Spatial and Longitudinal Patterns in County Age-Specific Net Migration in the United States 1950–2010

Many migration studies describe various counties by adopting a priori county typologies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service county typology, which might not be suitable for identifying different age migration patterns of the U.S. counties. This study employs a spatial clustering method that exhaustively compares all U.S. counties on their age migration similarity and spatial proximity to investigate signature age-specific net migration profiles across six decades of U.S. county age-specific net migration data from 1950 to 2010. All of the six-decade data are integrated into a common spatial county boundary on which counties below a population threshold are merged with the nearest county to mitigate the small population problem in net migration rates. As counties are merged by increasing large population thresholds, the Getis-Ord Gi* spatial autocorrelation statistic is applied to examine how the spatial migration patterns are affected. It is found that U.S. county age-specific net migration profiles exhibit four signature patterns. Although these patterns are persistent across the past six decades, their spatial distributions have experienced dramatic variation. The small population problem in net migration rates affects the extent and location of the significant spatial migration patterns.