Cultural avoidance and internal migration in the USA: Do the Source Countries Matter?

There has been a heated academic debate in the US migration literature regarding whether contemporaneous flows of immigrants displace domestic migrants. While the results of this question are important, it does not answer whether there are cultural avoidance effects in which domestic migrants avoid states with high stocks of past immigrants. The answer to this question would suggest non-labour market responses to immigrants. In assessing the cultural avoidance issue, we examine whether domestic migration responds to the origin countries of the immigrants. We find that after controlling for contemporaneous flows, net domestic migration is negatively associated with larger immigrant stocks from Latin America and Africa and positively associated with immigrant stocks from Canada and Europe. We find that the human capital composition of immigrants also influences net-domestic migration flows—in which native migration is positively associated to immigrant stocks at the tails of the human capital distribution. This pattern suggests that domestic migrants are attracted to immigrants who are complementary to domestic labour. However, origin country effects continue to influence immigration. The implication is that while labour market factors affect immigration, non-labour market factors appear to play a role.