Migration: Chicken or Egg?

Abstract

This paper is concerned principally with the relationship between migration and the growth of employment in U.S. cities during the 1950's. The more popular explanation for the strong association between the two, probably, is that differential rates of migration are induced by differential growth in job opportunities or employment. Among the more recent proponents of this first view are Blanco [1], Mazek [4], and Lowry [3]. It is fundamental to the so-called export-base theory of regional growth. An alternative, suggested in particular by Borts and Stein [2], is that differential changes in employment are induced by differential rates of in-migration. In the following section I shall describe these two quite different viewpoints in somewhat greater detail. In a recent paper [5] I made a preliminary examination of these two theories. My empirical findings tended rather strongly to support the Borts-Stein hypothesis. I found no tendency for manufacturing wages to grow at below-average rates in cities with an above-average total employment growth. The former tended to vary directly with changes in the average national price of a city's manufacturing output, however, as the Borts-Stein hypothesis predicts. More important for the purposes of this paper, when employment growth and migration were treated as simultaneously determined it appeared that in-migrants tended to find