morolf: I suppose this will only get worse with climate change. Maybe the US will eventually have to give up the entire southwest. Isn't California in for some 20-year drought (which seem to have been a recurrent phenomenon in previous centuries)?
Trust me, we gave up the South West a long time ago. We got so tired of them refusing to admit the rest of the country existed so we gave them their walking papers and went about with our lives.
That actually makes me think, and this goes for anyone not in the States. Are there people in Germany for example, who think their particular region IS Germany and that everything else is some Mad Max Thunderdome-esk wasteland?