Which States are Winning Migration? Part III
State Migration Varies by Income and Education
As I showed in my previous posts, state-level migration patterns vary widely around the nation, and those migration rates don’t fit neatly into stories about regional uplift or decline. Explaining trends in migration requires looking at trends among specific groups like the native- versus foreign-born, or, in this case, poorer and richer migrants, or more and less educated.
As I’ll show today, there’s a fairly strong, but still imperfect, correlation between states that attract more educated individuals and states that attract higher income individuals. Some states seem to be successful at exporting poverty, while others do a better job attracting upwardly mobile migrants.
Rich and Poor Individuals Migrate to Different Places
Many states have major differences in migration rates by income level, though some do not. For example, in Maine, individuals earning over $75k have a 0.6% higher net migration rate than individuals earning less than $25k. That’s equivalent to saying Maine gained essentially zero poor people, while gaining richer people at a high rate. If we recall our earlier discussion of racial migration patterns in Porland, Maine, the story of gentrification becomes even clearer.
New Mexico, meanwhile, has major out-migration, but far less for poor individuals. It is possible that richer people are leaving New Mexico for any number of reasons; taxes don’t seem extremely likely as a culprit. Causes for this bias are hard to pinpoint, especially since we know that New Mexico has relatively higher out-migration by native-born than foreign-born. Whatever the case, something is happening that impacts rich and poor people differently. And whatever is happening, it isn’t happening in neighboring Arizona, which attracts richer migrants.
Two other specific states I want to point out are Illinois and Delaware. I point them out because they have fairly extreme total migration flows, and because, on Friday, I’ll be digging into their records in much greater detail. Illinois has out-migration for both the rich and the poor: but out-migration of the poor is almost three times as high. For whatever reason, low-income people aren’t sticking around in Illinois. As I’ll show below in the education portion, that’s actually a major concern.
Delaware, on the other hand, has extremely high migration rates among the poor (2.7%), but barely breaks even among the rich (0.2%). As I’ll show on Friday, Delaware’s migration is disproportionately from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, and mostly concentrated in southern Delaware. It may be that Delaware’s beaches have driven a growing tourist economy, which provides opportunity for poorer workers. Or poorer people may just like that Delaware doesn’t have a sales tax. I’ll dig deeper on Friday, but, for today, it’s notable that not only do states like Illinois and Delaware have different total migration rates, they have different types of migration too.
Other major differences can be seen between Vermont and New Hampshire, Wyoming and South Dakota, Illinois and Missouri, Utah and Nevada, or Arkansas and Mississippi. These are all cases where close states, in some cases very similar states, have attracted radically different migrant groups.
Degreed and Non-Degreed Individuals Migrate to Different Places
The list of states with higher degreed net migration is, at face value, similar to the list for high-income migration. The west coast and northeast figure prominently among both richer and degreed migration. However, there are some exceptions. Those exceptions, in fact, are what I want to focus on.
A few states are disproportionately successful at recruiting degreed migrants as compared to richer ones. These states manage to attract lots of people who are educated but don’t have high incomes, or at least don’t yet have high incomes. States like Oregon, South Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, North Carolina, Colorado, and Vermont all see much higher migration of degreed individuals than high-earners. These are places that have succeeded in offering opportunities for educated people who aren’t high income yet to get ahead. They have robust graduate schools and PhD programs, strong job markets well-integrated with those schools, often have a more affordable cost of living, and have seen strong economic growth in recent years.
These are states that are attracting upwardly mobile migrants more than they’re attracting people who have already made it. They’re the places where people are getting ahead.
Where are places that aren’t working out so well? Some states show the opposite trend: they’re attracting high-earners, but not the educated, people who are more likely to be near their lifetime peak earnings. States like Iowa, Illinois, Maine, or New York succeed at attracting or retaining richer people, but can’t hold onto their own college graduates as well.
Looking at Illinois and Delaware again, the states appear similar: both are colored a light orange. Illinois loses both educational categories, but loses college graduates at a higher rate than non-graduates. Delaware gains both groups, but gains non-degreed migrants at a higher rate. In this case, Illinois is exporting its future by losing its educated-but-low-income population, while Delaware is apparently providing opportunities for people who are poor and uneducated.
Which states are “winning” or “losing” through interstate migration may differ based on what policymakers think is “good” migration. States losing poor people and gaining richer people might think they’re “winning,” even if they lose population overall. States might want to export poverty, as New Jersey, California, and Maryland seem to be doing. But on the whole, that’s shortsighted: we have a fiscal union, so poor people anywhere still create a burden on government, and rich people anywhere still contribute to taxes.
But more importantly, poor people shouldn’t be seen as baggage but as opportunity. There are only so many jobs a person earning $200,000 a year can take to improve their income (and therefore grow the tax base), and if they’re earning that amount later in life, they’re likely to see declining income within a few years. But a person earning $20,000 or $30,000 a year (especially if they’re young and educated, which is likely, as I showed in my earlier posts) has ample opportunities for upward mobility. Some states do a good job attracting the “educated poor,” i.e. the young and upwardly mobile, while others do not.
States getting rid of their lower-middle-class are exporting their future, while states that offer some chance of upward mobility will reap the rewards. This can be a tricky thing for policymakers to understand because, in the short run, swapping rich people for poor people seems like a good deal: get more taxes, pay less welfare. But in the long run, this policy mostly just means exporting young people, people looking to start new families, blue-collar workers, and other similar groups. The eventual result is a society of low economic mobility, unsuitable for family life, unaffordable for average working people, and ultimately segregated by economic class: so San Francisco, New York City, or Washington, DC.
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Follow me on Twitter. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration. I’m a grad student in International Trade and Investment Policy at the George Washington University’s Elliott School. I like to write and tweet about migration, airplanes, trade, space, and other new and interesting research. Cover photo fromUnsplash.
