It’s raining carpetbaggers – it seems everybody and their cousin has decided to move to the Old North State. So far the state and local governments have opened their arms to the influx without regard to the real cost the development has for its citizens.The population of the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) has grown by over 300,000 since levees on the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees (CARY) were topped seven years ago, and is expected to double in 13 years. That’s an entirely new metro area grown up overnight in the Triangle alone.

We’ve suburbanized the tobacco fields faster than the crop could cure, spent billions in new highways, and continue to fight a constant battle to put up enough schools to handle the surge of new students. As a result of this unchecked growth, the state is continually updating its infrastructure, forcing original taxpaying Carolinians to front an investment for new residents who have yet to pay taxes.

New low-income residents have helped us immeasurably. Our agriculture industry has survived thanks to illegal immigrants and NC’s guest worker program, but legal immigrants with well paying jobs have proved a drain on local citizens. They can actually demand the best police protection, highways, and schools before they even move in, and local and state governments have rushed to provide.

North Carolinians have spent decades pouring vast amounts of money and effort into making our colleges, hospitals, and highways the best. But despite the heavy cost we’ve put into the state, it seems this investment wasn’t meant for us to enjoy.

Prices in areas of high development have gone high enough to even price people out of their own towns. Chapel Hill has become so expensive. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found that most of the people who work for the University can’t even afford to live in Orange County anymore, let alone Chapel Hill proper. It now has to use charter busses to bring in its workforce from other counties.

Meanwhile, Charlotte and Greensboro have become the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb with Atlanta-like traffic. We’ve grown out, not up, and we’ve had to build cobwebs of bypasses and beltways like I-540 around Charlotte and Raleigh.

A powerful draw to the state has been the opportunity for families to take advantage of our public universities and the system has had to develop quickly to combat overcrowding. Currently both UNC and NCSU are developing external campuses to handle the growth, at a projected cost of over a billion for N.C. State’s Centennial campus alone.

The state university system creates the talent that fuels our continued economic development and represents a source of economic opportunity and advancement for hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who could not afford it otherwise.

Every increase in tuition, every larger class, every class taught by an overworked master’s student instead of an overworked professor is a direct threat to the economic future of North Carolina. Worse, it’s a betrayal of the investment of billions in public funding millions of Carolinians and local industries have paid for generations to develop their children’s futures.

North Carolina’s current pattern of development heavily favors the people who will move here five or ten years from now at the expense of its citizens. North Carolina grows in power and influence, but Carolinians are learning a harsh lesson in the difference between economic growth and economic success as our government and developers sell us out.

How can we stop other Americans from seizing economic opportunity at our expense? Secession? A large fence? Could we send a bill to our new neighbor’s home states after they move in?

Or do we clean house in Raleigh and start raising taxes in our favor to control development, making it sustainable and fair for local residents who’ve already paid their dues, and their new neighbor’s dues too.