is without risk. Some businesses would fail, and taxpayers would inevitably bear some losses. The question is whether investing in our own people ultimately produces a stronger return than continuing to devote the overwhelming share of our incentives to recruiting companies headquartered somewhere else.

Every major employer began as someone's small business. If Louisiana wants more Louisiana jobs, perhaps the answer is not simply attracting the next corporation. Perhaps it is helping build the next one.

Is this idea foolproof? Certainly not. It's a spitball, not a fully developed policy proposal. Remember, I'm no legislator. But we must first agree as a state that we are losing many of our brightest minds to our neighbors. If we fail to act proactively in some meaningful way, we should not be surprised when that brain drain continues and complacency becomes our future rather than our present.