Abstract
Background: Migration is the primary population redistribution process in the United States. Selective migration by age, race/ethnic group, and spatial location governs population integration, affects community and economic development, contributes to land use change, and structures service needs.
Objective: Delineate historical net migration patterns by age, race/ethnic, and rural-urban dimensions for United States counties.
Methods: Net migration rates by age for all US counties are aggregated from 1950−2010, summarized by rural-urban location and compared to explore differential race/ethnic patterns of age-specific net migration over time.
Results: We identify distinct age-specific net migration ‘signatures’ that are consistent over time within county types, but different by rural-urban location and race/ethnic group. There is evidence of moderate population deconcentration and diminished racial segregation between 1990 and 2010. This includes a net outflow of Blacks from large urban core counties to suburban and smaller metropolitan counties, continued Hispanic deconcentration, and a slowdown in White counterurbanization.
Conclusions: This paper contributes to a fuller understanding of the complex patterns of migration that have redistributed the U.S. population over the past six decades. It documents the variability in county age-specific net migration patterns both temporally and spatially, as well as the longitudinal consistency in migration signatures among county types and race/ethnic groups.
Department
Sociology
Publication Date
5-22-2015
Journal Title
Demographic Research
Publisher
The Max Planck Society
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Kenneth M. and Winkler, Richelle, "Migration signatures across the decades: Net migration by age in U.S. counties, 1950−2010" (2015). Demographic Research. 356.
https://scholars.unh.edu/soc_facpub/356
Rights
©2015 Kenneth M. Johnson & Richelle L. Winkler. This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/
Comments
This is an article published in Demographic Research in 2015, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2015.32.38