Internal Migration in the United States

Abstract

We review patterns in migration within the US over the past thirty years. Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of all distances. Although a convincing explanation for the secular decline in migration remains elusive and requires further research, we find only limited roles for the housing market contraction and the economic recession in reducing migration recently. Despite its downward trend, migration within the US remains higher than that within most other developed countries. 1 The notion that one can pick up and move to a location that promises better opportunities has long been an important part of the American mystique. Examples abound, including settlers making the leap over the Appalachians prior to the Revolutionary War; the nineteenth century advice to "Go west, young man, go west" often attributed to newspaper editor Horace Greeley; John Steinbeck's tale of the Joad family heading west in the 1930s to escape the Dust Bowl inThe Grapes of Wrath; and the mid-century Great Black Migration northward out of the poverty of sharecropping and wage labor in the South. Indeed, it is widely believed that internal migration rates in the United States-that is, population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country-are higher than in other countries. This belief is not exactly wrong, but reality is more complex. For example, the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s were not representative of their time, but rather were an exceptional case during a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie, 2003; Rosenbloom and Sundstrom, 2004). While the United States has historically had one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries-including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain-appear equally mobile.Moreover, internal U.S. migration seems to have reached an inflection point around 1980. As shown in Figure 1, the share of the population that had migrated between states trended higher during much of the twentieth century, with the exception of the Great Depression. However, migration rates have been falling in the past several decades, calling into question the extent to which high rates of geographic mobility are still a distinguishing characteristic of the U.S. economy.Economists and other social scientists have been interested in migration for more than a century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, a frequent topic of interest was movement from rural to urban areas (for example, Bachmura, 1959; Harris and Todaro, 1970; and the 2 annotated 1200-paper bibliography from Price and Sikes, 1975). Researchers tended to focus on the social costs of migration, including the "brain drain" from rural areas and the challenges to cities faced with absorbing migrants (Long, 1988, Ch. 1). As decades passed and urbanization of the United States slowed, interest in rural to urban moveme...

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