As with many other trends, the pandemic sent those migration patterns into overdrive while sparking a few new ones — shifting thousands of people and billions of dollars into fast-growing counties and leaving other areas scrambling to recapture their losses.analyzed IRS filing data to identify migration patterns for the 2019 and 2020 tax years — data that offers one of the most comprehensive pictures yet about how the first year of the pandemic reshaped migration in America.
Looking beyond the top of the list shows significant growth in smaller counties in Utah, Idaho and Colorado — places experts say are heaving benefiting from the rise of remote work, which has allowed those communities to lure white-collar remote workers despite a lack of a traditional top-tier metro area economy.
Indeed, the largest counties in metro Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco all posted negative net-migration totals by a wide margin — accounting for billions of dollars in income on the move.