A recent tweet by Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s press secretary shows the administration either doesn’t understand the state’s out-migration problem or it’s deliberately attempting to mislead Illinoisans. Jordan Abudayyeh’s dismissive response to a Fox 32 tweet tries to shoot down the argument that Illinois has a people-loss problem.
At the core of her response was the recent 2020 U.S. Census Bureau release that showed Illinois’ population dropped by 18,000 people between 2010 and 2020, far lower than the 250,000 drop the Census had previously estimated.
“Story over, nothing to talk about. No problems to see here,” her tweet effectively says.
In this tweet and elsewhere, the administration has treated the “improved” 2020 census numbers as a big win, never mind that Illinois was one of just three states in the entire nation to shrink in population (see Appendix for detail). Only in Illinois could such a loss be spun as a victory.
But Pritzker and his officials are wrong to celebrate. Illinois does have a serious people-loss problem, as Wirepoints recently revealed and Fox 32 subsequently covered.
Recent IRS data shows that Illinois lost approximately 760,000 net people to other states between 2010 and 2020 – enough to entirely wipe out all the state’s gains from net births and international immigration.
Below, we broadly lay out the changes in demographics that impact Illinois’ population – net natural increase, net international migration, and net domestic migration – and we examine why Illinois ended up with a population loss over the 2010-2020 period.
In an attempt to square up Illinois’ demographic changes with the final results of the 2020 decennial Census, Wirepoints used Census survey data as well as the more concrete IRS state migration data.
1. Births minus deaths. Illinois’ net natural increase, which is equal to births minus deaths, has a major influence on the state’s population. Over the past decade, Census data shows Illinois’ net natural increase averaged about 46,500 people annually.
Everything else equal, then, the state’s natural increase added about 465,000 to the state’s population over the last ten years.
2. Net international migration. On average, Census data shows the state has added about 24,500 residents annually via international immigration. Again, everything else equal, that added 245,000 to the state’s population over the last decade.
3. Net domestic outmigration of residents to other states. State-by-state migration data from the IRS, a separate set of hard data based on actual tax returns, shows Illinois lost an average of 76,000 net people (tax filers and their dependents) each year between 2011 and 2020. That’s a net loss of 760,000 people over the last decade.
Those out-migration losses wiped out the state’s growth from net natural increase and international migration, canceling out any net population growth the state could have had.
Wirepoints’ estimate of population changes over the decade shows a total net loss of 52,000 people, which is broadly similar to the final results of the 2020 decennial Census.
Illinois’ losses are real
Illinois’ population would have grown by hundreds of thousands of people over the decade if the state had simply broken even with other states in the competition for residents.
But Illinois didn’t break even. On the contrary, Illinois is a perennial loser of people to other states. In 2019 alone, Illinois was the third-biggest loser, both in the number of total people lost and as a share of population. A recent WSJ opinion piece, titled The State of Outmigration, captured Wirepoints research of the IRS data in detail.
That Illinois has lost hundreds of thousands of people to other states is not a “narrative” – it’s a fact backed up by actual tax returns.
Illinoisans would be far better served if Pritzker and others addressed the issues that make residents leave – the state’s high taxes, its worst-in-nation pension crisis, its broken finances, its unattractive business environment and its pervasive political corruption – instead of denying the fact that there’s a problem in the first place.
Illinois needs fundamental changes if it’s to change the path it’s on. After all, no state has ever shrunk its way to prosperity – it can only manage a slow and sad decline.