Contrary to popular belief, there has been no great migration in the U.S. during the pandemic.

New figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the proportion of people who moved over the past year fell to its lowest level in the 73 years that it has been tracked, in contradiction to popular anecdotes that people left cities en masse to escape COVID-19 restrictions or in search of more bucolic lifestyles.

In 2021, more than 27 million people, or 8.4% of U.S. residents, reported having moved in the past year, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

By comparison, 9.3% of U.S. residents moved from 2019 to 2020. Three decades ago, that figure was 17%.

Besides giving rise to shelter-in-place restrictions, the COVID-19 pandemic may have forced people to postpone life-cycle events such as marriages or having babies that often lead to moves. But the decline is part of a decadeslong migration decline in the U.S., said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

“These numbers show a lot of people didn’t move or moved at a slower rate,” Frey said. “But it’s a longer-term trend.”

That’s not to say that nobody moved. The one uptick in mobility patterns last year took place in longer-distance moves, from state to state, compared to moves within a state or county. Those 4.3 million residents who moved to another state may have done so because of the pandemic, Frey said.

Other factors contributing to Americans staying put have been an aging population, since older people are less likely to move than younger ones; the ability to telecommute for work, which allowed some workers to change jobs without having to move; and rising home prices and rents that kept some would-be movers in place, demographers said.

“I think the boom in remote work because of COVID coupled with the economic shock is the big reason,” said Mary Craigle, bureau chief for Montana’s Research and Information Services.

Among those who moved in the past year, a little under half cited housing-related factors as the reason, almost three times those citing job-related reasons and almost double family-related reasons. Of the 12.3 million people citing housing reasons, more than a third wanted a bigger, better or newer house or apartment, according to the survey.

Those with a bachelor’s degree or graduate degree had higher mobility rates than those with no high school degree or only a high school education.

Among regions, the South had the largest net migration, 576,000 new residents, while the Northeast lost the most – 146 million people. There were flows of people moving from rural areas into metro areas, as well as people moving from principal cities to suburbs in the same metro areas, though not in numbers that varied from past years.

Mobility in the U.S. has been on a downward slide since 1985 when 20% of U.S. residents moved. That was an era when Baby Boomers were young adults, beginning careers, getting married and starting families. In comparison, millennials, who today are in the same age range as their Baby Boomer cohorts were in the mid-1980s, are stuck in place due to high housing costs and underemployment, according to an analysis Frey did last year.

The slowdown in American mobility is part of a recent stagnation in population dynamics in the U.S. The 2020 census shows that the U.S. grew by only 7.4% over the previous decade, the slowest rate since between 1930 and 1940. Earlier this week, the Census Bureau revealed that the population center of the U.S. moved only 11.8 miles (19 kilometers), the smallest shift in 100 years.

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Most Americans say that religious groups providing community services should qualify for government funding alongside their secular counterparts, according to the 2021 Religious Freedom Index survey released Wednesday. 

The annual online survey, released by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, found that 71% of respondents held the view — up 6 percentage points over last year. 

“As Americans bounce back from a divisive year, we see an increased commitment to a wide range of religious freedom principles,” said Luke Goodrich, senior counsel at Becket and co-editor of the survey. “This across-the-board support shows a renewed confidence that protecting religious exercise and expression benefits American culture and civic life.” 

Sixty-two percent of respondents said people of faith should be free to voice their religiously based opinion in public, even on controversial matters, and 63% agreed with a statement that “parents are the primary educators of their children.” They said parents should have the final say in what their children are taught and support the right of parents to keep children out of “morally objectionable” public school content. 

Sixty-three percent said religious student groups should have a place on public university campuses in the same way as secular student organizations. 

Fifty-two percent said worship services are essential (62% for funerals) and the government should not ban such gatherings. 

The survey found significant support for religious exemptions to vaccine mandates: 46% said workers who decline a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds shouldn’t be fired for doing so. Respondents who work with people of faith were much more likely to support such objections, the survey found. 

“After a period where we all have experienced restrictions on daily life at some level, Americans seem more averse to placing restrictions on their neighbors, coworkers and friends for their religious beliefs,” said Katie Geary, content manager at Becket and co-editor of the index. “As Americans work together to bridge partisan divides, this naturally extends to greater support for religious freedom.” 

The online survey is conducted each fall by the independent firm Heart and Mind Strategies. It uses a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults who opt in for such polls. Becket said that probability sampling is not typically done for such online panels, but a hypothetical calculation of such a probability would show a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – More than two weeks have passed since the Supreme Court‘s extraordinarily rushed arguments over Texas’ unique abortion law without any word from the justices.

They raised expectations of quick action by putting the case on a rarely used fast track. And yet, to date, the court‘s silence means that women cannot get an abortion in Texas, the second-largest state, after about six weeks of pregnancy.

That’s before some women know they’re pregnant and long before high court rulings dating to 1973 that allow states to ban abortion.

There has been no signal on when the court might act and no formal timetable for reaching a decision.

The law has been in effect since Sept. 1 and the court has been unable to muster five votes to stop it, said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University’s law school. “While there is some sense of urgency, some justices had more of a sense of urgency than others,” Ziegler said.

Meanwhile, the justices are two weeks away from hearing arguments in another abortion case with potentially huge implications for abortion rights in the United States.

The court will take up Mississippi’s call to overrule the two major Supreme Court rulings that, starting in 1973, have guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion. The state law at issue bans abortions after 15 weeks, well before the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.

Viability, typically around 24 weeks, has been the dividing line: Before it, states can regulate but not ban abortion.

Even before the justices decide what to do about Mississippi’s law and the fate of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Texas’ law has effectively changed the standard at least for the time being.

It bans abortion after cardiac activity is detected in the fetus, usually around six weeks, and deputizes ordinary citizens to enforce the law in place of state officials who normally would do so.

The law authorizes lawsuits against clinics, doctors and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion that is not permitted by law.

It was designed to make federal court challenges difficult, if not impossible. Federal courts have had no trouble preventing other bans on abortion early in pregnancy from taking effect when they have relied on traditional enforcement.

The Texas law is doing what its authors intended. In its first month of operation, a study published by researchers at the University of Texas found that the number of abortions statewide fell by 50% compared with September 2020. The study was based on data from 19 of the state’s 24 abortion clinics, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.

Texas residents who left the state seeking an abortion also have had to travel well beyond neighboring states, where clinics cannot keep up with the increase in patients from Texas, according to a separate study by the Guttmacher Institute.

The Supreme Court is weighing complex issues in two challenges brought by abortion providers in Texas and the Biden administration. Those issues include who, if anyone, can sue over the law in federal court, the typical route for challenges to abortion restrictions, and whom to target with a court order that ostensibly tries to block the law.

Under Supreme Court precedents, it’s not clear whether a federal court can restrain the actions of state court judges who would hear suits filed against abortion providers, court clerks who would be charged with accepting the filings or anyone who might someday want to sue.

People who sue typically have to target others who already have caused them harm, not those who might one day do so and not court officials who are just doing their jobs by docketing and adjudicating the cases.

The justices’ history with the Texas law goes back to early September when, by a 5-4 vote, they declined to stop it from taking effect.

At the time, five conservative justices, including the three appointees of President Donald Trump, voted to let the law take effect. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court‘s three liberals in dissent.

The abortion providers had brought the issue to the court on an emergency basis. After they were rebuffed, the Justice Department stepped in with a suit of its own.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted the Justice Department’s request for an order that put the law on hold. Pitman wrote in a 113-page ruling that the law denied women in Texas their constitutional right to an abortion and he rejected the state’s arguments that federal courts shouldn’t intervene.

But just two days later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overrode Pitman and allowed the law to go back into effect.

The Justice Department made its own emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. Rather than rule on that appeal, the court decided to hear the two suits just 10 days later and without the benefit of an appellate court decision.

At the arguments, two Trump appointees appeared to have doubts about the Texas law. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether the law allowed people who are sued to air their constitutional claims in court and whether it would lead to a spate of copycat laws on abortion and other rights protected by the Constitution.

The court seemed particularly concerned about the “chilling effect” similar laws would produce on other constitutional rights, including speech, religion and gun possession, said Sarah Marshall Perry, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The court’s intervention has few counterparts in recent history, and those include Bush v. Gore, the fight over publication of the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, and Richard Nixon’s effort to keep from handing over the Watergate tapes that ultimately doomed his presidency.

The justices have never said why they opted to hear the Texas cases so quickly or how soon they might be decided.

The time since the arguments is less than a blink of an eye in high-court terms, where months typically elapse between arguments and a decision. But the justices themselves created the expectation that they would move quickly.

“This is obviously important, but there’s not a presidential election deadline looming,” Ziegler said. “Even by Thanksgiving would be extraordinarily fast.”

One possibility is that the court intends to issue a decision before the Mississippi abortion law arguments on Dec. 1.

But Perry said she thinks the court could hold off deciding the Texas case until after it hands down its abortion decision, probably in late June. That would leave the Texas ban in effect.

There’s much more that also might only become clear once a decision comes down.

If the court rules in favor of abortion providers or the Justice Department, will there be an accompanying order that blocks the law? That would be the quickest way to allow abortions after six weeks to resume. Justice Elena Kagan raised the prospect of an order during the arguments.

Will there be a majority opinion that speaks for at least five justices or will the court be fractured so that there are at least five for a particular outcome, but for varying reasons? Either side would be happy with five votes, but a majority opinion carries more force.

How many justices will write separate opinions, on either side? A proliferation of opinions can slow the process, as the justices circulate, comment on and revise opinions in their internal deliberations.

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