US Population Total Foreign Out Migration

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Ready to use this data? See the Core LMI reference documentation to get started.

Description

This dataset shows taxpayer migration out of the US in the past year (anywhere overseas, US territories, and APO/FPO ZIP codes where the taxpayer still files taxes in the US). This dataset does not include former taxpayers who no longer pay taxes in the US. This data is based on IRS taxpayer migration data, so people who move to Puerto Rico are considered foreign migrants to be consistent with IRS classifications. Data is available starting in 2012 (2012 tracks migration from 2011-2012) and is updated whenever new IRS data is available, generally lagging by two calendar years.

The source and design of this dataset excludes certain groups of people and thus does not represent the entire population, but rather is a good indicator of migrating workers within the laborforce, based on taxpayers. Specifically, the follow demographics are under-represented:

• Youth (not required to file taxes)
• Elderly (not required to file taxes)
• The poor (not required to file taxes)
• The very wealthy (complicated returns often get extensions and are excluded)
• New filers (excluded because they did not file the previous year)
• Former filers (excluded because they filed in the previous year but not the current year)
• Some joint filers (only the primary taxpayer is included)
• Mistakes (errors on a tax return can cause it to be excluded)

Additionally, on recommendation from the migration expert at the IRS, we multiply the published number of migrations by 0.9 to better approximate the actual number of taxpayers that are moving. Their recommendation is based on the assumption that 90% of exemptions claimed on tax returns actually represent a person, while the remaining 10% do not.

When requesting an MSA code as the area constraint in a query, the code must be prepended by MSA (e.g. for MSA code 10540, use 'MSA10540').

Use Cases

Questions answered by this dataset:

• Which counties show the highest rates of foreign out-migration?
• Are taxpayers in New York leaving the country at the same rate as taxpayers in Nebraska?

Metrics

• Population: Number of taxpayers who moved from the geography in question to somewhere outside of the US in the given year.

Filters

• Year
• AreaID (county, state, nation that taxpayers are migrating from)

Core LMI Metadata