Abstract
Prior research on the "Great American Migration Slowdown," or the declining rate of U.S. internal migration in recent decades, is dominated by two research foci. The first is concerned with the determinants of the migration slowdown. The second is concerned with spatial heterogeneity in the migration slowdown in and across places. With respect to the aim of this paper, many studies of spatial heterogeneity in the migration slowdown have implicitly raised questions about whether and to what extent places are connected to one another by migration flows, or the spatial interconnectivity of migration. The spatial interconnectivity of migration is a concrete manifestation of underlying spatial interdependence among places, and, as such, deserves to be explicitly unpacked to further our understanding of the migration slowdown. Using county-to-county migration flow data from the Internal Revenue Service and a novel application of Das Gupta's demographic standardization and decomposition procedures, we document changes in the spatial interconnectivity of migration during the migration slowdown between 1990 and 2010. We show that counties became more connected to one another by migration over time, and that the increasing spatial interconnectivity of migration helped to keep the migration slowdown from slowing further. We also document changes in the spatial interconnectivity of migration for four types of migration flows: metro-to-metro, nonmetro-to-metro, metro-to-nonmetro, and nonmetro-to-nonmetro. Our work further elucidates the characteristics of the migration slowdown by describing changes in the spatial interconnectivity of migration. It also raises new questions for future research about the determinants and consequences of these changes.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2274 |
| Journal | Population, Space and Place |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by Centre Grant #P2C HD041023 awarded to the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, Centre Grant #P2C HD041020 awarded to the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, and Centre Grant #P2C HD047873 and Training Grant #T32 HD07014 awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This work was also supported by a Proposal Development Partnership Grant awarded to DeWaard by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and by resources to Curtis from the Wisconsin Agricultural Experimental Station. Preliminary results were presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Denver, CO, on April 26, 2018, the Department of Sociology at the University of California‐Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, CA, on December 5, 2017, and the Cuningham Group's Urban Currents forum in Minneapolis, MN, on July 25, 2017.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by Centre Grant #P2C HD041023 awarded to the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, Centre Grant #P2C HD041020 awarded to the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, and Centre Grant #P2C HD047873 and Training Grant #T32 HD07014 awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This work was also supported by a Proposal Development Partnership Grant awarded to DeWaard by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and by resources to Curtis from the Wisconsin Agricultural Experimental Station. Preliminary results were presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Denver, CO, on April 26, 2018, the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, CA, on December 5, 2017, and the Cuningham Group's Urban Currents forum in Minneapolis, MN, on July 25, 2017.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords
- decomposition
- migration
- migration slowdown
- spatial heterogeneity
- spatial interconnectivity
- spatial interdependence