The Census Bureau’s Christmas gift to the American people, or at least to us demographics junkies, is its annual estimates of state populations at mid-year, issued in late December. They tell a story — actually, lots of stories — about how the nation is changing, sometimes in surprising ways.
The 2013-14 numbers just released, for example, show interesting contrasts with those of 2010-11, when the economy was flagging and stimulus money disbursed. Back then the Washington metropolitan area — Virginia, Maryland, D.C. — was growing well above the national average. Now, with the sequester cuts, growth in the region is below average.
Similarly, growth has fallen below the national average in Alaska, where North Slope oil production is declining, and in Hawaii, with its big defense installations.
California, with domestic out-migration and reduced immigration, has been growing just a bit more than the national average. But it has been far outpaced by Texas, which since 2010 has steadily accounted for almost 20 percent of U.S. population increase.
Most states either have growth well above the national average (Texas, the South Atlantic states, most of the West) or well below (most of the Northeast and industrial Midwest). Only a few states with little else in common have growth rates near the national average: Tennessee in the South, Minnesota and Nebraska in the Midwest, Oklahoma with its surging oil and gas production, Oregon with its microbreweries and light-rail lines and Massachusetts with its highly educated population.
The Census Bureau reports that international migration — i.e., immigration — increased to 995,000 in 2013-2014, a post-recession uptick but below the pre-recession levels. More immigrants come from Asia than Latin America these days, and immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population is above the national average in only 12 states and the District of Columbia, which together account for 69 percent of the year’s immigrants.
Immigration rates are highest in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and D.C., followed by Connecticut and Maryland. In contrast to pre-recession years, they’re notably lower in California and Texas, reflecting low post-2007 migration from Mexico.
Domestic outmigration is highest in some high-immigration states — New York, Connecticut, New Jersey — where Americans are effectively being replaced by immigrants. This helps explain why these three states, which collectively voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, are now rated solidly Democratic.
That process is also apparent, but proceeding more slowly in 2013-14, in California and fiscally troubled Illinois, where increased taxes appear to be driving out natives and discouraging immigrants.
You can see the effects of tax policies in the domestic migration figures. States with no income tax (Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington) or no sales tax (Delaware, Montana, Oregon) have been attracting Americans even as high-tax Illinois, New York and Connecticut repel them. But there was no significant domestic in-migration in 2013-14 in three other no-income-tax states, Alaska and Wyoming, presumably due to declines in energy production, or in New Hampshire, which has not grown more than the national average since Massachusetts lowered tax rates in the 1990s.
It’s important to note that in some states with above-average international migration, the immigrant inflow was less than the inflow of domestic migrants — much less in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Texas and somewhat less in Florida and Washington. There’s no sign that in these states immigrants are pushing Americans out and little indication that these states are becoming more Democratic as California, Illinois and the New York have.
It’s not inevitable that these trends will continue. The recent drop in oil prices could reduce the astonishing growth of Texas, though not nearly so much as in the 1980s when Texas’s economy was much more oil-dependent. It could move North Dakota out of its ranking as the number one domestic in-migration state.
But it’s not likely either that the next few years will see an end to the outflow of Americans from high-tax states. That trend has persisted for a generation now. It has been reversed only, as the example of Massachusetts shows, when a state reverses policy and gets its taxes down to competitive levels.
Why do immigrants, in contrast, tend to be more attracted to high-tax states? My hypothesis is that Asians, an increasing percentage of immigrants, tend to head to major metro areas with university, high-tech and pharmaceutical clusters.
That looks like a positive trend. We’ll see if it’s confirmed by the Census Bureau’s 2015 Christmas present.
