Kentucky’s Migration Story
How Migration Data Can Help Answer Local Questions
Several times in my series on migration, I’ve emphasized the importance of local knowledge over sweeping, generalizing theories. While such theories are useful, migration is basically a local act requiring local information and responding to local conditions. I’ve tried to explain what I can about nationwide migration trends, but have also left many questions unanswered.
Now I want to take a closer look at a local migration story I know more about: the story of my own home, the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The 15th state in the union, and the first one wholly west of the Appalachian mountains, Kentucky’s state flag depicts a man in buckskins shaking hands with a man in a suit: the pioneer and the settled, the intersection of the migrant and the non-migrant. By looking at Kentucky, I hope to demonstrate a few more tools policymakers and commentators can use to understand migration and offer information for use by stakeholders in Kentucky.
But before I look at the data, I want to give readers a frame of reference. There’s a kind of journalistic beat that’s committed to reporting on how everything is bad in Appalachia, especially (not to point fingers) in publications very far removed from the region, like the New York Times: see here and here for perfect examples. This line of writing, focused on portraying how Appalachia’s condition is a sign of what’s going wrong in American society and governance, isn’t new. The region has been on the receiving end of moral busybodies’ attentions for a very long time now, and its residents pretty regularly receive careful instructions on how they need to just take someone else’s advice in order to fix whatever is allegedly the matter with the region.
At the same time, many Appalachian residents are aware that there are very real problems, especially as coal employment rapidly vanishes. This has led to probably more productive work, as Appalachian communities of policymakers, businesses, and other stakeholders begin the long-overdue process of planning for the future. The most recent example of this kind of constructive engagement is the Save Our Appalachian Region summit. This kind of work, done by people who are deeply invested in the region for people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the region, is vital.
How we should think about Appalachia, its strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, is a question of vital importance for regional stakeholders, and also one with national weight. My aim here is not to offer a solution to every Appalachian problem, but simply to take a stab putting some real numbers on the problem in its distinctly Kentuckian manifestation.
Kentucky’s Population History
Steady Population Growth For 220 Years
Data from the decennial census going back to 1790 show roughly steady population growth in Kentucky. Sure, there are some slower periods (the 1820s and 30s, 1900s and 1910s, 1980s), but by and large the trend is roughly linear. No major trend breaks, no major volatility: no big story. At first glance, population growth in Kentucky could hardly be more dull.
But Kentucky’s not a small place. The Commonwealth, like many US states, is about the size of many whole countries in Europe or other parts of the world. It’s similar in land area to South Korea, Greece, or Austria. It’s big enough that there may be variation within the region.
Maybe, to find interesting stories, we need to zoom in even more than just the state level.
Defining Kentucky’s Regions
To find interesting stories within Kentucky, we first have to decide on a unit of analysis. Data about population and migration is available down to the county level, however, counties may be too small and too varied to tell a major story. Besides, while Kentucky’s counties (or “Little Kingdoms” as they’ve been called) are fiercely independent and closely tied to residents’ identities (Kentuckians are more likely to identify as being from a specific county than from a specific town), most peoples’ lives cross county lines at some point or another. Adjacent counties also usually have many similarities and connections.
I’ve identified 10 regions for analysis within Kentucky, loosely based a comparison of semi-official designations of regions, metro- and nonmetro-area designations, Appalachian Regional Commission designations, and my own knowledge of Kentucky geography. Doubtless some Kentuckians will object to my regional designations, arguing one county or another should have been categorized differently. However, for the most part, I believe the boundaries I’ve drawn effectively illustrate general regions within the commonwealth. Using these regions, it’s possible to explore trends within Kentucky’s population and migration history.
Regional Population Trends Vary Widely
Compared to the statewide population trend, population trends within Kentucky are far more volatile. We can clearly see a major population boom in Inner Appalachia between 1900 and 1950 as demand for coal rose, thus lifting incomes and improving living standards, and reducing infant mortality rates in the process. Thus a combination of rising in-migration and rising natural growth drove this boom.
But after 1950, the population fell dramatically, and hasn’t risen since. However, coal demand did not really see big shocks until the 1960s and 1970s. Coal employment actually peaked as a share of total employment in eastern Kentucky in 1984. So presumably this population decline isn’t directly linked to massive mine layoffs. Nor was there a sudden plague that wiped out 100,000 people.
Out-migration drove the population decline, mostly out-migration to cities, yet it happened at a time of relative economic strength. The whole nation was urbanizing and suburbanizing, fueled by rising college education rates (in no small part thanks to the GI bill), increased infrastructure spending to knit the country together by road and telephone wire, and ongoing high rates of military service that built nationwide networks of personal connections for even many low-skilled individuals.
Thus young people had more chances to see the cities thanks to infrastructure, more opportunities to make money there thanks to education and economic growth, and were more likely to be forcibly removed from home anyways thanks to the draft. This triple-shot of migration-related shocks combined with booming urbanization stripped rural regions around the United States (and especially Appalachia) of a whole generation. Newspapers in cities as far as Chicago and New York complained of “hillbilly neighborhoods,” often associated with crime and subjected to negative stereotyping. More recent academics have studied the period, and find strong evidence of Appalachian outmigration to cities and the formation of Appalachian diaspora communities.
Many Appalachians didn’t go far. Cities like Louisville, Cincinatti, and Lexington received many migrants and thus enjoyed significant population gains on top of the Baby Boom.
In recent decades, another shift has occurred in Kentucky’s internal population changes. Whereas from 1930 to 1970 Louisville and its surrounding counties saw the most growth, from 1970 until the present Lexington has begun to close the gap, at the same time as the “knowledge economy” has grown in importance. And since 1990, the Cincinnati suburbs in Northern Kentucky have also gotten in the game. Suburbanization especially is driving this trends as Americans continue to like their yards.
Kentucky’s Nationwide Migration Trends
Kentucky Diaspora Concentrates in Nearby States
I mentioned the Appalachian diaspora earlier. That word, diaspora, is commonly used to discuss international migrants, but is much rarer when we consider domestic migrants. However, for a variety of reasons, it is a valuable term. Abundant research suggests that migrants in the U.S. maintain many connections to their states and regions of origin, and so tracking where migrants have gone can show us where Kentuckians left behind may know people and have connections.
Recent Kentucky migrants have overwhelmingly favored nearby states with cross-border metro areas. There are 1.36 million Kentucky-born individuals living outside of Kentucky, and about 400,000 individuals residing in Kentucky moved out of the state sometime between 2009 and 2013 (I’m talking about gross flows here, not net). These are large numbers that speak to large networks. There are thousands of Kentuckians even in distant states like Washington, Texas, and Maine.
This kind of detailed data from the American Community Survey isn’t readily available before 2005, so we can’t say what out-migration looked like in 1960 with the same precision. But certainly the formation of domestic diasporas is interesting, and is an asset to home regions. Knowing people in other areas can open up job opportunities, business partnerships, academic collaboration, exchange of ideas, eccentric tourism patterns bringing guests in off-seasons or to less-visited locations, etc. This issue is actually my area of research (and I’ll have more on it another time), so I could wax eloquent, but for now it’s enough that domestic diasporas are a large, and largely underutilized, asset for their home states.
Kentucky’s Net Migration Trends
The first map tracked total out-migration over 5 years. This map presents net migration rates just in 2013. As can be seen, Kentucky’s migration patterns don’t fit many regional trend stories. The Bluegrass State gains from Texas but loses to California. On the one hand, we see the “sunbelt” states like South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee taking Kentucky migrants: so maybe Kentucky is “rust belt.” On the other hand, the state gains migrants from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio: so maybe Kentucky is actually part of the “sun belt.” What this map really shows is how useless broad regional categories become when we look at the actual experience of the states, especially states that occupy border areas.
Kentucky Internal Migration
Migration occurs not only between states, but within them. In Kentucky, that internal migration has fueled population growth in the Bluegrass and western areas. Using ACS 2008–2012 data (the most recent data available for county-to-county migration flows), we can see how population flowed between Kentucky’s regions. If you click the link, you can see not only total migration for each region, but the balance of migration between any two regions of your choice.
The results of this type of analysis are remarkable. For example, far from being an underperforming sector of Kentucky, “Inner Appalachia” actually succeeds in drawing net migration or about breaking even for every other region except the Bluegrass. Inner Appalachia includes counties that are deep in the mountains, have limited infrastructure, and have long been viewed by many outsiders as economic basket-cases. Yet these counties actually draw migrants away from Louisville, Cincinnati’s suburbs, outer Appalachia, and northeastern Kentucky, while experiencing slight losses to the Pennyroyal regions. Rather, where Inner Appalachia experiences major out-migration is to the Bluegrass: and there’s a strong likelihood this migration is educationally related, as the Bluegrass region includes many universities, including the University of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University.
“Inner Appalachia includes counties viewed by outsiders as economic basket-cases, yet these counties actually draw migrants from most other regions.”
Meanwhile, the areas that are actually experiencing pervasive out-migration are the small towns and farm counties of the Eastern Pennyroyal, and the major highway corridors and hilly parts of Outer Appalachia. At least as of 2008–2012, the real “problems” in Kentucky, in terms of areas unable to provide sufficient opportunities to retain migrants, are the southern farms and the fringes of the Appalachian mountains: not the hollers and the deepest parts of the mountains.
Without a doubt, the “victor” in Kentucky internal migration is the Bluegrass region. A vibrant economy, booming urban center, strong craft and culture industries like bourbon and horse racing, and an extraordinarily high density of universities (Lexington is one of the best-educated cities in the nation in terms of per capita degrees) together create a natural migration hub. Thus, unsurprisingly, the Bluegrass gets positive migration flows from every single other region of Kentucky except northeastern Kentucky, where it has a very slight negative rate due to some growth in NE KY’s western fringe, on the edge of the Bluegrass.
Kentucky’s other major urban areas, Cincinnati and Louisville, have also lost migrants to the rest of the state. The Cincinnati ‘burbs draw many migrants from Ohio, thus continue to grow, and have high birth rates, but can’t hang onto people within the state. Greater Louisville has somewhat lower out-migration mostly because, unlike the Cincinnati ‘burbs, it loses very few people to the Bluegrass. As a Kentuckian from the Bluegrass, I’m inclined to believe that Louisville’s disconnectedness from Lexington has something to do with them stealing UK’s basketball coach and cheering for the wrong team, but undoubtedly it also relates to to other factors as well. For example, the Louisville area may send fewer college students to Lexington due to the presence of the University of Louisville.
Check out the visualization for yourself to explore more connections between Kentucky regions.
While Kentucky’s population growth appears steady from the outside, on the inside, the state has seen major volatility in population growth among its various regions. Changes in education, demand for commodities, demographics, infrastructure, and policies have all impacted migration at one time or another.
But public perceptions about which areas are succeeding or failing may be misguided. Core Appalachian regions are much more resilient than in the past, while peripheral Appalachian regions, and areas outside the usual Appalachian-centric narrative of poverty in Kentucky, are struggling more. Meanwhile, even as Louisville and the Cincinnati suburbs attract interstate migrants and experience natural demographic growth, they lose migrants to other parts of the state, especially the Bluegrass.
The Bluegrass is a remarkable migration hub, attracting migrants from around Kentucky, the nation, and the world. This strength can largely be attributed to excellent infrastructure support, affordable electricity, numerous high-quality universities, ongoing business strength and hiring, a welcoming culture, and many other traits. However, if the Bluegrass region is not well-integrated, in terms of economic linkages and exchange, with the migrant-sending regions of Kentucky, then its strength may ultimately be a loss for Kentucky as poorer areas sink deeper into poverty.
To get the most out of in-state migration trends, the state needs policies that focus on promoting engagement and linkages between migrant receiving areas like the Bluegrass and migrant-sending areas like the Eastern Pennyroyal. In the short run, this may cause migration flows to become even more unbalanced, but in the long run, increased financial inclusion, educational partnerships, and hometown business connections will help the rest of the state catch up.
Tomorrow, I’ll have a special Thanksgiving-themed post. Then I’m off for the rest of the week to head home to the Promised Land (Kentucky). After Thanksgiving, I’ll shift my focus a bit to analyze migration by policy question. I’ll have a day on taxes, a day on occupational licensing, and a day on select social policies. Then, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I’ll present a roundup of whatever is on my mind, per the usual. My writing after Thanksgiving will have somewhat more academic content and a bit less visual work, but I’ll still try and present what I can.
Start the series from the beginning!
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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.
