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If the pattern of fertility, mortality and interregional migration exhibited by the United States population during 1950-60 were to continue in the future, the proportions of persons in the various age groups and regions would fluctuate from decade to decade. These fluctuations would become less marked with time, however, and eventually all the proportions would stabilize at certain fixed values. This collection of values may be called a stable age by region composition corresponding to the given schedule of fertility, mortality and migration. The same phenomenon may be observed when individuals move between socioeconomic categories as, for example, socioeconomic status or educational attainment levels. The substantial differences between these various situations conceal remarkable similarities. In each case the continued operation of schedules of fertility, mortality and mobility between categories may result in a stable composition. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the nature of these stable compositions, on the interrelation between their various components, and on their relation to the patterns of fertility, mortality and mobility which generate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the racial aspect of the differential fertility in California in 1930. In California, problems connected with the racial differential are particularly significant. The racial minorities are numerically important. They form rather distinct cultural groups and are, in the main, clearly set off from the majority by skin color. Many of them are denied the privilege of citizenship, and miscegenation is either prohibited by law or enforced by custom. And they are markedly differentiated from the white majority in another respect: they are not only guaranteeing the stability of their numbers in the future but were, in 1930, reproducing at a rate so high that they might be expected, when their age distribution becomes stabilized, to double in numbers in little more than a generation, while the reproductive level of the whites was, under the same conditions, at so low a level that a decline in numbers by about a third per generation might have been expected. The aim of this paper is to uncover some of the factors underlying this differential.