Migration, Population Structure, and Redistribution Policies

Calvin Goldscheider

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429715563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the links between migration and the composition, structure, and geographic distribution of populations. It discusses the evolution of population redistribution policies in Brazil, and examines internal migration between the 1930s and the 1980s.

Part I
Internal Migration-Types, Stratification and Assimilation

1
Metropolitan Migration in Developed Countries: A Cross-National Data Base

William H. Frey

Cross-national studies have mushroomed in the field of demography over the past two decades. Yet there have been some surprising omissions. One of these, until recently, has been a lack of comparative work on internal migration leading to big city population changes in the world’s developed countries of North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.

The reason for this void does not lie with a lack of interest on the part of academics or policymakers who witnessed unforeseen city declines and counterurbanization during the 1970s — representing important dislocations in long-standing trends (Champion, 1989). Rather, the lack of comparative research on this topic stemmed from almost impossible complexities arising from the incomparability of urban or metropolitan definitions across countries, and the lack of uniformity in the ways internal migration data are collected among the world’s developed countries.

It was into this minefield that I began to tread with a small research staff at the University of Michigan in the early 1980s. Our mission was twofold:

1. to assemble a data base that permits the analysis of internal migration stream contributions to metropolitan area population change and city-suburb redistribution for the largest metropolitan areas in the world’s, then market economy countries for one period around 1970 and another period around 1980, and
2. to produce statistics and analyses that identify cross-national variations and longitudinal changes in the migration processes contributing to population shifts in these large metropolitan areas.

The present paper focuses largely on the first of these two enterprises since this was by far the most arduous part of the project. It is my hope that, by relating our experiences toward this data collection effort, other scholars will delve further in such comparative work.¹ These efforts will soon hold much more than academic interest. In light of the new consolidation of European countries which will transform international migration into internal movement, and the increasing globalization of the economy, the needs for a common definition for metropolitan (labor market) areas, and the consistent collection of internal migration statistics are self-evident. I will begin by presenting the specific data-collection objectives of the project, before discussing the background conceptual and definitional issues we encountered in preparing this cross-national migration data base.

The Michigan Metropolitan Migration Project

The Michigan Metropolitan Migration Project undertook to compile age-sex disaggregated migration stream data for 81 comparably defined metropolitan areas (with populations greater than one million or capital cities of their nation) in 14 developed countries of North America, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand.

The unique aspect of this data set is that it employs a common metropolitan unit definition for each metropolitan area. Extensive inquiries to national statistical offices, international agencies, and various migration scholars, made prior to this study, revealed that no such data set was in existence or in the process of being compiled. Although several countries had defined metropolitan areas to encompass their largest cities, this was not the case for all of them, and the international variation in criteria varied far too widely to be appropriate for a comparative study. With respect to the migration data, it was found that most nations published migration flow tabulations only according to political boundaries rather than metropolitan area boundaries.

Our research team, therefore, specified comparable boundaries across countries in accordance with the U.S. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) concept and with the “functional urban region” concept developed in Growth Centres in the European Urban System by Peter Hall and Dennis Hay (1980) and a companion study at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The team then undertook to compile census- and population register-based migration tabulations, consistent with these definitions, from published volumes for the few countries where such tabulations were available and from special tabulations prepared by national statistical offices and cooperating universities in the remaining countries.

The migration data, descriptive statistics, and projection analyses compiled for this study constitute the first data base appropriate for examining migration stream components of metropolitan area-wide population change and city-suburb redistribution in comparably-defined large metropolitan areas located in most of the world’s developed, market economy nations. Previous comparable analyses of migration patterns (Vining and Kontuly, 1978; Rogers and Willekens, 1986) have been forced to rely on political boundaries that only rarely correspond to metropolitan area-like definitions. Alternatively, previous comparative analyses of population change that used metropolitan area definitions (Davis, 1959; Hoyt, 1962; Hall and Hay, 1980) were not able to decompose that population change into analytically meaningful migration streams. The data and statistics produced by the present study permit such analyses to be undertaken.

Background

The metropolitan area (operationalized in U.S. statistical publications as the SMSA or, more recently, the MSA) constitutes a fundamental organizing concept for most of the empirical research that has been undertaken on the structure and dynamics of population change in American metropolitan areas, cities, and suburbs (see, for example, Bogue, 1953; Hawley, 1956, 1971; Schnore, 1965; Taeuber and Taeuber, 1971; Berry and Kasarda, 1977; Frey and Speare, 1988). Moreover, the compilation of U.S. census fixed-interval migration data around the metropolitan area concept has permitted a great deal of research on the migration stream contributions to metropolitan and city change (Shryock, 1964; Taeuber and Taeuber, 1965; Frey, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1985, 1987; Long, 1988).

Unlike the situation in the U.S., there does not exist a data base that will permit a comparative analysis of migration contributions to metropolitan area change across other de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I: INTERNAL MIGRATION-TYPES, STRATIFICATION, AND ASSIMILATION
• PART II: INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION AND REDISTRIBUTION POLICIES
• PART III: POPULATION COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE
• List of Contributors