Which States Win Migration? Part I
North Dakota and Delaware Face Off Against New Mexico and New Jersey
While I’ve focused on metro areas up to this point, much of the public discussion about U.S. internal migration actually revolves around interstate migration. This is a strange fact for several reasons. First of all, not all states are even remotely the same size. Migrating out of Texas is not the same thing as migrating out of Rhode Island. Second, states aren’t necessarily rational economic units the way metro areas are: states with major cross-border metro areas like New York City or Washington, DC may have a bias. Third, states are very large units in most cases, and I’ve established up to this point that migration is highly localized: variation within states is often bigger than variation between states.
So should we even talk about interstate migration?
There are at least three very good reasons to analyze migration at the state level: first, state governments are extremely significant and competitive policymakers, and second, high-quality state-level data and maps are fairly easy to produce. Where there’s good data that can inform meaningful policymaking, it’s worth it to offer analysis.
Another reason we should care about state-level migration is the unique political dynamic of the states. Interstate migration flows impact Congressional representation and Presidential elections, driving key changes in who wins American politics. Indeed, state-level policy debates are often phrased in explicitly competitive terms. Perhaps the clearest example of this in policy-oriented writing on internal migration is Travis Brown’s “How Money Walks.” State policymakers often want to benchmark their performance and figure out if their state is a winner, or not.
I intend to show that what it means to be a “winner” or a “loser” in interstate migration is far less obvious than previous punditry has suggested. There are still winners and losers, but just because a state draws lots of people doesn’t actually make it a winner. Quality matters as much as quantity, and the very meaning of quality will vary by state.
But for now, let’s start simple: which states gained people, and which states didn’t?
Overall, what we can see is that state migration rates in 2013 varied widely. Alaska lost perhaps as much as 8% of its population to out-migration (see notes at the end for some perspective on this number), while North Dakota gained about 1.3%. Both of these changes were driven largely by changes in oil production. Regionally, there aren’t many clear trends: “Sun Belt” states show both positive and negative migration, though “Rust Belt” states still don’t show much strength.
State migration rates in 2013 varied widely around the country.
Lots of factors drive state-level migration trends. One huge factor is sub-state metro-area trends. If a state has strong cities, it’ll tend to have strong migration overall.
But that’s not the whole story. North Dakota’s non-metro areas, for example, dominated in-migration. Plus, some factors are simply out of city leaders’ control: like state occupational licensing policies or tax policies. Likewise, federal spending, such as on military bases, can have a large effect, but is mostly out of the control of local policymakers. State choices regarding Medicaid and welfare, education spending and financial aid, and law enforcement all matter for migration. State-driven policies can and do impact even local migration profiles.
The state policy most commonly associated with migration is taxation. I won’t offer a detailed regression analysis here, but the most recent and detailed academic research, using extensive longitudinal databases of migration, finds that state taxes do have a statistically significant impact on migration, though not necessarily a large impact. Recent research also shows that stringent ooccupational licensing standards can reduce interstate migration as well. I could go further on the role of state policies in altering migration flows (and hope to do so at the very end of this series), but those two cases demonstrate the point clearly enough. State policies matter.
Migration in 2013 Mostly Continues Previous State-Level Trends
For the most part, migration in 2013 followed previous state-level trends, although there were a few exceptions. Maine, Nevada, and Delaware can claim the awards for “most improved” migration in 2013 versus the preceding 6 years. New Mexico, Arkansas, and Idaho, meanwhile, all saw the biggest negative changes in migration rates. All three had positive average migration from 2007 to 2012, and then went negative in 2013.
The states with the highest longer-term migration rates are all over the map. North Dakota unsurprisingly leads the way, having added over 7.5% to its population through migration since 2006. But the runner up, Delaware, added 6.6% to its population through migration. This may be a surprise to some. Delaware’s strength isn’t a statistical fluke, either: it has had fairly high positive migration every year since 2007. Broken down by age, Delaware has had positive total migration from 2007–2013 in every age group except 40 to 44 year-olds. For states wanting to attract migration, Delaware may be a valuable case-study. Other high-performers include North and South Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah, Oregon, and, of course, Texas.
Coming in at the back of the pack for 2013 are New Mexico and New Jersey. New Jersey has had consistently negative migration for years, while New Mexico has seen both positive and negative migration.
Technically, Alaska and the District of Columbia have worse migration records than New Mexico or New Jersey, both for 2013 and the period 2007–2013 on the whole. However, both are special cases where the ACS data may not perform well, for reasons noted at the end of this post.
In the next post I’ll assess how internal migration relates to international migration. Immigration is a hot-button issue, but there’s much less discussion of what immigration looks like beyond the border. I’ll take a shot at that.
But for now, this post is sufficient to demonstrate the variation in interstate migration. And as anyone who’s read my previous posts should immediately notice, finding a truly meaningful “regional trend” in that map is more than a little challenging.
Start the series from the beginning!
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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.
This post may have raised a lot of questions for you, like why certain states have extreme migration profiles, exactly what I’m claiming about the relationship between taxes and migration, and maybe questions about why I don’t use IRS data or say things like, “New York lost $8 billion in income.” For answers to those questions, go to the technical notes post I’ve written. There were so many, I decided to make a separate page, to keep this post’s length reasonable.
