Impact of Migration on Poverty

To clarify... Are you trying to find the poverty rates of the in- and out-migrants? Or just how the poverty rate changes over time?

If it's the former, you could find the poverty rate of in-migrants using the Public Use Microdata (though you won't be able to get at the poverty rate of people who moved out).

If it's the latter, is there a reason why just tracking the year-to-year change in poverty is not sufficient?

From what I've read nationally, poverty has been concentrating in some communities because low-income people from the surrounding communities have been moving to be closer to jobs and services or displaced from gentrifying urban areas. Our poverty rate has been increasing by about one percentage point a year on average. What I would want to know in an ideal world is whether or not the rate would be rising if everyone theoretically stayed put.

We are looking at the poverty rate as part of a larger study on poverty in which we are trying to help our community identify potential intervention strategies. We need to be able to identify how in- and out-migration are influencing the poverty rate because the way that the community intervenes might differ depending on whether the problem is that people who have been growing up here are becoming poor or if the poverty rate is increasing because low-income people are moving here and high-income people are moving out.

To the best of my knowledge there are tables for both in fact-finder, which is what I've been working off of. But, I'm open to using the PUMs if that data's more flexible for this purpose.

One of the variables available for the PUMS data on the IPUMS web site is MIGPUMA1, which is the PUMA of residence one year ago. I think you might be able to run a report that filters for recent movers from your PUMAs of interest and report on their poverty status. Unless you can group the results from several PUMAs I would try this with 3 or 5 year ACS data to get a big enough sample to be confident in your results.

I second what Cliff said!

We are trying to explore a similar question--are people in poverty being pushed out of our county. I have been learning PUMS data for a poverty study that we are working on. Would it be possible to use DataFerrett and the MIGPUMA10 and MIGPUMA00 variables to search our county's neighboring PUMAs to see if individuals at or near poverty lived in our county in the last year? That is do these variables in DataFerrett provide the same information as the MIGPUMA1 variable in IPUMS?