This paper investigates an under-explored source of democratic resilience: emigration out of economically-depressed areas. Support for anti-democratic parties concentrates in adversely-shocked regions where a reduced supply of jobs no longer supports local populations. I argue that emigration moderates the adverse political effects of local economic shocks by ameliorating competition for remaining jobs. I create a county-level dataset on the annual migration of US tax filers from the Internal Revenue Service. I show that emigration significantly moderated the adverse local effects of the NAFTA trade shock on vote shares for two populist US presidential candidates: Ross Perot and Donald Trump. The regions that the shock pushed toward Perot also swung towards Trump twenty years later; however, this persistent backlash quickly dissipated in high-emigration regions. Consistent with the job-competition mechanism, high-mobility areas rapidly recovered from the shock in terms of wages and unemployment compared to low-mobility areas. Finally, I demonstrate that mobility is a stable characteristic of regions, with high homeownership costs and affordability as the driving force behind voters' decision to remain in trade-shocked areas. These findings place internal migration and housing at the center of debates over democratic resilience to economic shocks.