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Main Authors: Agostini, Gabriel, Young, Rachel, Fitzpatrick, Maria, Garg, Nikhil, Pierson, Emma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20989
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author Agostini, Gabriel
Young, Rachel
Fitzpatrick, Maria
Garg, Nikhil
Pierson, Emma
author_facet Agostini, Gabriel
Young, Rachel
Fitzpatrick, Maria
Garg, Nikhil
Pierson, Emma
contents Fine-grained migration data illuminate demographic, environmental, and health phenomena. However, United States migration data have serious drawbacks: public data lack spatial granularity, and higher-resolution proprietary data suffer from multiple biases. To address this, we develop a method that fuses high-resolution proprietary data with coarse Census data to create MIGRATE: annual migration matrices capturing flows between 47.4 billion US Census Block Group pairs -- approximately four thousand times the spatial resolution of current public data. Our estimates are highly correlated with external ground-truth datasets and improve accuracy relative to raw proprietary data. We use MIGRATE to analyze national and local migration patterns. Nationally, we document demographic and temporal variation in homophily, upward mobility, and moving distance -- for example, rising moves into top-income-quartile block groups and racial disparities in upward mobility. Locally, MIGRATE reveals patterns such as wildfire-driven out-migration that are invisible in coarser previous data. We release MIGRATE as a resource for migration researchers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20989
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States
Agostini, Gabriel
Young, Rachel
Fitzpatrick, Maria
Garg, Nikhil
Pierson, Emma
Computers and Society
Fine-grained migration data illuminate demographic, environmental, and health phenomena. However, United States migration data have serious drawbacks: public data lack spatial granularity, and higher-resolution proprietary data suffer from multiple biases. To address this, we develop a method that fuses high-resolution proprietary data with coarse Census data to create MIGRATE: annual migration matrices capturing flows between 47.4 billion US Census Block Group pairs -- approximately four thousand times the spatial resolution of current public data. Our estimates are highly correlated with external ground-truth datasets and improve accuracy relative to raw proprietary data. We use MIGRATE to analyze national and local migration patterns. Nationally, we document demographic and temporal variation in homophily, upward mobility, and moving distance -- for example, rising moves into top-income-quartile block groups and racial disparities in upward mobility. Locally, MIGRATE reveals patterns such as wildfire-driven out-migration that are invisible in coarser previous data. We release MIGRATE as a resource for migration researchers.
title Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20989