Changing Migration Patterns in the US
By Sanjoli Gupta
Because of increasing migration to urban areas, migration patterns in the United States have changed, bringing new arrivals to places where their previously charted urbanization strategies might no longer be regionally appropriate (Maxim and Grubert 2021). This influx of migrants can leave cities vulnerable to overpopulation and can cause secondary migration, where migrants have to move twice instead of just once to find a new home. Abrahm Lustgarten, a New York Times journalist, explains that “one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone… It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse.
This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty” (Lustgarten 2020). Since moving requires a baseline amount of wealth, and often requires connections in the new home or the need to send remittances back, those moving are likely to have some semblance of wealth, leaving the poorest people stuck in place to face environmental breakdown (Lustgarten 2020).
This has happened before in the United States, specifically during the migration caused by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Due to severe droughts and erosion of the topsoil, farming became difficult and huge dust storms forced 2.5 million people to leave Midwestern states and migrate to California. As the pattern has proved, these migrants faced discrimination and lower wages, and found themselves living in shantytowns on the outskirts of society (Editors History.com 2009). Today, a migration similar to the events of the Dust Bowl could very well occur again due to increasing drought and temperatures, making the conditions that plagued the Great Plains then twice as likely to occur again (Scharping 2021, Harvey 2020).
Work Cited:
Maxim, Alexandra, and Emily Grubert. “Effects of Climate Migration on Town-to-City Transitions in the United States: Proactive Investments in Civil Infrastructure for Resilience and Sustainability.” Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, vol. 1, no. 3, 24 Nov. 2021, doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac33ef.
Lustgarten, Abrahm. “How Climate Migration Will Reshape America.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 15 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html.
Scharping, Nathaniel. “As the Climate Warms, Could the U.S. Face Another Dust Bowl?” Yale Environment 360, 13 May 2021, e360.yale.edu/features/as-the-climate-warms-could-the-u.s.-face-another-dust-bowl.
Harvey, Fiona. “Dust Bowl Conditions of 1930s US Now More than Twice as Likely to Reoccur.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 May 2020, www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/18/us-dust-bowl-conditions-likely-to-reoccur-great-plains.
Editors, History.com. “Dust Bowl.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 27 Oct. 2009, www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl.
