Chicago City Wire

High taxes and crime have been driving Illinois residents, especially in Chicago, to move out of state. Now a Wirepoints study shows that Illinois is losing young people faster than any other state.

Overall, the state’s population loss since 2020 is the third worst in the nation. In the new report, Wirepoints Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner note that only a spike in illegal immigration has managed to slow the population decline.

The most devastating losses are among those 18 and younger.

Illinois had 184,000 fewer residents aged 18 and under in 2024 as compared to 2020. That 6% drop represents the largest percentage in the country.

“It's not only that, we're losing our wealthy people and we're gaining very poor people,” Dabrowski said. “And, from a tax base perspective and from a workforce perspective, from a, you know, a productivity perspective, it's very dangerous for Illinois.”

Florida, in contrast, had its age 18 and under population grow by 5.5%, or nearly 250,000, over the same period.

“To be sure, much of Illinois’ decline can be attributed to the national trend of declining births,” the authors write. “In all, just 11 states increased their youth population over the same period. But having the worst decline shows Illinois is in special trouble. Every one of Illinois’ neighbors had a far smaller decline than we did.”

“The overall population results of the last four years show why Illinois needs an absolute flip of its politics and policy,” they said.

For its part, Chicago is on a nine-year population losing streak. The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated Chicago’s population has declined each year since 2014, losing 128,034 residents, according to an August 2024 Illinois Policy Institute study.

“Population loss in Chicago—and Illinois in general—can be attributed to one cause: people moving out. More people are moving out of the city than are moving in,” the IPI report said. “While international migration continues to be a boon to population counts and births still outpace deaths, Chicago’s population decline is because Chicagoans are leaving.”

A year-old study by Economist Henry Canaday shows that murder rates in urban areas are reliable predictors of why people leave.

“Murder rates around 1 per 10,000, reminiscent of the 1950s, are apparently comfortable for city dwellers,” Canaday writes. “But once that rate gets much above and stays above 2 per 10,000 people start to leave.” 

In 2024, the city’s murder rate was 14.2 per 100,000 residents, but the year before it was 24.5 per 100,000, according to Wirepoints. That’s 1.42 and 2.45 per 10,000 residents respectively.   

“One thing we know for certain about American cities is that many of the big ones in the Northeast and Midwest hemorrhaged population in the last half-century,” Canaday noted. “Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis are far smaller than they were in 1970. Many lesser cities have suffered the same decline. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why this happened. Factories closed and manufacturing jobs departed for the South or foreign countries. Climate control made summer life endurable in previously unattractive places. And then there was crime.”