Geographic Immobility in the United States: Assessing the Prevalence and Characteristics of Those Who Never Migrate Across State Lines Using Linked Federal Tax Microdata

ABSTRACT This paper explores the prevalence and characteristics of those who never migrate at the state scale in the United States. Studying people who never migrate requires regular and frequent observation of their residential location for a lifetime, or at least for many years. A novel US population‐sized longitudinal dataset that links individual‐level Internal Revenue Service records across time supplies this information annually. Additional linkages to the Social Security Administration and other data sources provide information on sociodemographic characteristics. We use these administrative microdata to follow a cohort aged between 15 and 50 in 2001 from 2001 to 2016, differentiating those who lived in the same state every year during this period (i.e., never made an interstate move) from those who lived in more than one state (i.e., made at least one interstate move). We find that those who never made an interstate move comprised 75% of the total population of this age cohort. This percentage varies by year of age but never falls below 62%, even for those who were teenagers or young adults in 2001. There are also variations in these percentages by gender, race, nativity, and income. Our findings suggest a need for more research on geographically immobile populations in the United States.