Effects of Race and Politics on US Domestic Migration

To follow up on yesterday's post, I found some state-to-state migration statistics from the US Census Department here. I used the 2017 statistics, in combination with the 2012 percentages of whites by states, and a quantification of the states' level of conservatism as reported by a Gallop poll.

First, a look at the raw changes by state. (Click image to enlarge.)

Big winners were Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. Biggest losers were California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, who dwarf the losses of the other states.

Here is a chart adjusted for population.

Per capita, the strongest states were Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington. Losing states were Alaska, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Wyoming.

The goal of analysis was to determine if there really is a domestic migration preference for white states. In looking at the data, I determined that political affiliation would likely have a greater effect. That is because there are great inconsistencies to the white=conservative relation. For instance, Texas is white minority but conservative, where as many northern states are very white but vote Democrat. (Vermont is both the whitest and most liberal state in the Union.)

Considering raw data, I found that the correlation between white population and immigration numbers was .15, and between number of conservatives and immigration was .31. Those are positive correlations, but not strong. The rule of thumb is to take the square of the correlation to find the influence it wields. So if we take the square of .31, we find that the conservatism of a state accounts for about 10% of a person's decision to move there. Its enough to matter, but not really all that significant. Clearly other factors like economic performance and climate have a far greater impact. (I will attempt to tease some out in a future post.) A correlation of .15 between immigration and the percentage of white people means that only a few percent of the migration decision is determined by race. They only slightly skew to white states. Effectively, American migration patterns are not racist, although a racial breakdown of migration might paint a different picture.

When using the adjusted population numbers, I found a correlation of .32 with white population, and of .20 with conservatism. This is somewhat like taking the median instead of the average. It shows that, in most states, race has a bigger impact than political climate, but the big outliers, like lots of immigration to brown, conservative Texas and white, liberal Washington, skew the numbers. Which one are we interested in? Both, I'd say, but since we're in a head-count democracy, the raw, unadjusted numbers tell more about the downstream political consequences of the migrations.

Some other factoids.

• 54% of domestic migrants moved to more conservative state (than they were in).
• 52% moved to a state with higher percentage of whites.
• Between 1990 and 2012, the number of white people grew by 1.4%.
• In the same era, the white percentage of population dropped by 11.9%.
• The percentage of whites dropped in all 50 states. Only the imperial capital saw an increase in whites per capita.

The trends we talked about in the last post are there, but are only very slight. The most alarming statistic is the drop in white percentage of 12% in 22 years, nearly half a percent a year! If we assume that whites vote 60% conservative and non-whites 80% liberal, we can compute that liberals are gaining over 2% of the vote per decade from immigration alone. None of this counts the 20 million illegals here, who will likely gain amnesty with the next Democratic administration. Surely it's clear why the last thing they want is to enforce immigration laws. If you're conservative, or white, and want to live in a country that's conservative, or white, then please understand that, in a liberal democracy, the left primarily gains power through expansion of the electorate. The longer we play the game, the more we lose.