Some Leaving, More Coming

Despite several articles in the past few months highlighting the seemingly large number of people moving out of South Florida, the Miami Herald reports that the area's population has increased 9 percent since 2000. That puts us in the top 10 growth areas in the nation.

Curiously enough, the Sun-Sentinel, who has also written plenty on migration out of South Florida, has not published this story.

Immigrants are providing the biggest boost to the population increase.

A slowdown in population gains during the past two years is a momentary lull, planners said. Census numbers released last month showed that between July 2005 and July 2006 the number of people moving into Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties from other states -- known as domestic migration -- was less than the number moving out. South Florida's growth is fueled almost entirely by foreign immigration, a trend the new Census report says is happening in large metro areas across the country.

Without immigrants pouring into the nation's big metro areas, cities like New York, Los Angeles and Boston would have shrinking populations as native-born Americans move out of big cities.

In the South Florida metro area, there were 409,426 new immigrants during the period covered by the Census report.

Not all of these immigrants are either rich or poor. Plenty of these are middle class professionals leaving unstable countries such as Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina. That's a personal observation, but one that has been verified for several years now.

As far as the net loss in "domestic migration", the Herald article says this:

''The slowdown or plateau we've seen in the domestic migration is not a break,'' said (Ted) Leonard (senior planner for Broward County). I wouldn't be surprised if we see it for another year or so until the housing market straightens out and housing costs and income achieve more equilibrium. But it's just waiting to take off again, and it will happen.''