What’s the Deal with Interstate Migration?

How Americans Move is Changing

This year has seen a lot of coverage of migration issues. From The Upshot’s interesting tool assessing interstate migration over the last century, to the “unaccompanied minor crisis” of this summer, to Michael Mazerov at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities writing about the “negligible” impact of state taxes on migration (and my 5-part response at the Tax Foundation’s Tax Policy Blog), Americans are talking about why people move.

Migration advocates, researchers, and NGOs often focus on international migration, for obvious reasons. However, migration within countries, especially large countries like China, Russia, or the United States is larger than international migration.

In the United States as of 2013, about 27 percent of the population was born in one U.S. state, but lived in another. Just 15 percent of the population was born outside of the United States. With interstate migration practically double the size of international migration, the topic merits attention.

Interstate migration is probably higher than shown here, because many people may re-migrate to state of birth at some point in life, and many migrants may migrate across state lines once in the country, which would not show up in this data. It’s possible interstate migrants may be substantially more than a third of the total population.

See the full visualization, and get the data, here.

So should we care? Does it matter for the nation on the whole if interstate migration is large? As it turns out, yes, we should care, and there are three reasons why.

1. Migration rates have been declining for over 20 years, and are near their lowest point since the 1920s. If Americans can’t (or won’t) move around as much, then prosperity in one state is less likely to help people in other states. In other words, high interstate migration (like high interstate trade in goods) is a good measure of how much we’re actually reaping the benefits of our large, federally-guaranteed internal market.*
2. Migration can be a path to upward mobility. As I’ll show in ensuing posts, migrants are among the most upwardly mobile members of our society. They represent strong potential for growth and innovation. If people are migrating less, it may be a sign of fewer opportunities for advancement, and may go hand-in-hand disappointing levels of perceived economic mobility.
3. Migration is a key part of our national experience. Interstate migration is a key part of the glue that holds our nation together as one nation, instead of 50. Moreover, our national history is grounded in a narrative of migration. Parts of that narrative are optimistic and hopeful, like the first explorers of the New World, Daniel Boone and other pioneers, or the settling of the Wild West frontier. Other parts of our national migration story range from complex to downright grim: Dust Bowl migrants in the 1930s, modern migration to the Sunbelt States, or even the Trail of Tears and other displacements of Native Americans. But positive or negative, the migrant experience is graven deep in American national identity, and if that experience is becoming less common, it’ll have consequences down the road for how Americans view themselves and their nation.

Migration matters for Americans. International migration gets all the press– but migration within our borders is actually a bigger phenomenon, and that’s just at the state level. If we look at migration of people within states, the number grows even larger.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be presenting some information about the state of American migration. Where Americans are going, and why they do so, is changing. If we want vibrant cities, strong economies, healthy communities, a culture of opportunity, and a truly connected nation, we need to understand migration better. I hope my writing here can be a useful signpost along the way.

Go to the next post in the series!

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 taken from Google Maps.

* It doesn’t actually matter if migration is declining because people can’t migrate for better opportunities due to some kind of barrier, or if they simply won’t because of cultural shifts, habit, or preference: in either case, the total amount of connectedness in the national labor market is declining, and the network economies that power and direct migration may get weaker, leading to increasingly disconnected regional economies. Paradoxically, if internal migration slows down while international connectedness heats up, we get a world where London and New York City are more economically connected than London and Scotland or NYC and Ohio, which may in fact be happening, and which almost certainly poses major challenges for current institutions, public and private.