A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Inter-County Migration Patterns in the United States

The dynamic nature of internal migration flows has altered population redistribution and changed composition in the United States for more than a century. Socioeconomic push and pull factors have influenced people's migration decisions during various internal migration waves in the United States. The main objective of this paper is to identify how effective internal migration flows have been in transforming the population distribution of the United States since the mid-1990s. We also examine the characteristics of the counties that gained or lost population during the last two decades. We analyze migration data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from 1994-95 to 2006-07 to achieve these objectives. The results show that migration was very effective in redistributing population from rural to urban areas. Although suburbanization was a major characteristic of urban growth, our study indicates that suburbanization was not as effective as rural-to-urban migration. The South continued to be the major population magnet in the United States. Counties with large black and Hispanic populations had a negative migration effect. During the last two decades, increase in the Hispanic population and economic inequality in American neighborhoods have also influenced migration patterns in the United States.