When Americans moved in recent years, they tended to go to places like Southwest, Colorado, and central and northern Florida, while heading out of southern California, New York and south Florida, according to new data and research on migration flows released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
While it’s tempting to draw big conclusions from the data on the nearly 17 million people who moved to a new U.S. county between 2008 and 2011, and while maps are fun to look at (indeed, you’ll find two more below), what’s arguably more interesting is the nuances it reveals about American fluidity.
For example, there’s the fact that Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, attracted newcomers from the largest variety of other counties: 957. But people leaving Maricopa also scattered to the most counties — 1,190 — elsewhere in the country.
Other places that lost people to more than 1,000 different counties are Illinois’ Cook County, which contains Chicago; Los Angeles; Texas’ Harris County, home to Houston; and San Diego.
The Census Bureau has released migration data before, but new this year are the demographic specifics. For example, people with graduate degrees or professional degrees flow in the largest numbers from Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Cook County to Manhattan; from Washington, D.C. to Cook County; and from Manhattan to Los Angeles and Massachusetts’ Middlesex County, which includes Boston.
Generally, though, people tended to not roam far. Notice that when both in-migration and out-migration are tallied, people flow in the largest numbers from counties in the same state, often to counties very close to one another. The largest net flow, for example, was the 21,000 people who moved from Los Angeles County to San Bernardino County, directly to the east. Some 18,000 more moved from Brooklyn to Queens, 17,000 from Manhattan to the Bronx, and 16,000 from the city of Baltimore to Baltimore County. Here are the top net migration flows:
This new migration flow research is part of the Census Bureau’s effort to push its data more into the mainstream. You can make your own maps using its Census Flows Mapper, and the raw data are here.
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.
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