^ I was waiting for something like this confirm some suspicions I have. I'll make a longer post in the General Discussions thread but I managed to find monthly immigration rates for the US, and Chicago/Cook County has skyrocketed to being a top migrant destination in the past 2 years. For the 2016-2021 fiscal years (which starts in October the prior year), Cook County often wasn't in the top 10 list of counties for immigration. In 2023, however, Cook County had the
2nd highest immigration rate in the country, behind LA County by almost exactly 7k people. When you then take into account that NYC is split into 5 counties, NYC of course blows Chicago & LA out of the water. That said, immigration in the Chicago area is now at the same level, and sometimes surpassing, places like Miami, LA, Houston, and Dallas.
For example, Miami was the main place Venezuelans would migrate to for decades, with Chicago not even being a top 10 destination. However, ever since many Venezuelans were bused to Chicago, the number of Venezuelans who've immigrated to Chicago from 2022-2024 (~39k people) is more than Miami's Venezuelan immigration from all of 2001-2024 (~33k people)! Even though Gov. Abbott has basically stopped busing migrants this past year, three times more Venezuelans have migrated to Cook County this past fiscal year compared to Miami-Dade County! This means many Venezuelans are
choosing to come to Chicago instead of Miami, despite Miami having historically been an epicenter.
There's a lot more interesting stuff I'll write in a longer post, but for now if you want to play with the dataset, it's located at:
https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/ntanew/. It's pretty confusing to use, but the gist is that from left to right there are several columns to specify what information you're looking for. For example, if you want to learn for the 2024 fiscal year how many people of a given nationality are moving to the Chicago area, you would select "Fiscal Year NTA Dated" -> "Nationality" -> "Immigrant County" or "Immigrant Court". "Immigrant County" or "Immigrant Court" act as proxies for the Chicago area, each with pros and cons. "Immigrant County" can capture the number of people who listed Cook County in their home address, which is useful for comparing immigration rates to other counties, but this of course won't accurately capture the raw number since many migrants don't have a permanent address listed. "Immigrant Court" in some sense better captures the raw number of migrants coming to the
greater Chicago area, however it's not useful for comparing immigration rates to other counties since immigrants in the Milwaukee and Indianapolis area often apply to Chicago courts.
Note: forgot to mention, this dataset is of people filing in immigration court. So this won't list undocumented immigrants and immigrants arriving through a resettlement program, such as many Ukrainians.