Question: How do the numbers on Long Island millennials looking to leave our region compare to other regions?

The full, original question was:

How do the numbers on Long Island millennials looking to leave our region compare to other comparable regions in terms of millennials looking to leave their regions?

Short answer: we don’t know.

A quick google search will bring up news articles that asks similar questions, but unless we can look at their data – we would be doing a disservice to Long Islanders if we tried to compare what we’ve found with what they claim.

That’s not a knock on the credibility or integrity of these other articles – but we want to make sure we are comparing apples to apples, to use an overused idiom.

A longer answer: there might be some data

If you do not mind slightly outdated data, the University of Wisconsin-Madison built a map using census data that shows county level net migration by age. The end result is a very impressive map, along with a very detailed methodology page to go with it.

Otherwise, if age is an important factor but you are fine with state-level data, the IRS might have some data on that. We were a little bit surprised that IRS has migration data, and unfortunately the data does not really fit what we are looking for, but we’re sharing it in case our readers might find it useful.

On the other hand, if county-level data is important but age is not, the Census Bureau has county-to-county migration flows available here.

But wait, there’s more!

IPUMS USA hosts a great deal of fascinating data and allows people to mix and match and build their datasets – in fact we used it for our insurance coverage indicator.

And we suspect that it might be possible to build this dataset that was asked – age and migration – through it using some of their variables.

However, this would not be a quick, simple lift. We would have to make sure that we request the appropriate variables, that these variables mean what we think they do, fact check our math, double and triple check our math again – before we would feel comfortable publishing our findings.

We would like to look into this, and hopefully we will be able to find time to do so in the near future. If any of our readers have expertise in this field, or would like to collaborate with us on this – send our data journalist Kai Teoh an email.