| Baton Rouge: Executive Summary of the Population Update.
From July 1, 2008 to July 1, 2009, Louisiana gained 18,123 residents through positive net migration (i.e. more moved into the state than moved out).
This is the first time we have had consistent positive net migration since 1981.
The migration we are seeing is likely not a result of post Katrina repopulation and is likely due to our favorable unemployment rate relative to the rest of the country. The unemployment rate in Louisiana for 2008 was 4.6% which is 1.2% lower than the nation rate of 5.8%.
Because of our favorable migration, we are ~5,000 people away from our pre-Katrina population and should be at Pre-Katrina levels before July 1, 2010.
For the decade, Louisiana leads the nation in migration based population loss (negative net migration largely due to Katrina).
The net migration between 2005-2009 is not unprecedented for Louisiana. Between 1985 and 1990, Louisiana lost between 250,000-300,000 residents to negative net migration. Louisiana’s 1985 population was 4,408,118 and we did not cross the 4.4 million threshold again until 1997.
Despite the favorable migration trends, we will still likely lose national representation during the redistricting in 2010.
Though we do not know much about those who moved to Louisiana between 2008 and 2009, data on the 2007-2008 migration stream indicate that we are losing persons with Bachelor’s and Graduate degrees and gaining people with Associate’s degrees, some college, high school diplomas only, and people not completing high school. Also, the household income of inmigrants is lower than that of the outmigrants.
The entire report is available online at: http://www.louisiana.gov/Explore/Demographics_and_Geography/Population _Update.pdf
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