Estimating the regional migration patterns of the foreign‐born population in the United States: 1950–1990

Abstract

The regional distribution of the foreign‐born population is determined by two principal migration processes: internal and external migration, modified, of course, by the impacts of mortality. (Since the fertility of the U.S. foreign‐borns increases only the population of native‐borns, it only needs to be included in studies of the regional distribution of the U.S. native‐born population.) In this paper, we apply model schedules to graduate data on the internal and external regional migration patterns of the foreign‐born population for the 1950–1990 period. Prior to the graduation we “cleanse”; the observed foreign‐born data of obvious inconsistencies and errors arising from a small sample size. No observed data are available for emigration, forcing us to draw on methods of indirect estimation to obtain it. To find estimates of the unrecorded migration flows in‐between the four census‐defined periods in our study (that is, for 1950–1955, 1960–1965, 1970–1975, and 1980–1985) we interpolate between the data of adjacent census time periods. Finally, we combine the estimated migration data with the corresponding mortality data to calculate and analyze the multiregional life tables and projections associated with each five‐year time interval.