While the number of people moving out has increased, the number of people moving into the state has declined.
Virginians are continuing to vote with their feet — and also their moving vans — and they’re increasingly voting against the state.
A new batch of Census Bureau data shows that more people continue to move out of the state than move into it, and the gap between the two is widening.
This trend is not a new one. Since 2013, Virginia has experienced net out-migration, or more people moving out than moving in. What’s new is the latest set of numbers, which also tells more about just who is moving out. Warning: These numbers aren’t happy ones, because they show that the state is primarily exporting college-educated people, which raises the question of whether Virginia is helping to pay to educate people who then leave the state to become workers someplace else.
The numbers will be particularly unwelcome in the governor’s office. Gov. Glenn Youngkin is the only governor to make a big deal out of the state’s net out-migration. Many of the policies he’s pushed — shortening the time it takes people to get through school and into the workforce, and reducing taxes — are designed to reverse these outflows. For whatever reason, they are instead increasing.
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Here’s a look at what they show.
Out-migration has increased from 2021 to 2022 while in-migration has gone down.
There are two separate sources of numbers for outmigration: the Internal Revenue Service (which knows where people file their taxes from) and the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. The IRS numbers are more precise, but also run behind. On the number of people moving in or out, demographers prefer to rely on the IRS rather than the Census Bureau because the IRS really does know where you live. The IRS relies on a hard count of tax returns while the Census Bureau is extrapolating from surveys. However, those Census Bureau surveys do shed light on the type of people who are moving — the IRS doesn’t care about that sort of thing but the Census Bureau does.
With that caveat, we point to this: The Census Bureau says that 275,557 people moved out of Virginia in 2021 — and then says that number went up to 281,589 in 2022. Meanwhile, it says the number of people moving into the state dropped from 276,111 in 2021 to 267,168 in 2022. Given that these are surveys, it’s probably best not to get hung up on the specific numbers but to focus on the trend lines. Demographically, both those lines (those moving in going down, those moving out going up) are headed in the wrong direction.
An important note: This increase in net out-migration doesn’t mean Virginia is losing population. It’s not. The state’s population is still growing, because births outnumber both deaths and net out-migration — but as net out-migration grows, that net population growth slows.
Those most likely to move out of state are ages 25-34.
This means the people moving the most are early in their careers, which suggests that they either feel they’ve maxed out their job opportunities in Virginia or at least found better ones elsewhere.
In 2021, the 25-34 cohort saw 64,887 people move out, more than any other age group. In 2022, the number grew to 67,221. Again, don’t get hung up on specific numbers but pay attention to the directional trends. Youngkin has been concerned about filling the number of job vacancies in the state, but these demographic trends show migration is creating more such vacancies.
Now for some good news: The age cohort most likely to move to Virginia is also 25-34, and we have a slight surplus.
So far, we’ve just been looking at the outbound side of the ledger, and those numbers are big. However, so are those in the inbound side in these age cohorts. In 2022, when you compare those 25-34 who moved out with those who moved in, we actually yielded a demographic surplus of 1,536 people in that age group. That’s a good thing.
The age cohorts where we’re losing the most people are ages 45-64 and 5-17.
Here’s how Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, interprets that: We’re losing parents and their children.
The age 45-64 cohort for 2022, 36,337 people moved in — but 44,429 moved out. That’s a net loss of 8,092 in a single year. No other age cohort saw that big a loss. In the age 5-17 cohort, Virginia had a net loss of 8,282. Since kids aren’t likely to move on their own, it’s reasonable to assume they were moving with at least one parent. There’s obviously a lot of differences between a 45-year-old and a 64-year-old but the big loss of those 5-17 suggests we’re talking about adults on the younger side of that age group rather than the older side. These may well be people who, like their younger counterparts, feel they have maxed out their job opportunities in Virginia. The difference is that, unlike those 25-44, we’re not replacing them.
Those 65 and older are not a big source of net out-migration.
Of the Census Bureau’s eight age cohorts, those 65-85 rank as the sixth smallest in terms of raw number of movers. And in 2022 the net out-migration in that age cohort was just 193. Virginia’s main demographic problem is that it’s losing working-age people, not retirees.
Most of those leaving the state have a college degree.
In 2022, some 60.2% of those aged 24-64 leaving the state had a bachelor’s degree or more.
Here’s how the raw numbers shook out: Virginia had 51,805 people with a bachelor’s degree move in, but 58,770 with a bachelor’s degree moved out. Virginia had 32,980 with a master’s degree move in but 36,354 with a master’s degree move out.
The biggest cohort where Virginia saw a surplus was in those with one or more years of college but no degree — 20,570 moved in while 18,015 moved out.
In terms of educational attainment, Virginia is trading down.
The places where we’re losing the most people are Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
We knew this before; this data simply reaffirms it. We have been accustomed to thinking of rural areas as the places losing population. Some are. Some aren’t — in the Zoom era, we’ve seen some rural areas start to gain population, or at least see more people move in and slow their population declines. In a statewide context, though, those numbers are relatively small. The big losses are from Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads hemorrhaging people. Why are our two biggest metros losing people? The most commonly cited reason is high housing costs in Northern Virginia, and perhaps an exodus of former military personnel out of Hampton Roads.
People leaving Virginia are generally moving South.
Once again, we knew this before but now we have more data to reaffirm it. The top two states for those leaving Virginia: North Carolina and Florida. Between those two states, they account for nearly a one-quarter of those leaving the state. This is consistent with national trends; Southern states are generally those gaining population with domestic migration. Republicans like to point out that they also tend to have lower taxes, which is true, although it’s unclear how much lower taxes are a driving factor. However, those are also the states with fast-growing metros, so there’s a lot of job growth in those places. If low taxes are powering the job growth in those metros, then, yes, low taxes are responsible — although it could also be that people simply like warmer weather. It’s worth noting that some Southern states, such as Mississippi, also have both warmer weather and low taxes but aren’t seeing that kind of growth, so perhaps things are more complicated than taxes and temperature.
In any case, that’s where people are going. North Carolina is Virginia’s biggest destination for those leaving the state; Maryland is the biggest source of people moving in, followed by Florida and North Carolina. The difference is, we had a net gain of people from Maryland but net losses in our population trades with Florida and North Carolina. So, yes, migration is complicated.
If you’re curious about the raw numbers, here they are: In 2022, an estimated 36,028 Virginians moved to North Carolina but only 20,418 people moved the other way. That’s a gap of 15,880 people. In 2022, some 32,756 Virginians moved to Florida but only 23,913 moved north from the Sunshine State to the Old Dominion, a difference of 8,843. That’s as if the whole city of Martinsville (plus a few others) picked up and moved to North Carolina and the whole city of Lexington (plus a few others) decamped to Florida.
If that happened, we’d have legislators from both parties wanting to know why. What about with these numbers?
Source: Cardinal News
