- 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)