You May be a Migrant If… You Travel for Thanksgiving

What if Everybody Just Went Home?

Thanksgiving is upon us, and that means people are heading home for the holiday. My fiancé and I will be driving to Kentucky tonight to celebrate the holidays with family. Over the course of our journey, we’ll visit the Cincinnati suburbs, the Bluegrass area, and northeastern Kentucky for various reasons, playing a game of Kentucky-regional-bingo along the way.

Like many Americans, major holidays for us aren’t just empty days we can fill with vacation to anywhere we please: they are times to go home. Indeed, so many Americans come home from abroad over Thanksgiving that it creates a major shock to airline ticket prices. Next year, a few months out, look at prices for flights out of the United States before Turkey Day, and return flights after: they’re among the cheapest you’ll find all year, because airlines need someone, anyone, to pay for those low-demand legs of the journey, traveling opposite the millions of American expats returning home. Within the United States, the journey home is so widespread that it causes some of the worst traffic all year. I drove up to Long Island from DC on Thanksgiving Day last year: not a pleasant activity. This year, Google has published travel tips based on data they observed over the last two Thanksgivings.

More importantly for a migration-focused blog, the Thanksgiving traffic raises a big question: Why are so many Americans “away from home”? If millions of people travel over this week to go home, or go visit family, that in itself is a striking testimony to the prevalence of migration. According to some experts, Thanksgiving travel this year should include over 46 million people. The result is that the American Thanksgiving week ranks as one of the largest short-term migrations of people on earth, along with (substantially larger) migrations for the Chinese New Year and many religious observances of many faiths.

In technical terms, Thanksgiving for most people is “return migration:” migrants return to their sending-region for a period of time, however brief. Thus we might expect, in areas of persistent out-migration, to see higher inbound Thanksgiving traffic. Only Google knows whether this is actually the case, and I think more than a few geographers would like Google to give them some data on this topic, but, accurate or not, the idea of holiday travel as return migration suggests an interesting question for a migration nerd like me.

What if Everybody Just Went Home?

See the full visualization and get the data here

The above map shows how much each state’s population would change if every native-born American returned to their state of birth. I leave all foreign-born individuals where they are, because I have no information on how many American-born individuals from each state live abroad, thus any adjustment to international populations would be completely one-sided.

Put simply, this map shows us one big thing: what is the cumulative direct impact of past migration on the total population of each state? If every single American went home for the holidays, how much would population change?I’m assuming “going home” means “returning to state of birth,” which obviously isn’t always the same thing, but is a reasonable proxy.

Some key facts:

1. Traffic- If every American returned to the state of their birth and was accompanied by precisely zero extra family members, 83.9 million Americans would travel over the Thanksgiving holiday. In other words, traffic would double. However, many people may travel to a state that was never their home for Thanksgiving: children and spouses stand out in this group. On the other hand, even if everybody goes to visit family over the holidays, it’s possible that parents and grandparents may relocate to be nearer their descendants, thus reducing the amount of holiday temporary return migration. All of this is to say: the Thanksgiving holiday is probably not at at the peak potential travel level, but it’s certainly getting there.
2. Biggest Winner- New York would gain 5.3 million people overnight if the whole New Yorker Nation came home. But that obscures the real size of migration here: New York would lose 2.5 million people currently living in the state, and actually see about 7.8 million people come back! The states with the next largest diasporas are California (6.8 million) and Illinois (4.6 million).
3. Biggest Loser- Florida would lose 5.6 million people. Like New York though, the gross migration flow is much bigger: 2.4 million native Floridians would return to the motherland, while over 8 million people would leave Florida. The next two states with the biggest populations born in other states are California (6.9 million) and Texas (5.6 million).
4. Biggest Churner- Since it appeared on both lists, it should come as no surprise that California has the most total migration in our hypothetical massive Thanksgiving migration extravaganza. Over 13.6 million people would move in or out of California.
5. Biggest Relative Winner- No state would see its population increase by a larger percent than the District of Columbia. DC would see a 132% population increase if everybody born here returned (and everyone not born here left). After DC, the next biggest gainer is North Dakota at 43.6%: while recent years have boosted North Dakota’s migration rates, for decades prior to that the state suffered enormous out-migration.
6. Biggest Relative Loser- At the other end of the spectrum, Nevada would lose 41% of its population if everybody went home, and its neighbor Arizona comes in second, losing 32.8%.
7. Biggest Changes- If we compare this map to a map of migration in 2013, there are some states that totally change migration profiles. The most jarring example is probably North Dakota. While the Peace Garden State has drawn huge amounts of in-migration over the last 5–10 years, in the longer term, those inflows still haven’t outweighed historically pervasive out-migration. Despite recent inflows, the North Dakota Diaspora remains 2.5 times as large as the out-of-state-born population within the state. For perspective, if North Dakota maintains its near-record-high migration rate in it had in 2013, it will still take the state at least 20 years to reach the diaspora break-even point. If the North Dakotan diaspora is particularly long-lived, it could take up to 30 or 40 years of such high migration.

Thanksgiving is a holiday about migration celebrated in a nation of migrants, and the way we celebrate it happens to reveal the trends in our more recent migrations. The Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock were, at root, migrants looking for a different kind of life. When we travel to see family over the holidays, we recapitulate the migrations of our past or our family’s past. These experiences, in our own history or our nation’s, speak to the vital role played by migrant-receiving communities, risks posed by poor governance of migration, and the importance of networks of kin, religion, language, technology, and physical infrastructure. The Pilgrims were also essentially migrating for policy reasons relating to religious freedom, which serves as historic testimony to the importance of our political choices in driving migration flows.

Over 40 million Americans will retrace the steps of yesterday’s migrations this week. At the end of their journey, alongside the dinner table debate (possibly about international migration), most families will take time to give thanks: for food, for one another, depending on the conversation up to that point possibly even for the distance that separates them the rest of the year. But at the same time, we should be thankful that we live in a nation of migrants that affords Americans nearly unrivaled freedom of movement. If we were ever to lose that migrant part of our national identity, well then, we may as well stop cooking turkeys and just call it a great couple of centuries (I jest, of course). Without the migrant experience, the whole American experience is greatly impoverished; with it, we participate in one of the most truly American activities of all.

Happy Thanksgiving! I’ll be writing again on Tuesday of next week with a focus on specific issues. I’ll definitely write about taxes and occupational licensing standards, and may also take a step back in history to explore the role of military service (and especially the draft). Then, on Friday, I’ll do another Kentucky spotlight.

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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 fromUnsplash.