Migration and Distance

THE DISTANCE which must be spanned in migrating is generally regarded as one of the principal factors influencing the number and characteristics of migrants which arrive at or leave a given point.' Because only fragmentary data have been available until recently, it has been almost impossible to form even a vague notion of the extent to which distance acts as a barrier to internal migration in the United States. Also relatively little is known concerning distance as a selector of migrants. Since distance is a continuous variable, in classifying migratory journeys one would like to escape the necessity of using such qualitative categories as long and short and to be able to study the effect which varying amounts of distance have upon the number and characteristics of migrants. Although data which would permit a precise and detailed distance analysis are still not available for the United States, it is now possible to arrive at a few broad conclusions, using the enumeration of migrants taken as a part of the Sixteenth Census. This can be accomplished by classifying each state by its distance relationship to every other state or division, and grouping the states into very broad distance zones with respect to every other state. While the distance continuum which is thus constructed is a very crude one, it is nevertheless capable of grouping migrants into distance classes with sufficient consistency to permit some basic generalizations to be made concerning this subject about which there