When surveyors from Virginia and North Carolina set out in 1728 to determine just where the border between them lay, the assignment seemed simple enough: Draw a straight line.
The work turned out not to be so straightforward. They set out on March 27 but the weather soon turned warm enough “to give life and vigor to the rattlesnakes,” so they stopped after just a few weeks. When they resumed their work in the fall, the Virginians and the North Carolinians argued over how far west they should go. Virginians wanted to go all the way to the Blue Ridge, the North Carolinians thought that was a waste of time because nobody was going to live there for a long time yet. William Byrd II, one of the three Virginia surveyors, blamed another reason. He claimed that the four North Carolinians wanted to leave as soon as the “good liquor” ran out and then had the audacity to drink a farewell toast with “the last bottle we had left.”
After that, the Virginians argued amongst themselves. Byrd alleged that one of his fellow Virginia surveyors left early because he was also a judge in Williamsburg and wanted to collect double pay by presiding over court.
Despite all those problems — the snakes, the swamps, the squabbles — the surveyors succeeded in establishing a border that runs in a straight line from the Atlantic to the Blue Ridge. Or, if you want to be technical, a straight line from a cedar post the surveyors pounded into the ground as their starting point on the north shore of the Currituck Inlet. near the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, they prized geometry over geography: No natural barrier would interrupt their dividing line.
When you cross from Virginia into Maryland, you’re crossing a physical barrier — the Potomac River. Cross into West Virginia or Kentucky and you have to cross a mountain (except the West Virginia Panhandle, but let’s not get distracted). The point is, when you cross from Virginia into North Carolina, there’s no way to tell except for the state line sign.
Or, perhaps, economic statistics.
The Brookings Institution recently released a report on the economy of the Washington metro area to see what impact President Donald Trump’s downsizing of the federal government has had on the region. The first finding: The D.C. area has lost jobs. But there was another that’s more important: Brookings looked at all the metro areas in the country with a population of 1 million or more to see how the D.C. area’s job losses compared, as a percentage of total jobs. The result: On a percentage basis, the Washington area had lost a higher percentage of jobs than any other large metro. The Washington area was down 1.7%. However, the metro area with the next biggest job losses was Hampton Roads, where jobs were down 1.4%. Those losses can’t be blamed so much on Trump (although tariffs may well be a factor), but that’s not the point. This is: The two largest metros with the most job losses, on a percentage basis, in the country are also Virginia’s two biggest metros.
I wrote about that in a previous column. Now for the rest: The metro area with the biggest job growth, on a percentage basis, is just south of us in North Carolina: Charlotte saw its jobs grow by 2.8% from December 2024 to December 2025. In fourth place was another North Carolina metro — Raleigh’s jobs have grown 1.3%.
Nowhere else in the country do we have this kind of contrast, where one state is seeing its two biggest metros lose jobs while next door a neighboring state is seeing its two biggest metros gain jobs.
This isn’t simply a case of four different metros, two growing jobs, two losing jobs. It’s more broadly a case study of two different states. From December 2024 to December 2025 (the same time period as that Brookings study), North Carolina had the second-fastest job growth in the country on a percentage basis: 1.54%. Virginia ranked 40th, posting a loss of 0.18%
Why is this happening when the only difference between the two states is a political border, not a natural barrier?
Virginia’s two biggest metros face economic challenges; North Carolina’s don’t
Let’s deal with the easy answers first. To start with, Virginia is being pulled down by Northern Virginia, which has a unique economy. Only two states — us and Maryland — have major metros dependent on the nation’s capital, which once was a plus but now is a minus. North Carolina doesn’t have that problem. Even before Trump’s federal cutbacks, the largest locality in Northern Virginia — Fairfax County — was facing demographic challenges. It’s consistently seen so many people moving out that the county is now losing population. The reasons for that out-migration are complicated — older people retiring and moving out, younger adults unable to move in because of high housing prices — but they do pre-date Trump.
Virginia is also being pulled down by Hampton Roads, which has a unique economy, being so tied to the military. The reasons for Hampton Roads’ job losses may be a topic for another day, but for our purposes here today, we can simply say this: Our two biggest metros are both facing economic and demographic challenges, something that North Carolina’s two biggest metros (Charlotte and Raleigh) aren’t facing.
That explains a lot of the differences between the two state figures, but not all of them. Let’s keep going.
North Carolina is attracting more than 13 times as many new residents as Virginia
North Carolina isn’t that much bigger than Virginia, population-wise — 11.1 million vs. 8.8 million. However, North Carolina’s population is growing more quickly than Virginia’s (7.2% since 2000 for North Carolina; 2.7% since then for us).
Why such a big difference?
It’s not because North Carolinians are procreating more or Virginians are dying more. Our numbers of what demographers call “natural change” — births vs. deaths — are about the same. Most years since 2020, Virginia has added more people than North Carolina through natural change.
It’s not because of immigration, either. Virginia far outpaces North Carolina when it comes to attracting immigrants. Those numbers have always been roughly the same.
The big change has been other Americans moving into North Carolina and not Virginia. The Internal Revenue Service started tracking such data in 1978 and consistently saw more people moving out of Virginia than into the state — until the past two years. Meanwhile, North Carolina has consistently posted net in-migration — and large amounts of net in-migration that that.
The most recent figures show that for the year ending July 1, 2025, Virginia saw a net gain of 6,268 residents through domestic migration, aka, the moving van. By contrast, North Carolina saw a gain that year of 84,064. And that wasn’t even North Carolina’s biggest year lately. Some years it’s seen a net gain of 100,000 or more new residents per year move in, while Virginia until recently was seeing people move out.
I’m wary of emphasizing population growth too much because some communities don’t want a lot of population growth. Still, population growth is tied, at some level, to job growth. People move to where the jobs are. And sometimes jobs move to where the people are.
In any case, there’s a manmade line from the Currituck Inlet to the Iron Mountains (a sub-range of the Blue Ridge) that would appear to have some influence over human behavior. What’s causing this?
Beware! We now wade into terrain as fraught with peril as the Great Dismal Swamp was for those 18th-century surveyors: politics.
Some of the reasons why North Carolina is attracting more jobs than Virginia
North Carolina Gov. Luther Hodges was helping to launch the Research Triangle in the late 1950s when Virginia’s political class was still busy pushing Massive Resistance. Instead of U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. telling Gov. Lindsay Almond he needed to risk going to jail instead of integrating schools, what if Byrd had told Almond to go out into the pine scrub outside Richmond and build a research park? In many ways we are still living with the consequences of decisions made almost seven decades ago.
More recently, we’ve seen North Carolina invest more money in site development than Virginia has; it’s only been since the tail end of the Ralph Northam administration that Virginia has made site development a priority on the scale North Carolina has. In many ways, we are still playing catch-up.
We also need to point out different tax rates: North Carolina’s corporate tax rate is 2%, Virginia’s is 6%, according to the Tax Foundation. North Carolina has a flat income tax, with a tax rate of 4.25%. Virginia has a tiered tax system, with the top rate of 5.75% — and there were efforts in this year’s General Assembly to raise the top rate for high-income earners. If you’re a business making location decisions, is it possible that these rates come into play? Logically, we’d think so, right?
There are lots of other comparison points available — an economic development group in Virginia once told me it had received a questionnaire from a site selector with about 100 questions — so this is by no means a comprehensive list. Different companies will rank different things higher or lower, so some factors may make up for Virginia’s higher tax rate, others won’t.
Still, two things aren’t debatable. North Carolina is one of our main economic competitors, so we ought to pay attention to what’s happening there. And then there’s this: The part of Virginia that’s in the most direct competition with North Carolina, along the southern part of the state, is one of the parts of Virginia with the least political power.
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