Ever wondered about cities with the highest net migration in America? Just lay back and relax – we have compiled the list for you. With ever increasing globalization trend, borders are slowly, but steadily becoming more and more obsolete. This is especially the case in modern, highly developed and democratic countries which the United States of America certainly are. However, this is also the case in third world countries, and even developed countries in some kind of turmoil (take Syria for example). What I’m saying is that migrations are people movements in general. It doesn’t matter if they’re entering or leaving a specific country – both types of movements are migrations. When people are moving into designated country – this is called immigration, and when they’re leaving their resident country – it’s called emigration. You are probably familiar with both terms, but one of these is likely more often the topic, based on your location. That way, developed EU countries are currently buzzing with the term immigrants – whether legal or illegal. At the same time, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries around the globe are mostly talking about emigration. Because we are talking about net migration in American cities, we’ll have to take both types of migrations into consideration.
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We have gathered the data for our research from Governing webpage. As soon as you open the page, you’ll see the explanation about their methodology. Net migration is obviously a difference between immigration and emigration. Things aren’t that simple here, however, as natural population change has to be taken into account as well. Natural change is a difference between newborn and deceased people. So, net migration accounts for all those changes. Migration rates which we’ll also mention, are differences between immigrants and emigrants per 1,000 inhabitants. The formula basically divides this difference with total population for the start of given period of time, and then multiplies the result with 1,000 (inhabitants).
US metropolitan areas have received around 7.5 million new inhabitants for the period between 2010 and 2013. Out of that figure, 3 million or 40% of people have arrived either from abroad or from US rural and other non-metro areas. Remaining 4.5 million people who account for 60% are counted towards the natural change. Since natural change is positive, the number of newborn children is far greater than the number of deceased. All these changes have had a large impact on certain American cities and their respective growth rates. Here you can see the 15 fastest growing US cities ranked by population growth, and while most of them are non-metro areas, they have certainly exhibited their share of population changes caused by migration.
While most international immigrants usually end up in American largest hubs, domestic migration tends to gravitate towards the Sun Belt, Silicon Valley and DC metro areas. At the same time, large cities are losing plenty of their inhabitants due to rather low (Los Angeles), or even negative migration rates (Chicago). Fear not, however, as sheer birth\death ratio helps them not only to keep, but increase their overall population. It doesn’t, however, help them beat the mentioned metro areas which are currently attracting most migrants. To conclude. As you’re about to see, American cities with highest net migration are usually large developing and highly developed hubs in American south or other isolated, highly-developed areas. Apart from obvious DC area and the Sun Belt, most attractive metro cities are ones where high-tech engineering industry is at its finest.
