- Thanks for coming today.
It's a pleasure to be here talking at the conference.
And the title of my talk,
which I wrote, of course, like six months ago
when we had to submit the proposal ideas,
talks about population change,
but given that we have a fairly limited
amount of time this morning,
I'll focus specifically on migration
that's occurring in the state,
and with particular emphasis of
what's been occurring in the last six years
since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009.
I'll start briefly with just some international perspective
and then also some national data on migration
to sort of give you more of a context
of how migration in Wisconsin is operating
within these larger spheres.
And then I'll turn to the state's counties
and address some patterns
at regional and typological levels.
So, there's a rather cliched phrase
used by managers who served,
are like the manager in Dilbert, if you follow that cartoon,
which is give me the view from 30,000 feet.
It's referring, roughly,
to the cruising altitude of commercial jets,
but it's used as a metaphor for giving the big picture.
In this case, the United States as a whole.
I did a little bit of research,
and how high up would you have to be to see the whole US?
And, in fact, you'd need to be about 1.65 million feet up.
About 310 miles.
And that's roughly where the International Space Station is.
So if you haven't learned anything else here,
you at least know how high up in the air
you'd have to be to see the whole continental US.
So, what are the big picture views
of international migration to the US
and, in turn, to Wisconsin
before, during, and after the Great Recession?
First, to the US.
Here are the annual estimates of international migration
that come out of the
Federal US Census Bureau's estimates program.
The gray areas that I have on this slide
will appear on other slides going forward.
These represent the two officially recognized
recessionary periods in the country since the year 2000.
The one very early in the start of the last decade
and then the Great Recession.
So the slides show the migration pattern
as well as the recessionary periods.
Now, some of the decline here after the 2001 recession,
obviously it's the post-9/11 climate.
International migration was very much slowed down.
And decline in international migration,
again at the US level,
began actually kind of prior to the start
of the Great Recession.
And that may be related in many ways
to decline in particular workforce sectors,
in particular construction.
If some of you remember mid-2006 in Wisconsin,
the housing market had been rather heated before that,
and then all the sudden it just stopped.
So, actually, there were a lot of recessionary type things
happening in certain sectors
prior to the official bounds of the economic recession.
And since the Great Recession,
you can see that international migration has rebounded
and has been recovering gradually;
although it's still below what it was
at the start of the period in 2001.
Looking specifically at
international migration to Wisconsin,
again, same sort of graph here,
and it's a very similar pattern.
Not surprisingly, the decreases are a little more muted,
the increases are a little less muted.
Where we are now in 2013-2014,
you see we're still below the peak years of 2003 to 2006.
For sort of a better comparison
or comparing on very different population scales here,
it's a little more reasonable to look at the rate,
international migration rate per 1,000 people.
And you can see it's been a little up and down
in the United States rate.
The rate, international migration
has been really relatively steady
when you look at it in comparison to the total population.
Wisconsin, in terms of total population,
Wisconsin, we have about 2% of the national population,
but we generally receive only about
0.8% of the international migration flow to the country.
So that's sort of the preceding 13 years or so
since the year 2000.
And in terms of looking forward,
it's sort of like that caveat they give you
for stocks and mutual funds.
Past performance does not guarantee
future results, sort of thing.
So as little as one year ago,
most European demographers were not predicting this.
They were not predicting thousands of Syrian immigrants
risking their lives crossing over
to the Greek islands and the shoreline.
And still, will this diaspora
from the Middle East affect,
first, United States immigration,
then, in turn, Wisconsin's,
it still obviously awaits resolution.
The Obama Administration has recently raised
sort of the cap that we have
in terms of political refugees from 70,000 to 100,000.
But if you follow the news about Syria,
there are four million people displaced in Syria.
So, again, you can see the past pattern.
Obviously, world events can greatly impact
what happens in the US,
and then, also, as well as Wisconsin.
40 years ago, roughly, a little before that,
we had no idea we'd be admitting
a lot of Hmong refugees to the state.
Wisconsin now has the third largest Hmong population
in the whole country.
So there's a precedent to accepting international refugees,
and hopefully our better selves will prevail
over the next couple years.
And we may see increases certainly
in international migration both to the country and the US.
So let's come in a little closer.
So, from about 15,000 feet,
if you were sort of right over the center of Wisconsin.
That's about three miles up.
You could see the whole state on a clear day.
So, let me start with some context about recent history
of what we call domestic migration,
or within the US migration here
is what I'm going to talk about now,
both for the state of Wisconsin and nationally.
So, again, within a national context here,
an important consideration is that movement domestically
in the US has been on a very long decline.
This graph was prepared by some Federal Reserve researchers.
It indicates US migration rates in the 1950s and 1960s,
on the left side of the graph here.
There's a lot bouncing around,
but they traversed a fairly narrow range
in terms of the rate, and even in the 1980s.
But since about 1990, the pattern has been heading downward.
The conclusion of these researchers and others
is that better knowledge of labor markets.
Think about we now do looking for work.
You go on the internet.
You don't actually have to physically go to a place.
And then there's also less geographic specificity
to a lot of jobs.
Think about Detroit area with automotive.
That's scattered in all areas of the country now.
So they believe that that's led
to these lower rates of migration.
So movement into Wisconsin
is affected by what's going on nationally,
and it's not limited just to...
You think about young people in particular,
moving a lot,
but, actually, it turns out the shift
in sort of the total movement of people between states
is occurring at all ages.
On this graph, I brought up
this information coming from the current population survey.
This is interstate migrants in each age group.
The years 2003 and 2005, you see a very similar pattern.
Again, you get a lot of movement,
of course, in college age and early adult years.
But then the pattern really has changed.
This is just sort of throwing all these up at once,
but this is 2007 through 2013.
And you can see the line, you still have that same peak,
but it's really shifted downward.
And just for good measure,
just to show there wasn't a one year change,
that's the 2014 value as well.
It's tracking very similar to what's occurring
in the last eight years or so.
So this may be kind of a new normal pattern
for us in the country,
that they'll be a lot less movement among all age groups
around the country.
If we look specifically at migration in Wisconsin,
the age distribution here is really important
in discussing our state's migration picture.
On this graph, again, you've got very similar patterns.
These are the movements,
net migration in each decade by age in the state.
The main thrust of this slide I'm trying to get across
is just that there's much greater volatility
at younger age groups,
and net movement really declines
starting around age 40 or 44
and onward into older age groups.
Now, right now, the baby boomers,
who are the biggest cohort in the state,
they're about 28% of the state's population.
These are people born 1946 to 1964,
so they're about 50 to 69 now.
You can see there's very little movement
by people in this age group.
So the amount of migration in Wisconsin
will be depressed somewhat
simply based on the age structure of our population.
So, the prior slide illustrated on a decadal basis
what's been happening on an annual basis.
Again, I'll turn to the Census Bureau's work on this.
Here's a view of the annual domestic net migration rates
that I've calculated from their work.
And the pattern since the 2007-2009 Great Recession
for the state is that,
again domestically speaking only,
net migration has remained negative
and has continued on a downward trend.
Now, this is, again that was illustrating domestic
within US migration.
It's a little bit offset
by international migration in the state.
So I've switched over just to bar chart format.
The blue bars here, again, indicate the domestic migration.
The orange bars are the international migration.
So you sum the two of those,
which then represents our total migration
in and out of the state.
So, through 2009 when you combine
both domestic and international for this state,
we were in positive territory,
but the last four or five years, for Wisconsin as a whole,
we've actually been seeing negative or net out migration.
Just for a little comparison
to our friends in the adjoining states.
Again, just sort of shortening this a little bit,
just looking at the center year of the Great Recession.
These are Wisconsin's net migration figures for each year,
again coming from the prior slide,
and here's Minnesota and here's Iowa.
So the states had, as you can see, if you look at 2008,
we had nearly equal net migration in 2008.
And, basically, all the states
did stay positive through 2009,
so sort of the last official year of the Great Recession.
So, Wisconsin started being negative in 2010.
Minnesota was also negative.
But now Minnesota and Iowa have posted gains
over the last four years, and Wisconsin has not.
So, not wishing to strike too much panic
into your hearts here,
I also thought let's step back and take a longer view.
I used to work with a demographic services center
at the state Department of Administration.
We do the annual population estimates there.
I still assist with that.
It's nice, they've been doing that
for like 40-plus years, 45 years now almost.
I was able to go back into their numbers and calculate,
okay, what is the net migration pattern
over much longer time frame?
So this is going back 35 years.
I've added this fitted line on here
to show that migration in Wisconsin,
it follows this long cyclical pattern.
And in fact, now we're starting to see sort of a return to,
particular in the DOA estimates,
seeing a slight return to
positive net migration at this point.
All right, so let's get on to the counties here.
So, if we're about 500 feet up,
we should be able to see Marathon County
from one end to the other.
I'm not quite sure if that calculation's right,
but maybe if you're on a hot air balloon ride
over Marathon County sometime, you can check this out.
What's happening at the county level with migration?
Just to provide a little more perspective here,
I'll talk a little bit first about total population change
and then also what's happening with births and deaths
to know what's happening
in just total population in the state's counties.
So, looking solely at counties gaining
and those losing population
is what I'm presenting in this graph.
The number of losing counties stayed below 20
through 2004.
And then you can see the number of counties
that started losing population began to increase.
And we've been hovering, for the 72 counties,
we've been hovering sort of in the more or less
half gain, half loss situation since the Great Recession.
And again, while I'm trying to focus on migration here,
I'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about
what's happening with natural increase.
And natural increase is simply the difference
between number of births minus the number of deaths in each,
at the state level and then in the counties.
So, starting at the state level.
Again, I've got the recessionary periods up here.
So this is the pattern of births across the last 13 years.
And you can see that sort of between the recessions,
number of births rose at quite a steady rate.
Got up above 70,000 for a number of years.
But then, once the Great Recession hit,
we saw fertility decline.
And this is also part of,
Wisconsin is just part of a national pattern.
You may have read some stuff
in the popular press and literature
about decline in birth rates
over the last four or five years.
So, from the peak year,
if 2007 where we had about 73,000 births,
the state's total has fallen now, about 6,000.
So we're averaging about 67,000 births
over the past three years.
And now, here's the counted deaths.
And this has held fairly steadily across time,
but deaths have been edging upward in the past few years.
And, again, this gets back to what I mentioned
a little bit earlier about the big baby boomer cohort.
Sad to say, those of us who are in it
are facing increased mortality rates as we get older,
particularly into the late 60s.
So this has a consequent effect on the number of deaths
that are occurring in the state.
So the difference, again,
between the number of births and number of deaths
is natural increase.
You can see back in 2001,
the difference was about 22,500.
Now that has shrunk to about 16,650.
So, this does kind of show, okay,
here's another factor that's also feeding
into just the size of the total population of the state.
And if we switch, again, to county level numbers,
those that have positive natural increase
and those that have negative natural increase,
I know it sounds kind of like an oxymoron there,
which I guess it is.
You could also say natural decrease in those situations.
So the number of counties with positive natural increase
held relatively steady through the 2000s,
but since the Great Recession,
the number with more births than deaths has begun to slip.
What this analysis doesn't show
is that over the last five years,
the number of Wisconsin counties
with declining natural increase,
either positive and getting smaller
or actually turning negative
or negative and becoming more negative, 64 of the 72.
So this is a very broad change
that's happening across the entire state
and really affecting virtually every county equally.
Switch back here to talking about
domestic migration only here.
Before I was showing total population change;
now I'm switching back just to talking about net migration,
and, again, this is just within the US.
So the number of losing counties began to increase
around the time of the Great Recession.
And more counties have been in the negative column
regarding net migrants
than in the positive column since 2006.
So, clearly, demographically speaking,
a distinct break did occur
with the start of the Great Recession,
perhaps even a little bit before in 2006,
in the state's population change
and in both of these major components,
both natural increase and migration.
For the balance of my presentation here,
I'll draw contrast with regard to migration
between the post-recession years,
which I'm calling 2009 to 2014,
and an equivalent five-year period
before the recession started, 2002 to 2007.
So, temporally, we have equally sized periods
that we are comparing.
And, again, when I switch to looking at stuff
in these five-year periods,
and it's always better to do this.
Single year estimates make nice, long time series
that you can do graphs of and so forth,
but there's a lot of variability when you do estimates
from one year to the next, assumptions you make and stuff.
So it's often quite a bit better to look at estimates
in terms of a three-year or five-year period.
The change in terms of the counties
over those five-year periods and their domestic migration,
28 counties moved from gainers to losers.
So I'll attempt to now, in the balance of my talk here,
to sort of illustrate where these changes are occurring
and sort of slicing and dicing the state's counties
by different typologies.
First, I'll lead off talking about metropolitan areas.
And, first, I'd like to address
the southeastern part of the state,
Milwaukee County and the immediately adjoining counties
who are known as WOW, you know,
Washington, Ozaukee, Waukesha, and as well as Racine.
Now, Milwaukee's population has actually been fairly stable
in terms of total population across the last 35 years.
It's sort of in the range of about 950,000 people.
And so that represents about 16% of the state's population.
So one out of every six Wisconsin residents
live in Milwaukee County.
This entire five-county area that I'm highlighting here
has about 1.75 million residents.
That's about 30% of our state's total population.
In Milwaukee County,
natural increase has been positive for a long time.
Births exceeding deaths quite substantially every year.
So the reason the total populations remain level,
if you have natural increase going up,
you've got to have some out migration,
and largely that has been to the surrounding counties.
So during the pre-recession period,
this is just Milwaukee County here,
Milwaukee was kind of in its usual pattern,
which it's seen for the three decades before that.
They lost about 50,000 or 52,000 people.
Sorry, my number didn't come out very well here.
They lost about 52,000 people over five years.
About 10,000 a year.
That's been kind of their historic norm
since about 1970 or possibly even back into the '60s.
But during the recession,
so migration is slowing down everywhere.
So counties that were losing a lot
actually started losing less.
If you want to define that as a better situation, (laughs)
maybe you do.
So, anyway, in the five-year period post-recession,
the net loss in Milwaukee County has actually dropped
to only about half of what it was before the recession.
So this has a consequence,
and I should say this is typical all across the country
that post-recession, what we call large metro core counties
who generally were losing people to their suburbs,
just traditional migration loss mainly to their suburbs,
across the whole country was seeing a real drop.
And then even some places
have actually completely reversed course
and started seeing a positive migration flow.
But in Wisconsin's case,
in this area in particular, the migration pattern
for the surrounding counties has shifted.
I hope you can see,
the numbers aren't completely important here,
but it's mainly to show the picture
that Ozaukee County has been able to remain
relatively stable in terms of its migration.
But you can see there have been big declines
for Washington and Waukesha Counties.
And in Racine's case, they were negative,
and they become more negative.
So they're not receiving as many migrants
as they are accustomed to.
When a lot of people move out of Milwaukee County,
the population and the migration population
of the surrounding counties rise,
and when fewer people leave Milwaukee County,
their net migration either falls or actually goes negative.
So, a couple other big metro areas
that really influence our population in the state
are Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul.
We're right on the edges of those.
And they actually have a lot to do
with the net migration figures
for the whole state of Wisconsin, actually,
even though it pretty much involves only five counties.
The Chicago metro area has like nine million people,
so that's like 65% more people in the Chicago metro area
than in the entire state of Wisconsin.
And Minneapolis/St. Paul is about 3.3 million,
so that's about two-thirds of our entire state population.
So, again, there are five counties
that are affected in particular by these metros.
There's Pierce, Polk, and St. Croix
in Minneapolis/St. Paul area,
and Kenosha and Walworth Counties right out near Chicago.
Three of these five were actually already included
in the metro areas.
And it may not be long before Polk
is included in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
They include people based largely on commuting patterns.
And Walworth may at some point join Chicago.
So kind of similar to what we saw in Milwaukee.
These five counties had strong migration gains
prior to the recession,
but their fortunes have basically reversed
in the post-recession period.
So let me just focus, these are kind of the big metros,
I'm just going to focus on one small,
what we call small metro area, the Madison metro area,
which consists of Dane County
and then Columbia, Green, and Iowa as outlying counties.
And looking at the Madison area,
also I'm going to sort of lead into my concluding discussion
on counties at the edge of these small metro areas
and how Wisconsin's experience is the same or different
from the national pattern.
And, again, so Madison has about,
the Madison metro area has about 633,000 people.
Dane County is a little over 500,000 right now,
about 80% of the area.
So the other outlying counties are actually,
population-wise, they're pretty small.
Now, Dane County has been bucking the trend
when we look at the pre-recession and post-recession period.
Pre-recession they had about 6,000 migrants,
but since the recession, it's closer to 8,000 coming in.
So there are actually only three counties in the state
when I did this pre-recession/post-recession analysis,
there are only three counties that have higher in migration
in their post-recession period than pre.
The other two were La Crosse and Grant County.
And Grant, and maybe even La Crosse to some extent,
are probably largely influenced
by the UW campuses there and other college campuses.
So with Dane County rising,
you might kind of anticipate that the outlying counties
would also rise in terms of their net migration,
but that hasn't been the case.
And this points to what's happening in general
in counties that are on the periphery or edges
of small metro areas in Wisconsin.
We've got some big metro areas,
two of which lie technically outside our boundaries.
Wisconsin does have quite a few of these
what we call small metros, under a million people.
These ones I've highlighted there,
there's like a central core county to these small metros,
and then there's some outlying ones
which we call fringe counties.
So there are eight counties in Wisconsin
that fall in this category.
And they're all relatively small in population.
You think sort of Iowa and...
Iowa County, Columbia County, and Chippewa,
even somewhat Douglas County.
I mean population-wise, not very large counties.
They actually average about 40,000,
whereas the core counties within these metro areas...
I have two minutes left? Okay.
Average about 240,000.
So the core counties of these small metro areas
have been holding their own in terms of net migration,
as I'm showing here.
But the eight counties on the periphery
of these central core counties
have seen their net migration fortune
slip from positive to negative, collectively.
In fact, seven of the eight
have experienced negative net migration since the recession,
and all eight have seen their net migration fall.
Now, I have a really big group of counties,
we've got metro areas and then we have non-metro counties,
which are adjacent to the metro areas.
There are 37 of these counties in all,
more than half the total in the state.
And another nine that I just have in green here.
These are what are called non-metropolitan counties
non-adjacent to metro areas.
So these are further,
ones that lie even further distant from metro areas.
We're sort of dealing with census definitions here.
These non-metro adjacent counties,
their average population is about 36,000.
So they're very similar in size on average
to the small metro fringe counties.
The more distant counties
have an average population about 18,000.
And some of these you think of
as sort of the classic retirement,
recreation counties far up north.
But there's a differential that shows up.
So when I look at the non-metro
adjacent counties and aggregate,
those that are close to the metro areas
but not actually in metro areas,
their aggregate net migration is flipped
from about plus 12,000 to minus 12,000.
And the more distant counties,
they've kind of held their own okay.
Maybe not so many retirees moving in
as happened in the mid-2000s,
but overall net migration-wise
they're kind of holding their own.
So I know I've thrown a lot of numbers up here
and a lot of graphs.
I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with graphs.
I love graphs.
But let me try to summarize here, briefly,
what I see going on with migration
in Wisconsin counties since the Great Recession.
So mainly I'm seeing sort of the metro counties
are holding their own.
Again, I mention the situation with Milwaukee County,
which there's less loss which equals less gain
for surrounding counties.
Same sort of situation for those counties
on the edges of the Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul metros.
Non-metro small counties
that are not adjacent to metro areas in any way,
about those nine counties mostly up north,
they're kind of holding their own too
in terms of migration patterns.
And again, these are primarily
recreational retirement communities, counties.
And, finally, the moderate size counties,
so 37 and 38, I put together as 45.
These are these peripheral counties on small metro areas,
or that are adjacent to those metro areas.
They're the ones where we've seen this switch
from gaining population to losing population.
If we look at it in a little more detail
about the typology of counties
that the Economic Research Service does,
16 are defined as manufacturing dependent.
So we're seeing a real drop
in a lot of those counties that have,
smaller population counties, about 40,000 average,
and they are dependent on probably
mostly small manufacturing.
14 of the counties are recreational retirement focused.
And, again, not trying to paint too dark a picture here,
I compared these particular groupings of counties
against the whole US situation.
The non-metro adjacent counties are doing okay
in terms of their peers nationwide.
Actually gained a little bit more in the mid-2000s
and have lost a little bit less post-recession.
But these small metro fringe counties are,
the experience there in terms of migration
is quite different,
particularly since the recession for those counties.
So, that is everything I have.
Thanks for coming, and it's time for questions.
(audience applause)