Sources of emigration to the Washington metropolitan area.
by James A. Bacon
The U.S. Census Bureau has released inter-metropolitan migration data based on its 2009-2013 American Community Survey, and Luke Juday at the Stat Chat blog has created a tool allowing people to visualize the origins and destinations of people coming and leaving each metropolitan area. The results for Virginia’s metros, though hardly surprising, are nonetheless intriguing. Showing the linkages between metros, I would suggest, shows how inter-connected they are by ties of family, friends, education and business.
The Washington metropolitan linkages are, strongest by far with the major cities of the Northeastern megalopolis, particularly Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia and Boston, but the region does have fairly strong ties to Virginia, including Richmond, Hampton Roads, Blacksburg and Charlottesville as well. Washington’s ties to states south of Virginia are tenuous. Only Atlanta registers as an important node for back and forth movement.
The net immigration, not shown in the maps but displayed in the table below, also is revealing. New York, Boston and Phillie send far more people to Washington than they receive in return. But Washington exports people to Virginia — Richmond at the top of the list, followed by Blacksburg and Charlottesville. One suspects there is a strong university connection with Blacksburg and Charlottesville. The steady leakage of people from Washington to Richmond is an interesting phenomenon worth digging into.
The Richmond story is marked by strong linkages with the other metros in Virginia. While its total migration numbers are smaller than those of Washington, a metropolitan region five times its size, they are larger as a percentage of the population. The situation is reversed for movement between Richmond and New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia; there is less movement than between Washington and those metros, even on a population-adjusted basis.
Sources of immigration to Richmond
Richmond is a net exporter of population to Blacksburg and Harrisonburg, college towns, and a large importer from Washington, Norfolk and New York.
The one big surprise in this data: There was far less movement between Richmond and North Carolina metros than I expected. In my personal experience, Richmond is full of Tarheels (including my wife). I guess that anecdotal information doesn’t count for much.
I did not have time to develop comparable profiles for other Virginia metros, but if readers are inclined to do so, I would be happy to publish their analysis.
