They read like Civil War battlefields: Chattanooga, Tennessee; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Greer, South Carolina; West Point, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Tupelo, Mississippi; Smyrna, Tennessee. They are the towns and small cities in the Deep South where America now builds its cars and trucks.
Take Greer, for example (population of thirty-five thousand as of 2020). Located in the foothills of the bucolic Blue Ridge Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina, it is home to the BMW US manufacturing plant.
According to BMW, the Greer facility employs over twenty-three thousand people to produce the models X3–X7 as well as the XM crossover SUVs and has invested nearly $5 billion in the 1,150-acre, four-million-square-foot campus.
What about New York?
There was a GM
Read More »