Free Republic

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...

The latest data from the 2010 Census show how people are moving from place to place within America. In gen eral, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched. When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it's painfully clear what's happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy. Whites are also fleeing the big Northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in...

Black Americans are leaving northern states and relocating in the south, US census data show. Blacks are not just leaving Michigan, as one would expect. They are leaving New York and Illinois and the two major cities therein: New York City and Chicago. The New York Times reports that those leaving tend to be "younger and better educated." Walter Mead has a long post today on what this reversal of "the great migration" means for the "Big Blue" model of Democratic Party governance. Here's an excerpt: "The failure of blue social policy to create an environment which works for Blacks...

Austin fared very well on this year's Best Cities Rankings, and here's another interesting indicator of the difference in migration between Austin and San Francisco: "When comparing California with Texas, U-Haul says it all. To rent a 26-foot truck oneway from San Francisco to Austin, the charge is $3,236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Clearly what is happening is that far more people want to move from San Francisco to Austin than vice versa, so U-Haul has to pay its own employees to drive the empty trucks...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The world's Muslim population will grow twice as fast as non-Muslims over the next 20 years according to a new study, which predicted that Muslims within a generation will make up more than a quarter of the global population. Using fertility, mortality and migration rates, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life project a 1.5-percent annual population growth rate for the world's Muslims over the next two decades, and just 0.7 percent growth each year for non-Muslims. The study, called "The Future of the Global Muslim Population," projects that in 2030 Muslims will make...

After the initial results of the 2010 Census were released before Christmas, commentators focused on their short-term political effects and demographic implications. Many noted the six House seats and electoral votes that will be reapportioned to states carried by John McCain from states carried by Barack Obama. Others noted that California, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, gained no new seats. The comparison tells us much about the country's present—and the shape of the future. SNIP The population of the Pacific states including Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii tripled—up 208%—in 1930-70. But growth has...

The American people have been voting with their feet, the Census Bureau announced on Tuesday, leaving states with heavy union influence and choosing to live in "right-to-work" states with higher job growth where they cannot be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. But the National Labor Relations Board, now dominated by Obama appointees, is deaf to the preferences of voting Americans. It wants to do everything in its administrative power to tilt the playing field towards unionization-even if it means higher unemployment and lost jobs. As a result of geographic shifts in population uncovered by the...

Pope Benedict has called on immigrants to respect the laws and national identity of their host countries. He said that every country had the right to regulate the flow of migration and immigrants had a duty to integrate.The Pope's comments are likely to add to the Europe-wide debate about integration of foreigners.The Vatican traditionally identifies with migrants and refugees and recently criticised France for deporting 1,000 Roma (gypsies) to Romania and Bulgaria.During the summer, about 200 camps were dismantled.The policy aroused a sharp response from the EU and prompted the Pope to tell French pilgrims they should "accept legitimate human...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Global warming could drive millions more Mexicans into the United States in search of work by 2080 due to diminishing crop yields in Mexico, a study released Monday showed. "Depending on the warming scenarios used and adaptation levels assumed... climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or two percent to 10 percent of the current population aged 15-65 years) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone," the study said. Researchers led by Michael Oppenheimer of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University estimated...

(Reuters) - The United States and Cuba will meet in Washington on June 18 for a new round of talks on migration, despite ongoing tensions between the longtime ideological foes, a U.S. spokeswoman in Havana said on Saturday. This will be the third time they have met to talk over migration since President Barack Obama became president last year, and represent one of his avenues for trying to improve relations with the communist-led island. The discussions primarily cover agreements from the mid-1990s aimed at preventing an exodus of Cuban refugees to the United States such as the 1980 Mariel boatlift...

The discovery of a single foot bone is forcing anthropologists to rethink how people first reached the islands off south-east Asia. It suggests that humans arrived on Luzon, the largest and northernmost major island in the Philippines, at least 67,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than had been thought. The arrival of people in Australia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago is a good comparison," says expedition member Florent Detroit of the National Museum for Natural History in Paris, France. We have no idea how settlers got to Australia, he says, but we know from the archaeological evidence...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Confronting soaring frustration over illegal immigration, President Barack Obama on Wednesday condemned Arizona's crackdown and pushed instead for a federal fix the nation could embrace. He said that will never happen without Republican support, pleading: "I need some help." In asking anew for an immigration overhaul, Obama showed solidarity with his guest of honor, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who called Arizona's law discriminatory and warned Mexico would reject any effort to "criminalize migration." The United States and Mexico share a significant economic and political relationship that stands to be damaged the more the nations are at odds...

On March 24, Ker Than argued in National Geographic that "Global warming could make the world a more violent place, because higher temperatures increase human aggression and create volatile situations." Reporting on the findings of a new study released last week, Than repeated the study authors' estimate of increase in violence as temperatures climb: "[I]f the average temperature in the U.S. increases by 8 degrees Fahrenheit, the country's murder and assault rate will jump by about a hundred thousand cases a year." Than also used temperature projections from the UN's IPCC, which has recently been forced to admit "flaws" in...

More than $70 billion in wealth left New Jersey between 2004 and 2008 as affluent residents moved elsewhere, according to a report released Wednesday that marks a swift reversal of fortune for a state once considered the nation’s wealthiest. Conducted by the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, the report found wealthy households in New Jersey were leaving for other states — mainly Florida, Pennsylvania and New York — at a faster rate than they were being replaced.

U.S. anthropologists hypothesize that ancestors of aboriginal people in South and North America followed High Arctic route Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed. The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies...