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Title: The Closing of the American West

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2012

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Abstract: Based on 1890 returns, the U.S. Bureau of the Census declared the frontier closed. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner began expressing his well-known thesis regarding the importance of the frontier in America's growth and development. Freely-available land depleted over time and frontier culture changed a great deal; however, one important aspect of the frontier remained--people continued moving west. It was not until 100 years later, during the 1990s, that net migration to the West ceased. Why? That is the question addressed in this paper, which uses modified gravity models of interstate migration based on 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 census data in combination with seemingly unrelated Tobit regressions to demonstrate that the concentration of the foreign born in the West has been an important factor in the native-born population departing the West and tending to not move there.

Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5774/6039ed7a2250e8c75a073dc3907710b8e0da.pdf

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Authors: Greenwood, Michael J; Sexton, Jesse

Publisher: University of Colorado at Boulder

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

Countries: United States