Probabilistic County-Level Population Projections.

Population projections provide predictions of future population sizes for an area. Historically, most population projections have been produced using deterministic or scenario-based approaches and have not assessed uncertainty about future population change. Starting in 2015, however, the United Nations (UN) has produced probabilistic population projections for all countries using a Bayesian approach. There is also considerable interest in subnational probabilistic population projections, but the UN's national approach cannot be used directly for this purpose, because within-country correlations in fertility and mortality are generally larger than between-country ones, migration is not constrained in the same way, and there is a need to account for college and other special populations, particularly at the county level. We propose a Bayesian method for producing subnational population projections, including migration and accounting for college populations, by building on but modifying the UN approach. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the counties of Washington State and comparing the results with extant deterministic projections produced by Washington State demographers. Out-of-sample experiments show that our method gives accurate and well-calibrated forecasts and forecast intervals. In most cases, our intervals were narrower than the growth-based intervals issued by the state, particularly for shorter time horizons.

"I Wish I Were a Plumber!": Transnational Class Re-Constructions Across Migrant Experiences Among Hong Kong's Professionals and Managers.

This study examines processes of class construction within a transnational community of professionals and managers who are emigrants, returnees, and non-migrants. Building on Bourdieu's class analysis and literature on transnational migration, we examine how class statuses are supported by moral claims based on varying transnational mobility strategies. We draw our results from qualitative interviews with 45 Hong Kong respondents in Hong Kong and Canada. We find that despite Hong Kong emigrants' loss of economic capital due to de-professionalization, their cultural and symbolic claims frame an alternative set of norms about their life successes. Returnees claim to have the best of both worlds having amassed economic capital, while making social distinctions from stayers in terms of their globalized cosmopolitan imaginaries. Stayers appear envious of emigrants' and returnees' flexibility and seek to accumulate economic capital for future retirement migration or to send their children abroad. Respondents' moralizing discourses reveal a social field defining within class distinctions apart from hyper concerns of upward mobility through material gains. Nuanced class distinctions articulate values around freedom of space, time, and expression not readily accessible to residents remaining in Hong Kong.

Weather-Related Hazards and Population Change: A Study of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms in the United States, 1980-2012.

Environmental determinists predict that people move away from places experiencing frequent weather hazards, yet some of these areas have rapidly growing populations. This analysis examines the relationship between weather events and population change in all U.S. counties that experienced hurricanes and tropical storms between 1980 and 2012. Our database allows for more generalizable conclusions by accounting for heterogeneity in current and past hurricane events and losses and past population trends. We find that hurricanes and tropical storms affect future population growth only in counties with growing, high-density populations, which are only 2 percent of all counties. In those counties, current year hurricane events and related losses suppress future population growth, although cumulative hurricane-related losses actually elevate population growth. Low-density counties and counties with stable or declining populations experience no effect of these weather events. Our analysis provides a methodologically informed explanation for contradictory findings in prior studies.

Economic Shock and Migration: Differential Economics Effects, Migrant Responses, and Migrant Cumulative Causation in Thailand.

Classic migration theory predicts that individual and household migration decisions are partially responsive to economic pushes from origin communities and pulls from destinations. Recent theorizing argues that this basic relationship is fundamentally influenced by the experiences accumulated within migrant streams, connecting potential migrants with future migrants between origin and destination. Drawing upon a 16-year study of migrant departures and returns from 22 villages in northeastern Thailand, we extend current knowledge about these fundamental relationships before, during, and after Thailand's economic crisis of 1997. We answer the following questions: How are migrant departures from the origin affected by the crisis, how are migrant returns to origin communities affected by the crisis, and how do migrants' accumulated experiences connecting origin and destination moderate these relationships? We examine effects separately for men and women since village and destination economies are sufficiently sex differentiated. We find that migrant selectivity partially explains year effects: that is, earlier periods are more highly selective. Migrant cumulative experiences facilitate migration throughout the time period and modestly influence the migration decisions during economic downturns, but these effects are far more important for women than for men. For return migration, year effects emerge only for the post 1997-98 period and only after controlling for migrant social capital and occupational sector. Origin-based migrant social capital slightly, but significantly, reduces the odds of return migration throughout the period of observation. However, migrant social capital does amplify the likelihood of return migration after the Asian Financial Crisis. Construction workers are the most likely to return to their origin villages after the Asian Financial Crisis, while manufacturing, service, and agricultural workers show little change in behavior.

CLIMATE VARIABILITY, LAND OWNERSHIP AND MIGRATION: EVIDENCE FROM THAILAND ABOUT GENDER IMPACTS.

Scholars point to climate change, often in the form of more frequent and severe drought, as a potential driver of migration in the developing world, particularly for places where populations rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. To date, however, there have been few large-scale, longitudinal studies that explore the relationship between climate change and migration. This study significantly extends current scholarship by evaluating distinctive effects of climatic variation and models these effects on men's and women's responsiveness to drought and rainfall. Our study also investigates how land ownership moderates these effects. We find small, but significant, increases in migration above existing migratory levels during periods of prolonged climatic stress, and that these patterns differ both by gender and land tenure.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON IMMIGRANT CONTEXTS OF RECEPTION: The cultural armature of cities.

We argue that important, overlooked differences in what we call the 'cultural armature' of Portland, Maine, and Danbury, Connecticut help explain the variation in how each city received new immigrants in recent years. Portland has a long history of contact with the outside world and used its cosmopolitan character to promote urban redevelopment and welcome immigrants from a range of countries of origin. Danbury's small-town, insular outlook, and the fact that most of its newcomers came from a single country of origin - some without legal documents - made immigrants' welcome more fragmented. While leaders in both cities speak of multiculturalism and tolerance, the 'cultural armature' of each led city leaders to put that talk into action differently. We describe how we see this 'cultural armature' at work and argue that it - in combination with demographic realities - led immigrants to be more warmly welcomed in Portland than in Danbury.

Unexpected Outcomes of Thai Cassava Trade: A Case of Global Complexity and Local Unsustainability.

Tracing the Thai cassava (Manihot esculenta) trade network, between 1960 and 2000, offers a compelling example of global complexity at work. The emergence of Thailand's dominance of world export markets caught the world by surprise. The opening up of a European market for cassava was supposed to be met by Brazilian and Indonesian producers. Instead, Thailand took over the market by 1975. Several factors facilitated this emergence including: entrepreneurial diasporic networks of Thai-Chinese traders, local political economy conditions in both Europe and Thailand, and ecological conditions in Thailand. These same factors also shaped the subsequent timing of the closing of the European market, the emergence of a new industry association, the creation of new cassava products, and the expansion to other markets. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of cassava market yielded equivocal outcomes for both Europe and Thai farmers.

The Migration and Development Prism: A Lens on Vulnerabilities and Capabilities.

The inexorable link between migration and development is paradoxically both taken for granted and a challenging puzzle. Describing interdependent dynamic processes, the study of both offers opportunities to theorize and observe social change. The body of knowledge that has come to include studies of both migration and development has enriched the individual fields of migration and development. In the development field, concerned with the processes that underlie economic growth or contribute to improved livelihoods, adding a migration focus has broadened observations about development to include those about vulnerability and security, for example. A migration lens on the development process also reveals the presence of social networks and the selectivity of behaviors and events. In both cases, such observations have enriched our understanding of development processes. The same epistemological process is at work when migration scholars consider development in relation to migration. A development lens means attention to the institutions that regulate the production of goods and services and the related distributional processes. The migration of populations and experiences of migrants elucidate both the potentialities and vulnerabilities that accompany development and globalization, while simultaneously introducing a new conceptualization of class.

Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration?

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In this article, we map the recent intellectual history of gender and migration in the field of sociology and then systematically assess the extent to which studies on engendering migration have appeared in four widely read journals of sociology (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces). We follow with a discussion of these studies, and in our conclusions, we consider how future gender and migration scholarship in sociology might evolve more equitably.

Gendered Migrant Social Capital: Evidence from Thailand.

Employing longitudinal data from Thailand to replicate studies of cumulative causation, we extend current knowledge by measuring frequency of trips, duration of time away, level of network aggregation (village or household), and sex composition of migrant networks to estimate a model of prospective migration among men and women in Thailand. We find that trips and duration of time away have distinct influences upon migration; that household level migrant networks are more influential than village level migrant networks; that female migrant networks and male migrant networks have different influences upon migration outcomes; and, that migrant social capital influences men and women's migration differently. Our elaboration provides significant quantitative evidence as to how gender and family variously imbue migration dynamics.

Do Migrants Degrade Coastal Environments? Migration, Natural Resource Extraction and Poverty in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Recent literature on migration and the environment has identified key mediating variables such as how migrants extract resources from the environment for their livelihoods, the rate and efficiency of extraction, and the social and economic context within which their extraction occurs. This paper investigates these variables in a new ecological setting using data from coastal fishing villages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. We do not find as many differences between migrant and non-migrant families regarding destructive fishing behavior, technology, and investment as might have been expected from earlier theories. Instead, the context and timing of migrant assimilation seems to be more important in explaining apparent associations of migration and environmental impacts than simply migrants themselves. This finding fits well with recent literature in the field of international migration and immigrant incorporation.

Engendering migrant networks: the case of Mexican migration.

This article compares the impact of family migrant and destination-specific networks on international and internal migration. We find that migrant networks are more important for international moves than for internal moves and that female networks are more important than male networks for moves within Mexico. For moves to the United States, male migrant networks are more important for prospective male migrants than for female migrants, and female migrant networks lower the odds of male migration, but significantly increase female migration. We suggest that distinguishing the gender composition and destination content of migrant networks deepens our understanding of how cumulative causation affects patterns of Mexican migration.

Does remarriage expand perceptions of kinship support among the elderly?

This study addresses the debate over whether higher-order marriages will help offset the expected loss of social support from kin due to divorce for future generations of the elderly. We use data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH1, 1987-1988) to examine the effects of marriage, marital disruption, and remarriage on perceptions of overall support and support from kin. To measure perceptions of overall support, we look at whether respondents say that they have someone to: (1) turn to in an emergency, (2) borrow money from, and (3) talk to when they are depressed. To measure perceived support from kin, we look at whether respondents name kin as a source of support. We find that marriage and remarriage increase perceptions of support from kin, whereas divorce reduces perceptions of support. We also find that men benefit more from marriage and lose more from divorce than women. Taken together our findings suggest growing inequality in social support among the future elderly population.

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS IN THAILAND.

Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys' and girls' educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984-1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

Common property systems, migration, and coastal ecosystems.

Common property systems are a critical institution mediating the relationship between population change and environmental outcomes, especially in coastal and marine ecosystems. Evidence from El Salvador; Goa, India; and the Solomon Islands demonstrates how the social structures and institutions stemming from patterns of human migration variably influence environmental out-comes through their effects on common property resource institutions. In each of the case studies, the demographic phenomenon is not population growth or a change in numbers, but an underlying process that affects population size and growth rates: i.e. migration and associated social relations that result from or cause more migration. The following 3 cases studies provide the respective historical and cultural context to show that there is a nonlinear link between population and environment, which when explored reveals the importance of understanding how individuals and communities are embedded in sets of social relations that must be considered when evaluating environmental policies or when determining the causes of environmental degradation.

Markets, population dynamics, and coastal ecosystems.

Our synthesis focuses on how markets influence the population and environment relationship within coastal ecosystems by considering the differential valuing of environmental resources and ecosystem services through 3 perspectives: livelihood, globalization, and public goods and externalities. These are not new perspectives when considering how markets shape demographic and environmental outcomes. However, we suggest that the insight offered by viewing coastal and marine health through these combined lenses brings into focus with renewed urgency the perils facing these vital ecosystems.