How Military Mobilization Impacts Migration
Military Service, the Draft, and the Recent Decline of American Migration
I started out this week with a controversial and popular topic: taxes. Then I shifted to the less debated but similarly important topic of occupational licensing. Today, I want to return to where I started this whole series: a historical note. From 1940 to 1973, the United States maintained “selective service,” or conscription. Military service as a share of the population declined steadily after the Second World War, but especially after the end of the the draft.
So why consider the draft when looking at migration?
Military service has been a large part of American history and, unsurprisingly, impacts migration. The decline of military service is a structural change in the American economic experience, especially for those people for whom the experience was most jarring.
Because individuals in the military are relocated away from home at least once, and often relocated several times during their service, they gain exposure to a wider range of locations than otherwise. This is especially the case for lower-income individuals. Furthermore, social connections formed through military ties can broaden a veteran’s post-service network, enabling future migration.
Conscripts and Volunteers: American Military Recruitment Since 1789
The United States has instituted direct conscription three different times: during the Civil War, WWI, and from the beginning of the Second World War until 1973. The Civil War draft was highly ineffective, with many people evading it, and many who didn’t evade hiring “substitutes.” Overall, draftees represented a very small share of Civil War soldiers, although the war was by far the largest military mobilization the nation had seen up to that time. At its peak, 1 million men fought for the Union, and yet less than 200,000 soldiers were raised through the Federal draft.
Before and during the civil war, many states required all able-bodied men to carry out some level of militia service, and many states drafted or used draft-like recruitment for their militias. Less data is available on these state militias, but if they were included, draft numbers would likely be higher.
America’s most draft-intensive war, however, is one where the draft is perhaps the smallest component of the national memory: the First World War. The uniformed service rose from 179,000 individuals to 2.9 million in 1918. During that time, 2.8 million individuals were drafted.
The next major draft round came in the Second World War. Over 10 million men were drafted from 1940–1946, with military service peaking at just over 12 million men. Some finished their term early or were discharged, but over the course of the war, draftees represented a large share of all soldiers. That said, many individuals “volunteered for the draft.” Thus the wartime draft may not reflect involuntary conscription on a meaningful scale.
It wasn’t until the Cold War that the draft became a major part of the national political narrative. Both the Korean and Vietnam wars saw substantial wartime drafts, and there was a peacetime draft between them. These drafts probably drew a much larger number of people who never had any intention of serving in the military. That is to say, the Cold War drafts actively distorted the economic and residential behavior of draftees in a way that WWI and WWII drafts may not have.
Three Channels of Draft-Related Migration: Avoidance, Evasion, and Networks
The existence of the draft can boost migration through three channels: evasion through relocation, avoidance through education, and increased networks through military experience. I’ll briefly analyze the first two channels, then consider the third in greater detail.
The existence of conscription may provoke evasion. One way to evade a draft is to relocate. International relocation, or even domestic relocation in the interim, can be used as tools to evade the draft. Determining the size of this effect is obviously difficult or impossible, but it’s at least one way that the draft probably impacted at least some peoples’ migration decisions.
Another response to conscription, for those with the resources or ability, is to seek higher education. Educational exemptions or deferrals could reduce an individual’s chance of being drafted, and the pursuit of such exemptions impacts migration. By altering the returns to education, some students may have been induced to pursue an education (especially in a degree in ministry) who otherwise would not have. They could migrate for school, or increased education could make them more likely to migrate than otherwise. This effect, again, is hard to quantify, and likely small, but it is, all the same, likely to exist.
But the most important channel for draft-related migration is through the draftees themselves, not people avoiding or evading the draft. Draftees are relocated from their home at least once, and could be moved several times. This direct relocation constitutes migration. Even if the vast majority eventually return, the level of migratory churn increases notably. That makes at least one first-order migratory effect.
But the draft can create second-order effects for draftees as well. Draftees may have lived in other areas for a long enough period of time to develop familiarity with job opportunities in those locations, or develop related skills. The longer the period of military service, the more likely this effect becomes. Structural components of military service, included the service branch and the draftee’s exact experiences, could substantively impact future likelihood of migration.
Finally, social ties formed while in the military may impact future migration. By developing connections among fellow servicemen from other places, draftees could create social networks far wider than they had prior to being drafted. Army buddies have been a pathway to job opportunities for their friends since time immemorial. Much as college graduates gain a valuable network of peers and faculty, so too for soldiers with their buddies and officers.
This last set of effects, the increased migration associated with having been a draftee, has been empirically assessed in some academic papers. There is a moderate amount of evidence that, in fact, draftees are more likely to be migrants, and that draftee migration is significant for some communities. Other studies have found that the impact of the draft on migration varies by race.
Is Migration Declining Because the Draft Ended?
The decline in migration in the US since it peaked in the late 1980s has many sources. The most widely-recognized source is reduced job transition, but reduced college migration is also one source I’ve already outlined. Furthermore, the draft ended almost 20 years before migration peaked, so while that policy change may have slightly reduced migration, it wasn’t the whole story.
However, total uniformed military service remained stable or rose through the 1980s, then fell dramatically in the 1990s. Such personnel reductions likely impacted migration. Military rotations are a major source of migration. Some of the cities with the highest migratory churn are those with military bases. Thus, while the end of the draft may have slightly reduced migration, the larger story is the decline of uniformed military employment generally. The quasi-voluntary migration associated with the military service has fallen dramatically over the last 40 years, and with it the second-order effects experienced after soldiers return to civilian life.
Military migration is different from civilian migration, and has been in decline for decades. Federal policies as diverse as base closures, military spending and procurement, and the draft all impact migration. Obviously, those policies are not set based on their impact on migration, but they do have side effects. And perhaps most interestingly, even nation-wide federal policies can impact regional migration.
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Follow me on Twitter. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration. I’m a grad student in International Trade and Investment Policy at the George Washington University’s Elliott School. I like to write and tweet about migration, airplanes, trade, space, and other new and interesting research. Cover photo from Unsplash.
