“The num­ber of immi­grants near­ly tripled in the nation’s 20 most pop­u­lous coun­ties from 2021 to 2022, as immi­gra­tion returned to prepan­dem­ic lev­els nation­al­ly, the Cen­sus Bureau report­ed on Thurs­day.” Accord­ing to a New York Times arti­cle by Robert Gebeloff, Dana Gold­stein, and Ste­fanos Chen, “Many of the new­com­ers were drawn to big cities with more lib­er­al immi­gra­tion laws and long­stand­ing immi­grant enclaves.” 

Despite the rebound in inter­na­tion­al immi­gra­tion, many of the coun­try’s top coun­ties lost pop­u­la­tion over­all. “Los Ange­les Coun­ty in Cal­i­for­nia, Cook Coun­ty, which includes Chica­go, in Illi­nois, and the bor­oughs of Brook­lyn and Queens in New York all lost pop­u­la­tion, but the loss was small­er than in 2021.” Mean­while, more afford­able Sun­belt metro areas con­tin­ued to draw more new inter­nal migrants. 

One excep­tion was, sur­pris­ing­ly, New York City’s prici­est bor­ough. “Man­hat­tan, the stand-in of choice for urban doom­say­ers, had a sharp turn­around: The bor­ough added 17,472 res­i­dents in 2022, after a loss of near­ly 100,000 the pre­vi­ous year — the biggest improve­ment in the nation.” The arti­cle notes it is the first time Man­hat­tan saw a net gain in domes­tic migra­tion since 2000 or ear­li­er, despite sharply ris­ing hous­ing costs. “The medi­an rent in Man­hat­tan in June 2022, at the end of the cen­sus report­ing peri­od, was near­ly $4,000, includ­ing land­lord con­ces­sions — a jump of more than 28 per­cent from the same month the pre­vi­ous year.”