Americans again moving from Snowbelt to Sunbelt

Nearly a decade after the recession, population migration in the U.S. is reverting back to traditional patterns, with the Northeast and Midwest losing people and the South and West gaining people, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Immigration from abroad has continued to shore up the U.S. population, even as the country saw the lowest rate of growth last year than at any time since the 1930s. Last year the U.S. also registered the highest number of deaths in its history.

The 10 counties with the largest gains between July 2015 and July 2016 were largely in the Sunbelt, in Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Washington, California and Florida.

Maricopa County, Arizona. had the largest numeric growth, displacing Harris County, Texas, home to Houston,which had spent the previous eight years in the top slot. Maricopa, which includes Phoenix, was growing steadily before 2007 because of international migration, according to Peter Borsella, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s population division.

Both domestic and international migration declined there after the recession, but in the past five years a large influx of people moved there from elsewhere in the U.S., while international migration remained relatively low. Harris County, which includes Houston, saw a substantial dip in domestic migration last year, though a high rate of international migration kept it in second place.

The counties and metropolitan areas with the biggest population losses were mostly in Midwestern and Rust Belt states. Notably, the Chicago area saw a decrease for the second year in a row, its only two years of losses since 1990.

This reflects the country’s direction before the recession, said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“There was huge growth into the Sunbelt — Florida, Texas, Phoenix, Las Vegas — and it had to do with the huge economic engines that were creating jobs in those areas, coupled with a very favorable housing market (and) low interest rates,” he said. “Those were boom times in that part of the country.”

The recession reduced the flow, while shoring up areas that had been losing population. “In a way these people were sort of captive migrants in some of those places; they would have moved if they could have,” Frey said. “So the Snowbelt to Sunbelt highway was on hold a little bit. In the past three years there’s really evidence that some of these are coming back. So in a way it’s kind of back to normal of the broad sweep of where the country’s been going since the 1980s and 90s.”

Metropolitan areas with a high cost of living have seen more out-migration as the nation’s economy has improved post-recession. Along with Chicago, greater New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. showed the biggest losses due to domestic out-migration, though these three areas still grew through international migration and natural increase (the number of births compared to deaths).

The flight from rural areas has also begun to slow down, though their population is still declining overall. Traditionally, rural counties near metropolitan areas grew faster than more remote ones because the sprawl from metropolitan areas spilled over into them, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute. While the recession reversed this trend, rural counties near metropolitan areas began to grow again last year, he said.