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United Van Lines released its annual accounting of where American households are moving and Michigan ranked as the 6th highest state in outbound traffic in 2012. That is a modest improvement over 2011, when the Great Lake State was ranked 4th. Specifically, 58 percent of all United Van Lines 2012 Michigan-related moves are outbound. The good news is that this isn't the most recent improvement in the state's ranking. From 2006 through 2009, Michigan ranked as the company's No. 1 state for outbound moving traffic. Also, by making this state a more attractive place for investors and entrepreneurs to locate...

ST. LOUIS- The Northeast region leads the United States in outbound migration, according to the results of United Van Lines’ 36th annual “migration” study, which tracks which states the company’s customers move to and from during the course of the year. Washington, D.C., continues to lead the nation in inbound moves based on the study findings released today, which analyzed moves from the full year 2012. “As the nation’s largest household goods mover, United’s data is an accurate reflection of the overall U.S. moving trends,” explained Carl Walter, vice president of United Van Lines. “Tracking the number of inbound and...

As the din of America’s falling headfirst over the fiscal cliff reverberates across the nation, the Obama administration is quietly killing a key economic metric that tells how, and how many, people are voting with their feet. Since 1991 the Internal Revenue Service has been compiling statistics on filers’ addresses, which the agency’s Statistics of Income division uses to show who is moving into and out of every county and state in the nation. As you’d expect, the IRS also knows the aggregate income levels of those who move. So the movements of the most fundamental productive components of the...

A century ago, nine out of ten black Americans lived in the South, primarily in formerly Confederate states where segregation reigned. Then, in the 1920s, blacks began heading north, both to escape the racism of Jim Crow and to seek work as southern agriculture grew increasingly mechanized. “From World War I to the 1970s, some six million black Americans fled the American South for an uncertain existence in the urban North and West,” writes journalist Isabel Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns. Principal destinations in the Great Migration, as the exodus came to be called, included...

Indo-European tongues traced back more than 8,000 years to present-day Turkey ANCIENT SPREADThe map shows the timing and geographic expansion of Indo-European languages proposed in a new statistical analysis. The red area in what’s now Turkey is a possible birthplace of the Indo-European language family more than 8,000 years ago.Remco Bouckaert et al. Indo-European languages range throughout Europe and South Asia and even into Iran, yet the roots of this widespread family of tongues have long been controversial. A new study adds support to the proposal that the language family expanded out of Anatolia — what’s now Turkey — between...

Native Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday. The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas. But the new study, claiming to be the most comprehensive analysis yet of Native American genetics, claims to have found incontrovertible proof that there were three immigration waves -- a theory first put forward in 1986. Most Native Americans, said the study,...

Not only do my ex’s live in Texas, but your ex’s, and pretty much everyone else’s ex’s as well. All of America is moving to Texas. Especially the ex-residents of high tax states like California and New York. And, I'll bet many of the ex-residents of Big Brother tax and spend Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan are there too. The fact is Texas led the nation in net population growth for the past decade, while New York and California led the nation in net population loss. Interestingly, the most new Texans (over 550,000) came from one state- California. They brought with...

For decades, scientists thought that the Clovis hunters were the first to cross the Arctic to America. They were wrong — and now they need a better theory The mastodon was old, its teeth worn to nubs. It was perfect prey for a band of hunters, wielding spears tipped with needle-sharp points made from bone. Sensing an easy target, they closed in for the kill. Almost 14,000 years later, there is no way to tell how many hits it took to bring the beast to the ground near the coast of present-day Washington state. But at least one struck home,...

These are the snowy owls attracting quite a crowd of onlookers across America as an ‘unbelievable’ mass migration continues to grow. Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of the Arctic birds winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a mass southern migration. Some states as far south as Texas are reporting sightings of the bird that is as white as the driven snow.

Battered by the worst drought on record in Texas, the world's only self-sustaining flock of migratory whooping cranes is showing vulnerabilities that raise the stakes for crane work in Wisconsin. Texas' dry conditions and booming development have heightened worries about the health of the cranes and have sparked a legal battle over whether the endangered birds are getting their fair share of fresh water. The specter of drought, hurricanes or other calamity is the reason why Wisconsin and a few other states - away from Texas - were identified as candidates for crane reintroduction. The 5-foot tall cranes that migrate...

First of two parts For more than 20 years, natives of Guerrero, Mexico, have sought a better life in the U.S., with many of them settling in Orange County, especially in Santa Ana. Lately, what was a one-way wave of immigration has reversed. The slow U.S. economy and an unprecedented number of deportations have led many of those immigrants to return to Mexico. Orange County Register staff writers Cindy Carcamo and Michael Mello detail the phenomenon in a two-part story. These stories were made possible by a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism grant that was funded by the Rosenberg...

The National Geographic has info, a teaser for an October 26 Nova special: The genetic results add both information and intrigue. From his genes, we now know that the Iceman had brown hair and brown eyes and that he was probably lactose intolerant and thus could not digest milk—somewhat ironic, given theories that he was a shepherd. Not surprisingly, he is more related to people living in southern Europe today than to those in North Africa or the Middle East, with close connections to geographically isolated modern populations in Sardinia, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. The DNA analysis also revealed...

Earlier this week, the journal Proceeedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study on climate change that is at the same time scary, comforting, insightful and a statement of the obvious.To be more accurate, I should probably say that the paper is capable of being interpreted in all of those ways, rather than risk implying that the authors intended to do more than run the numbers and see what popped up. What they're talking about is climate change in Europe, specifically between 1500 and 1800 AD - a period that encompasses the so-called Little Ice Age. It...

I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone. According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of...

For years planners and policy advocates have argued that young people are fleeing Suffolk County because of the cost of living. This has implications for schools, housing density, and even where to invest in parks and recreation. Well, a research paper presented Tuesday questions what many thought was common knowledge.

Conservatives yearn for a big, clarifying electoral victory in November of 2012, but they’re already winning decisively whenever Americans vote with their feet--or their moving vans. New Census numbers show citizens fleeing by the millions from liberal states and flocking in comparable numbers to bastions of rightwing sentiment. Call it the Great Political Migration. Between 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of “residents lost to other states” were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as “red states”...

For black Northerners, the reverse migration makes economic -- and emotional -- sense. / RE: Chicago's Shrinking Black Community Experts say that a reverse migration to the suburbs and the South may be irreversible. Why We're Moving: Thomas Clark was one of those committed New Yorkers. "For me it was the whole urban dynamic of being in a big city, being in the financial center of the world," said the former New York state banking official and onetime president and CEO of Carver Federal Savings Bank. Commuting into Manhattan from his White Plains, N.Y., home, the self-described "little guy from...

For well over a decade urban boosters have heralded the shift among young Americans from suburban living and toward dense cities. As one Wall Street Journal report suggests, young people will abandon their parents’ McMansions for urban settings, bringing about the high-density city revival so fervently prayed for by urban developers, architects and planners. Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year. Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a...

David Cameron wants to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”. To achieve it, he is talking up the Government’s plans to cut immigration, setting off all sorts of political spats. But, even as the Prime Minister speaks, his government is actually closing in on the target. Not because immigration is falling, of course, but because emigration is increasing. Not for the first time in our history, we are witnessing an exodus of Brits. And they are increasingly the people we can least afford to lose. Over 1,000 people leave this country every day. Of that number, around 40...

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times. The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state blacks fled the stagnant job opportunities, high taxes and rotten social conditions of the mostly blue northern states to seek better lives for themselves in the south.. --snip-- Within those states, Chicago and the city of the New York (widely considered among the most successful...