Where We Came From, State by State | Hacker News Reader

Where We Came From, State by State

nytimes.com

108 pointsacdanger27 comments

I used to live in Idaho, and its interesting to me to be able to track back trends that we anecdotally could see happening, but had no hard numbers on. For example, one of the major trends has been the population volatility, and particularly California immigration due to the lack of population and low land cost.

In 1950, 1% of Idahoans were from California. In 1960, 2%. In 1970, 4%. In 1980, 7%. In 1990, 7%. In 2000, 9%. In 2012, 12%.

To me, this is particularly cool when compared to a state like Alabama or Tennessee. Literally no change in relative immigration from neighbors except for a slow loss of native children.

In fact, you could create a volatility scale for states (how homogeneous is their immigration over time) and it would go from almost zero in the East to crazy in the West. Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada being particularly interesting / volatile states.

I wonder if there's a correlation to the volatility and the general political leanings of those locations. IE, does politics diffuse along these same lines? If California, was 75% "liberal" and 25% "conservative" over time, could we estimate that Idaho has gotten about 7% more liberal in the last 40 years? or is the immigration self selecting? (people want to live near folks like them?)

There are two big trends:

- External immigration to large population centers in New York, California, Washington state, the Washington DC area and Illinois.

- Inward migration of Americans leaving those denser areas to states such as TX, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, etc. where land is cheaper and the standard of living is higher for the middle class. This is not represented in the graph because it only shows the origin of state residents. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/2010-census-state-m...

I can speak towards migrating to Oregon. My cost of living has dropped by about 25% while my overall quality of life, sans anything money-related, has gone up.

SSHHH! You can't let the secret out. Remember what we tell the outsiders:

"It rains here. All the time. We never see the sun. You'd hate it here."

--says the Oregon resident from Michigan by way of Arizona. :)

Shhhh, this is our line in Seattle. Also, it doesn't apply to the eastern parts of either state.

--says Portland-born but long time Seattle resident who now lives in...Beijing (BTW, the pollution is real and not a story just made up to keep you away).

The NYTimes groups all immigrants as "Outside the United States".

If you are interested in where the immigrants from each state come from, check this out:

Map: Where The Majority of Immigrants Come From By State https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8179477

It also plots it excluding Mexico, as Mexico is the #1 for most states.

I've been looking everywhere for the inverse of these graphs = states that former-residents of each state moved to.

I used to live in a state that many went to college in, but none of those stayed after graduation.

Is this along the lines of what you're looking for? http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/2010-census-state-m...

Interesting to me was that there were plenty of foreigners in multiple states before 1960, it then dropped mostly to it's lowest in around 1970 and then grew again to today.

So what happened in the run to the 70s that so few foreigners live in CA, NY, WA etc...

I think what you're identifying is mostly the baby boom.

I originally thought the same. Instead of immigration numbers decreasing during those years, it's possible a lot more people were born in the states relative to the number immigrating then. It turns out, though, that foreign-born population did actually decrease substantially:

http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/...

Tight immigration restrictions were put into federal law in the 1920s, and as people born before that decade aged, they made up a smaller and smaller percentage of people in each state. The peak period of immigration to the United States, as a percentage of people who had already arrived, was about the turn of the century between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 loosened a lot of restrictions on immigration that formerly applied to whole regions of the world, resulting in a new increase in net immigration (but still not all the way back to historical peak levels).

One pattern that is long-lasting in these data is the extremely low rate of settlement of foreign-born persons in most states in the deep south (that is, the states of the old Confederacy). States that attracted more immigrants tended to be those that were more dynamic and with more personal freedom, and then the presence of immigrants in those states helped preserve the dynamism and personal freedom, setting up a virtuous cycle that attracted other immigrants.

Disclosure: my family background is one of ancestors who arrived in the United States well before the Ellis Island immigration station in New York harbor was even built, well in advance of the first major federal restriction on immigration, which was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. My ancestors through whom I gain my family name arrived, father and son, after being born in New York state and then settling for a while in Wisconsin Territory, to Minnesota Territory sometime in the early 1850s. My wife, by contrast, is a first-generation immigrant herself, who first arrived in the United States in 1985.

The extreme low rate of settlement etc. in the deep south had a good deal to do with the weak economy.

Also racism and lack of air conditioning, problems that have gotten better.

basically, asian people weren't allowed to immigrate to the US until the mid 60's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act...

Many affluent Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, etc) still do not allow any immigrants to settle. Those that do are often the "well-cultured" Southeast Asian brides from Vietnam and Thailand.

uh, yeah, this is why the US is supposed to be better than all those places. at least in theory.

I would love to see something similar about Europe. I've always heard Americans move around more. I wonder if it's true.

Straight from Eurostat via (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....):

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images...

Wow, 25% of people in New Hampshire came from Massachusetts! No wonder our politics have been shifting recently.

I wonder how relocations along towns near state boundaries, such as moving from the Arkansas side to the Texas side of Texarkana, reflect overall interstate migrations.

According to Google, Texarkana has 32k residents, so I'm betting not much.

But examples of moving within a metro area that has a larger population (NYC->NJ/CT, DC->MD/VA) might actually be statistically meaningful.

Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada were the most interesting to me. They all had considerable migration from every region of the US, plus international.

For CO and NV, I'd say it's the Rockies/skiing and Las Vegas respectively, which attract a specific personality type respectively.

Arizona, I have no idea.

I know Arizona is big for retirement. Mild weather, low taxes, lots of outdoor leisure activities like golf.

Seems we a lot of people coming here from Canada. Not sure if they're permanent residents, or just snowbirds. Ontario plates are pretty common (as are Illinois).

Colorado has a diversifying economy that was driven in the '90s by tech/telecommunications and today by the energy boom. It also has a lot of federal jobs. The cost of living isn't great compared to its neighbors, but the outdoors lifestyle is certainly a draw too. (Source: My family was among the 1 million people who moved to Colorado in the 1990s)

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