Population, Geography of

Population geography examines population growth and change and the demographic characteristics of large and small areas on the earth's surface. Although geographers have long been concerned with the study of population and population characteristics, the subfield of population geography traces its origins to the 1953 Association of American Geographers presidential address of Glen Trewartha. Trewartha stated that population never would be adequately covered in the prevailing divisions of physical and cultural geography and that the discipline should be organized around a tripartite structure of population, the physical earth, and cultural landscape. A critical mass of population geographers had emerged by the mid-1960s and closely aligned its interests with spatial demography, logical positivism, and quantitative methods. Early research themes addressed the determinants and consequences of internal migration and residential mobility at the intraurban level using model-oriented and behavioral approaches. Considerable effort was directed toward understanding the decision to move and toward identifying the forces associated with internal migration flows in the United States and across the world.

Although human movement remains the central theme of population geography, the scale of analysis has shifted from local movements to global flows. This change in scale coincided with the dramatic growth in international migration and a growing recognition that global movement has altered local economies and societies in developing nations, not to mention the social and economic structure of U.S. and European cities. In 2001, more than 140 million people lived outside of their country of birth. These movements resulted from economic globalization, substantial and growing income differences between developed and less developed countries, civil conflicts, natural disasters, and lingering imbalances associated with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Population geographers are concerned with the magnitude and direction of the flows themselves and with their positive and negative consequences for sending and receiving countries. For sending countries, migration tends to relieve pressure from unemployment and to generate substantial remittances. Returning migrants often are agents of modernization. For most receiving countries, immigration provides demographic and economic vitality for aging populations and increases cultural diversity; however, in some places, it strains social, educational, and health services.

Population geographers are particularly interested in refugees, a special class of immigrants defined as those people living outside of their country of nationality and unwilling to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution. Recent research reveals the difficulty of separating refugees from labor force migrants because many refugees are, in fact, motivated by forces similar to those that influence other migrants—regional disparities in income and welfare, the presence of relatives who provide much-needed information and support for new immigrants, and the weakening of traditional values and social ties in the face of modernization. Economic factors often are as important as political violence in understanding the causes of refugee flows. The Eritrean refugee crisis of the 1980s was, for example, a response to agrarian transformation in Sudan.

Transnationalism is a process whereby the everyday lives of international migrants transcend national boundaries. Population geographers are interested in[Page 369] the nature of transnational communities and networks, remittances sent to countries of origin and their effects on the economic and social structures of these countries, and identity formation among people who lead transnational lives. Interest in the latter has led population geographers to supplement the traditional quantitative methods of spatial demography with more qualitative approaches to study human movement. Ethnography deemphasizes the event of migration itself and stresses the larger social world in which it occurs. In this respect, ethnography balances attention to the everyday detail of an individual's life with wider social structures. Allison Mountz and Richard Wright, in a fascinating use of ethnographic techniques to study interconnections between Mexican workers in Poughkeepsie, New York, and family and friends in the rural Mexican community of San Agustin, Oaxaca, found that the mainly male migrants in Poughkeepsie interacted with their wives, children, and families in Mexico on a frequent basis and returned for fiestas, funerals, and other village events; provided remittances; and sent and received messages about their daily lives in the transnational community.

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