Building a Case Study of Migration and the Curated Data Enterprise - Essential Elements

The Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) is both an infrastructure and a continuously evolving ambition to empower and enable Census Bureau scientists and their data users to develop together new measures of the nation’s people, places, and economy. The CDE could be an engine for better migration and mobility data, leading to improved planning for labor market changes, emergency response, and state revenue projections. State and local economic planners and demographers need information about the interplay between migration and local labor markets, especially given recent dramatic changes in the nature of work during the pandemic. Yet current measures do not keep pace with these changes.

Any area of the country affected by wildfires, extreme weather, flooding, and droughts associated with longer-term watershed issues, experience changes in their patterns of migration. These events precipitate movements that need to be monitored close to real time, so local and state planners can react quickly. When disaster strikes, emergency preparedness plans are needed, informed by reliable data on the size of affected populations, the composition of households, their access to travel or transit, to assess the potential for population displacement. State and local governments require population data for revenue projections, the distribution of resources, the identification of needs, and the establishment of priorities and strategies to address those needs. To be most useful, planners need access to methods to measure migration close to real time to discern the difference between temporary versus permanent shifts in population.

The CDE could support the integration of relevant data sources, including federal surveys such as the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS), combined with administrative data such as tax and address data, as well as third-party data, e.g., new home mortgage applications, real estate inquiries/transactions, private company mover records, cellphone detailed records, and utility company accounts. Technical challenges to overcome in using these data involve creating linkages between survey data, which have a substantial lag but are still valuable to gauge trends to shorter-term indicators, all for small geographic areas. Locally, migration patterns need to be studied as a way of addressing equity issues, for example involving access to housing, health care, and broadband, and displacement of populations based on race, ethnicity, and income. These observations not only rely on estimates of the total population, but the integral role played by population estimates and projections by age and sex, which undergirds measures of well-being, especially rates related to public health issues and poverty measures.

Salvo J, Shipp S, Zhang S. Building a Case Study of Domestic Migration and the Curated Data TR# 2022-027 - Essential Elements, Technical Report BI 2022-027. [Print]. Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia; 2022 April. https://doi.org/10.18130/bcwa-gt69

This report was funded by U.S. Census Bureau Agreement No. 01-21-MOU-06.