Revising Methods to Better Reflect the Impact of Disaster

On Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, causing widespread devastation.

This disaster not only impacted residents of the island, resulting in increased net out-migration from Puerto Rico to other parts of the United States, but also the quality of data typically used to measure migration patterns.

During 2018, people began to move back to Puerto Rico as the island recovered from Hurricane Maria, which was not immediately reflected in typically utilized data sources.

While the 2017 ACS did not appear to fully capture the scale of out-migration in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, monthly airline data did show a higher level of out-migration from the island to stateside during this time period.

As a result, the U.S. Census Bureau modified its existing migration estimation method to produce its Puerto Rico population estimates for both 2018 and 2019.

At the time of the hurricane, the methodology for estimating migration to and from Puerto Rico and stateside used the American Community Survey (ACS) and its counterpart, the Puerto Rico Community Survey (PRCS).

In the wake of the hurricane, the PRCS halted data collection from October to December 2017, and used data from the previous nine months to extrapolate patterns for the entire 12-month period, resulting in an overestimation of in-migration to Puerto Rico.

In addition, the 2017 ACS estimate did not reflect a substantial increase in out-migration from Puerto Rico to other parts of the United States. This was perhaps due to the late timing of the hurricane during the calendar year, the ACS two-month residency requirement for inclusion in the survey, and the tendency of migration data collected from surveys to lag measurement of actual migration events.

Similarly, while the 2018 ACS picked up increased out-migration from Puerto Rico to other parts of the United States, it did not reflect the substantial return migration to Puerto Rico that occurred during the first part of the year.

As a result, the Census Bureau’s usual methodology for estimating net migration between stateside and Puerto Rico could not reliably capture the periods between July 2017 and July 2018 and July 2018 to July 2019.

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