Who Migrates? Part I
Early Career, Educated Young People.
Whether you’re writing a blog post (hello, reader), telling a story, or passing a law, the first consideration is always the audience. Who are the people we should be focused on? For our present discussion: Who are migrants really? If you listen to the public debate about migration, you might think migrants are homeowners, retirees, families with children, or rich individuals seeking lower taxes. But as I’ll show, those characterizations are woefully exaggerated. Migrants tend to be young, educated, low- or middle-income, childless renters. In other words, the most mobile group today are Millennials (though, as I’ll show in later posts, that’s not true everywhere).*
Migrants are mostly young.
As can be seen, in 2013, young people were overwhelmingly more likely to migrate than the elderly. Early career-age individuals (25–29) were almost 6 times as likely to migrate as retirees. This challenges some essential notions about migration: most flows of migrants won’t be impacted greatly by things like estate and inheritance taxes, for example. Sure, retiree migration may reflect those taxes, but retiree migration, as we can see, is extremely small. Furthermore, retiree migration is highly concentrated in a small number of states (Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada). Even in those states it is often highly concentrated in certain cities or communities.
The migrants who really have potential to drive economic growth are younger migrants, people who can expect to see rapid increases in their income and consumption. Attracting more young people to a city or state can yield a “demographic dividend,” meaning that the state gets to ride the upward slope of young peoples’ earnings profile. Indeed, areas that get huge in-migration by young people and out-migration by older individuals often have strong economic performance, like DC for the last 10 years (though such lopsided migration can have other negative consequences).
At the same time, it’s important we don’t make the same mistake with Millennial migrants as with Boomer migrants: they can’t be the whole story, and can’t fill out the migration profile ofevery city and state.
Migrants aren’t particularly rich.
There’s a pervasive narrative that migrants are rich. Oddly enough, this idea shows up in international diaspora communities as well, with people who “stayed behind” in home countries often believing that all those who migrated to the United States, for example, are rich. There’s just something about people migrating that apparently makes them look rich. The fact of the matter is that migrants are actually more likely to be low-income than the general population.
About 19 percent of migrants in 2013 had incomes between $1 and $10,000, compared to just 15 percent of non-migrants. Meanwhile, about 6.6 percent of non-migrants had incomes over $100,000 compared to just 5.9 percent of migrants. In other words, migrants are more likely to be poorer people looking for opportunity than rich people flitting between high-rises and tax codes.
Undoubtedly much of this is merely an effect of age. As I noted, migrants are young, and young people tend to have lower incomes. But even in studies that control for age, migrants often have lower incomes. However, in the few studies that look at outcomes after migration, migrants are usually found to have faster rising incomes than non-migrants. This suggests that migrants often move for, and succeed in finding, upward mobility. They were poor, so they go somewhere else for better opportunities. For this reason, policymakers can’t just focus on creating jobs to attract migrants: they need to focus on creating jobs that offer upward mobility. Whether it’s disproportionately high wages as in North Dakota’s oil fields or a robust job market with numerous opportunities for advancement as in DC, attracting migrants requires offering upward mobility, not just more dead-end paychecks.
Plus, there’s an obvious reason high-income people migrate less: they have high incomes! If a person is making a lot of money, they simply have less reason to make the costly decision to migrate. People with specialized skills may not even have many migration options, as their industry may be highly concentrated in a few areas. Imagine how many options there are for a person who practices international human rights law in the United States: most jobs are in just 3 or 4 cities. The same is true for many other specialized careers. So it makes sense that high-income people would migrate less, because they have less reason to migrate. But lower income people (people for whom a given state or city just isn’t working out) are better candidates for migration because they’re more likely to find a job that pays better, and more likely to be in geographically diversified industries.
Migrants are well educated.
As discussed in my earlier post, changes in education are a key part of the story of American migration. But not only do people migrate for education, educated people also tend to migrate more. Many states recognize the role of education in promoting migration, and so offer financial aid to attract and retain students, or offer discounted tuition at state universities. These policies probably do retain many students and reduce migration for 18–19 year olds, but may not be as effective as policymakers wish: being educated actually makes people more likely to move.
Education often creates specialization, and specialization often increases income contingent on the specialist working in a specific area or company. Thus, if states train lots of students, but those students develop specialties associated with companies located in other states, then chances are that the state just paid the bill for someone else’s worker. Investing in education is a poor strategy for retaining migrants unless there is a simultaneous investment in the broad-based economic growth that creates jobs that fit student specialties. Higher education investments will only retain migrants if college towns also have entry-level jobs that offer potential for upward mobility or robust post-graduate programs.
Migrants aren’t who you might expect. The most typical American migrant is a college graduate taking her first job in a new city, probably struggling with loans, but hopeful for her future. She’s more likely to have done college close to home than in the past, and thus has fewer connections in her new home than previous generations of migrants. Her biggest tax bills are probably payroll, FICA, and state sales taxes rather than state or federal income taxes.
We need to add this new American story of migration to our longer national narrative, and consider it when we think about migration-related policies.
In the next post, I’ll cover characteristics of migrants relating to family, industry, and housing. And after that, I’ll get into specific cities and states. Once I’m in that section, we’ll see that, as interesting as these average characteristics may be, every place is different.
* There’s an unfortunate tendency for writing on migration to conflate “Millennials” with talk about a “Creative Class” of software engineers, tech gurus, innovative nonprofits, artisanal brewers, etc, and focus migration-related policies on these groups. Certainly some cities have succeeded by playing to the bike-riding, food-truck-loving, early-adopting, hip-and-monied crowd. But most Millennials won’t be part of the “Creative Class:” they’ll hold middle-class jobs as medical technicians, teachers, miners and oil rig workers, mid-level managers, legal services, and other jobs that aren’t quite as sexy as the tech titans of the 21st century. “Creatives” may form a valuable component for some cities’ or states’ migration profiles, but, for most areas, the main story will be rather less sexy professions. “Young” is not synonymous with “hipster” and “educated” is not synonymous with rhetoric about a new “knowledge economy.”
Start the series from the beginning!
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.
