... according to the 2015 American Community Survey numbers released late last year — the most recent number available — 7.5 million Americans lived in another state just one year earlier — and thus decided that the time had come to move from their home states.
But, of course, those who moved were not evenly distributed, and there are some big differences by region.
When we look at the net number of residents moving in from other states, we find that the destination for most of these 7.5 million migrants was states in the South and in the West — excluding California:
...One objection we might raise here is the fact that the two states fueling the most out-migration have very large populations. How big is the population loss, really, if we look at it in terms of percentages?
It turns out that in many places the loss, relatively speaking, is still quite large:
Even when taking into account population loss proportional to the overall population, Illinois (-1 percent), New York (-0.9 percent), and New Jersey (-0.9 percent) still top the list, with Alaska (-0.8) and Connecticut (-0.7) not far behind. By this measure, California — which was second-worst in the nation in terms of raw numbers — is only the fourteenth biggest loser in terms of the percentage of its population that moved away.
The states with the biggest proportional gains were Delaware (+1.4 percent), North Dakota (+1.4 percent), Nevada (+1.2 percent), Idaho (+0.1 percent), and Arizona (+0.1 percent). ...