MPC IN THE NEWS: Where We Came From and Where We Went, State by State

Source: New York Times, The Upshot

The folks at the NYT’s Upshot recently did a piece charting how Americans have moved between states since 1900. The charts in Where We Came From and Where We Went, State by State were compiled using Census microdata obtained from ipums.org, the MPC’s longest running data project. The microdata are records containing the characteristics of individuals compiled from a representative sample of Census forms. The individual, anonymized records are provided by the Census Bureau so researchers can explore the data beyond the published summary tables.

To measure domestic migration, the charts look at the place of birth of residents in each state of time. Because the focus of this report is movement of people from their U.S. state of birth to their U.S. state of residence, foreign born residents were collapsed into a single immigrant category. Likewise, the category “U.S. Other” was created to include residents of states born in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a small number of people who in early Census years were identified as being born in Native American tribal territory. Residents who were classified in the data as U.S. born but without a specific state were allocated a state of birth proportionately based on the make-up of their state of residence for the given year.