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Population
Bulletin Vol. 53 No. 3 September 1998 Table of Contents |
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Population: A Lively Introduction Migration
The third component of population change is migration, the movement of people into or out of a specific geographic area. Migration adds to or subtracts from an area's population depending on whether more people move in or out. Migration usually has the greatest impact on population change in small geographic areas and where there is little or no natural increase from the excess of births over deaths. Migration is the most complex and volatile demographic variable. It can occur in great waves in response to major events—such as the mass exodus from East to West Germany after these countries were reunited in 1990—or as a slow trickle, such as the attrition of young adults from small towns in the rural Midwest. Migration is selective. More educated and more adventuresome people are more likely than other people to move, for example. Migration is closely tied to the life cycle. People are most likely to move at certain stages of their lives, especially when they marry, divorce, or retire. Migration is also more difficult to measure than fertility and mortality. Most countries do not have an easy and accurate way to track population movements. Every year, millions of Americans move to a new home, but not all such residential mobility is classified as migration. Neither are temporary moves for work or leisure. Migration refers only to the movement of people across a territorial boundary for the purpose of changing their place of usual residence. International migration involves movement across a national border. The terms immigration and emigration describe whether people are moving into (im-) or out of (e-) a country. Internal migration describes moves within a country. In the United States, people must move across a county line to be an official migrant. Other countries define migration differently—as movement to another municipality, for example. The terms in-migration and out-migration refer to movement into or out of a specific county, state, or other political jurisdiction within a country. Net migration, the difference between the number of people moving in and out, may be positive or negative. Between 1990 and 1997, Florida had a net gain of 1.3 million people through migration, while New York state suffered a net loss of 673,000 people.35 The United States as a whole experienced a net immigration of 5.6 million people from abroad between 1990 and 1996. In the developing world, where internal migration is dominated by moves from the countryside to the cities, rural areas often experience high net out-migration while urban areas undergo high rates of net in-migration. Most moves are local, short-distance moves. International moves are the least common. About 16 percent of Americans moved to another residence between 1996 and 1997, but fewer than 3 percent moved from another state, and fewer than 1 percent moved from another country (see Table 2). The U.S. mobility rate, or percentage of the population who moved during the past year, has varied between 16 percent and 21 percent since 1947. Americans are more mobile than residents of most other countries. In Japan, for example, only 4 percent of the population over age 1 moved to a new residence in 1996. Americans move about 11 times during their lives (see Box 3).
Local, or intra-county movers, generally are making housing adjustments or responding to life-cycle changes such as leaving the parental home or getting married or divorced. Longer distance moves are primarily for economic reasons such as seeking a new job or accepting a corporate transfer. People also move long distances to attend school, to find a more amenable climate, to adopt a new lifestyle, or to live closer to family members. High levels of residential mobility can foment social problems, especially if the moves dramatically change the age, racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics of the population in the places of origin or destination.36 In the United States and most other countries, residential mobility is relatively high for children under age 5; relatively low during the mid-teens; and extraordinarily high for persons in their early 20s. Thereafter mobility rates decline with age, rapidly at first, and then more gradually until about age 85, when there is a slight upturn (see Figure 5). The pattern is similar for Japan, although there is no increase in mobility in the advanced ages.
Young adults are the prime movers (if not yet shakers) in most societies. Mobility is highest between the late teens and the early 30s as individuals leave their parents' homes to attend college, find jobs, get married, and build families. The children of these young parents have high mobility as well. As these parents buy homes and settle into neighborhoods and careers, their mobility and that of their children (by this time, in their teens) declines. Most of the elderly stay put, but a sizable minority trade their homes for smaller residences or elder-care facilities, or move to far-away retirement areas.37 Men and Women U.S. women are about as likely as U.S. men to move, but the rapid increase in mobility in the young adult years starts earlier for women than for men because women tend to marry at a younger age than do men. In many Latin American countries, the heavy flow of rural-to-urban migrants is dominated by young women because they are more likely to find a job in urban areas, often as domestic workers. In African countries, however, men are much more likely to move to the city to find work, often leaving wives and children behind. Income, Education, and Ethnicity African Americans and Hispanics move more often than whites in the United States, but they tend to move shorter distances. Between 1995 and 1996, the proportion of whites who moved was 16 percent compared to 19 percent for blacks and 23 percent for Hispanics.38 One reason blacks and Hispanics move more often than whites is that they are more likely than whites to rent rather than own their residences. There is no simple link between residential mobility and income. The propensity to move depends more on the type of jobs people hold. Doctors, lawyers, and others who rely on local bases of operation have low rates of mobility, for example, while business executives are highly mobile. Educational attainment is also related to mobility. The most frequent movers are individuals at the educational extremes—the high school dropouts and the college-educated. Those in the middle, people who complete high school but do not go on to college, have the lowest mobility rate. Hispanics have higher high school dropout rates than other major ethnic and racial groups, which helps explain their higher average mobility rates. The distance of moves differs by education. The best educated make relatively more long-distance moves; the least educated tend to make more local moves. This helps explain why U.S. Hispanics and African Americans, who have lower average educational attainment than whites, make more short-distance moves than do whites. International migration is a worldwide phenomenon. During the 1990s, international migration streams of one sort or another have made headlines around the world—the dramatic influx of Rwandan refugees into Zaire and Tanzania, Haitians sailing to the United States in flimsy boats, and Bosnians fleeing to Germany and other parts of Europe. An estimated 120 million people lived outside their country of birth in the 1990s. These migrations occurred for the traditional reasons—the migrants either wanted to upgrade their lot in life or escape from harsh, often intolerable circumstances. In short, migrants are "pushed" from their homeland by difficult conditions and "pulled" to a new country where conditions appear to be better. Migrants who leave home to avoid persecution because of their political, religious, or ethnic backgrounds are classified as refugees or asylees. These "involuntary" migrants are protected by international law, although they are not always welcomed by the countries in which they seek protection. National governments must decide who is or is not a legitimate refugee or asylee, and they sometimes send such foreigners home.39 The United States is traditionally a country of immigrants, and receives twice as many immigrants as all other countries combined. More than 1 million newcomers have immigrated to the United States annually over the past few years—the highest level since the mass immigration of Europeans in the decades before and after 1900. During the 1990s, legal immigration averaged about 900,000 persons a year. Net illegal migration probably averaged 275,000 persons per year.40 The numbers seeking to enter the United States are not likely to abate in the near future because of continuing population and economic pressures in the developing world, particularly in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia. Around 270,000 legal U.S. residents emigrated each year during the 1990s. Most are immigrants moving on to another foreign country or returning to their country of origin. Some are U.S. citizens taking a job abroad or looking for a country with a lower cost of living.41 International migrants differ from the compatriots they leave behind and from the residents of the countries in which they settle. They differ from one another depending on why and how they arrived in a new homeland. Age Young adults and their children are more likely than older individuals to immigrate to a new country. The immigrant flows to the United States traditionally have been dominated by young adults. The present U.S. immigration policy, with its guiding principle of family reunification (giving preference to relatives of previous immigrants), has reduced the proportion of young adults among recent immigrants. Refugees can be much more varied in age—they may include more families with small children, elderly individuals, or young men—depending on the circumstances that brought them. Sex Males have traditionally outnumbered females among immigrants. An extreme example of this phenomenon was the 27-1 male-to-female ratio among Chinese immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s. Today that ratio is about 1-to-1 for immigrants.42 The male-to-female ratio is substantially higher, however, for refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal aliens. The sex ratio of immigrants varies throughout the world, depending on the types of jobs available in the country of destination and the cultural climate in the country of origin. Labor immigrants to the Middle East are predominately men, for example, in part because there are few jobs for women in these predominately Muslim countries. Race and Ethnicity The vast majority of immigrants to the United States between the early 1800s and the mid-1960s were Europeans; but Europeans accounted for only about 16 percent of legal immigrants in 1996. About 42 percent of legal immigrants came from Latin America and another 34 percent from Asia. Africa contributed only 3 percent.43 Immigration is changing the ethnic composition of the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, and many other countries. Socioeconomic Status Often the more ambitious and adventuresome people in a poor society are the ones who migrate. Migrants tend to be more educated than others in their home community, but less educated than the residents of the country to which they are moving. Immigration laws can affect the types of people who come in, for example, by restricting visas for unskilled workers, encouraging the entry of highly educated professionals, or accepting refugee families from a specific country. The educational and socioeconomic status of immigrants varies greatly among individuals and groups. In 1990, for example, 59 percent of the foreign-born population ages 25 and older had at least a high school education, compared with 77 percent of the U.S.-born population. The proportion of the foreign born completing high school was much greater for immigrants from Africa (88 percent) and from Asia (76 percent), especially from India (87 percent), than it was for immigrants from Latin America (42 percent), especially from Mexico (24 percent). Legal immigrants tend to have higher educational attainment than illegal immigrants; and refugees tend to have lower average attainment than other legal migrants. More recent immigrants are less likely to have a high school diploma than native-born Americans, but they are also more likely to have a college degree.44 Statistics on occupation and income tell a similar story. Among the largest immigrant groups, Asians have a relatively high socioeconomic status and Hispanics a relatively low one. During the 1980s and early 1990s, however, an influx of less-educated refugees from Southeast Asia injected more economic diversity into the Asian American population. While the average incomes of Asians remain higher than for other groups, growing numbers of U.S. Asians are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.45 When educated and highly skilled people emigrate to a new country, their home country loses. Not only does the home country lose its investment in raising and educating those expatriates, it also loses their potential social and economic contributions. This "brain drain" is not just a problem for developing countries such as India. Many scientists, engineers, and college professors from Great Britain and other developed countries, for example, have immigrated to the United States.46 Individuals usually do not uproot themselves and their families at random to move to another area; nor do they choose their place of destination by flipping a coin. Migration is a social process involving networks that connect the place of origin to the place of destination. The movement of individuals takes place through chain migration, defined as movement in which prospective migrants learn about job opportunities, transportation, and housing in the place they want to move to from relatives or friends from their home area who have migrated ahead of them.47 Chain migration operates in both international and internal migration. In the former, a few bold immigrants blaze a trail to a new country, establish a foothold, and then send for friends and family to join them. These individuals form small ethnic communities, such as the Chinatowns in cities throughout the world, which act as magnets (or pull factors) for others in the place of origin. Most immigration to the United States has followed this pattern. Hispanic and Asian immigrants often join established communities of their compatriots, such as Little Saigon in Southern California's Orange County. U.S. immigration policy strengthens migration networks by granting entrance visas to close relatives of current U.S. residents. Chain migration also plays an important role in rural-to-urban migration. The presence of a network of relatives and friends in a particular city attracts rural out-migrants to that city. These networks help ease the financial and social problems associated with relocation. While chain migration is not as important in the United States today as it was in the past, moving "to be closer to families and friends" is still one of the main reasons individuals give for changing their residences.48 But when it comes to social networks, migration is a two-edged sword. While it may provide new opportunities for the migrants, migration often tears individuals away from a network of relatives and lifelong friends who provided valuable financial, health care, and other support.49 It is no wonder that migrants seek neighborhoods in their new countries that bring them back to the embrace of familiar social networks.
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