So people are moving out of the Northeast and midwest and towards the South and the West? Good. 
If you look into the data you'll see it's really people moving to big urban areas while rural areas are in decline.
Not entirely. Among metro areas over 1 million Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Hartford, and Rochester (NY) were the only losers from 2014 to 2015. They are also in the NE/Great Lakes area.
And the accompanying rural areas in those states declined even faster...
In IL the state as a whole lost about 22K people from 2014 to 2015. Cook county lost 10K during the same period or 45% of the total loss of the state. Cook county is only 40.7% of the population of IL, so it is losing at a rate faster than the state as a whole. There were individual rural counties that lost at a higher rate, but their small size meant that Cook was the single largest source of population loss in the state.
Yep. There are actually some "rural" counties (like Peoria's suburban ones) that are growing pretty fast, aren't there?
