New Geography.com has posted a map and state-by-state data on American mobility -- specifically, the percentages of non-immigrants who live in the same state in which they were born. (Hat tip: Brainiac.)
A few observations:
California is clearly no longer much of a magnet for other Americans. Outside of immigrants, 72 percent of the people now living there were born there; that's the same number as in North Dakota. (And there are no songs titled "North Dakota, Here I Come!" or "North Dakota Dreamin.'") The comparable number in 1990 was 60 percent.
Utah is the only other Western state with a higher-than-average percentage of homebodies. Yet, unlike California, it has had double-digit population growth over the past decade. The difference is due to its extraordinarily high birth rate. With births outnumbering deaths by almost 4 to 1, Utah doesn't need to atttract other Americans in order to grow.
Though the Northeast as a whole continues to lose native-born Americans to other regions, the states of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania still seem to be exporting people to the neighboring, and more suburban, states of Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
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