Migration, Employment, and Race in the Deep South

The study of internal migration in the United States has a long and respectable tradition. However, much of the recent work in this field has proceeded with little concern for the social problems related to migration. The general practice has been to explain flows of migrants by differences in economic opportunity between cities, regions, and other economic areas.' Thus, population redistribution has been viewed as a natural result of the free market, leading in the long run to an efficient distribution of economic activity. Such propositions fail to recognize important mechanisms that modify the geographic distribution of opportunities for various subgroups in the population. More particularly, an explicit acknowledgement of race in the analysis of migration intro-