U.S. Population moving east, says University of Arizona Geographer
Contact:
David A. Plane, 520-621-1652, E-mail: [email protected]
"Go west, young man," New York journalist Horace Greeley told growth-happy American men (and women) in the 19th century. And for most of America's history, the country's increasingly mobile citizens pushed west, and south.Until recently, perhaps.David A. Plane, a former Census Bureau analyst and now professor of geography and regional development at The University of Arizona in Tucson, was looking for a standard method for summarizing population movements in the U.S. What he found was something of a surprisThe best known summary measure of "drift" is the center of population, last pegged to a farm just west of St. Louis, Mo. In Greeley's day this point would have been near the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio. At the beginning of the republic, it was east of Baltimore, across Chesapeake Bay. Since the first federal census in 1790 to the last one in 1990, the population center has moved farther west.
Plane's calculations revealed something new. Between 1992 and 1995, "the net direction of U.S. interstate population movement was to the east rather than the west -- reversing a longstanding historical trend of westward migration drift."
From a demographic standpoint, the data that produced these results are fairly new, and Plane says a considerable amount of further study is needed to show what it all means.
Various factors influenced this shift: the economic and other problems hitting California in the early 1990s, the changing points of foreign immigration from the east to the west coast, employment trends and population aging around the country.
Plane says that such a shift might have occurred in the past, but data collected prior to 1980 aren't very illuminating about what happens between censuses. From the 1910 Census through the Great Depression, for instance, the center of population moved more slowly than at any other time in history, but always continued westward.
Intuitively, the results of Plane's study may come as a surprise, since the hottest metro growth areas are in the West. Denver, Tucson and Las Vegas, and especially Phoenix, have experienced explosive growth over the past three decades. Even taking into account the out-migration from California due to economic stresses there during the early 1990s, the trend over the last two decades is still a slowdown in westward and southward net movement.
Plane analyzed data collected from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service that indicate how far and in which direction people moved to communities in other states. In two periods, 1981-82 and 1994-95, the total length of all interstate moves passed 6 billion miles. (By comparison, Pluto at its furthest orbit is only 4.2 billion miles from the sun.) But when all directions of these moves are averaged out, the net east-west population drift represented by each migrant is considerably shorter. (Plane has a bar graph showing this trend.)
Plane says forthcoming data may likely show a swing back to net westward movement, especially since California's economy has recently rebounded. But this "short-term reversal" is evidence of a longer term slowdown in westward migration drift. The once strong frontierward flows, says Plane, have largely given way to a more dynamically complex system of interregional movement. And the massive frostbelt-to-sunbelt southward movement has also slowed considerably.
"The decentralization trends are playing out not just at the intrametropolitan scale, but also at broad interregional ones," Plane says. "Also significant in this regard has been the swapping of the West Cost with the East Coast as the primary point of entry for foreign immigration."
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