In 1990 Montana had just over 799,000 people. By 2019 that state had over a million.
That’s 200,000 new people in the span of thirty years, and 75,000 more than had arrived over the previous thirty.
Who were they, where did they come from, and...what did they want?
We know from birth and death records that most of the new arrivals were transplants. The average number of births each year in the state over the course of the 2010s was 12,000 per year, while the average number of deaths was closer to 10,000.
Since 1990, we can therefore assume that just 60,000 new Montanans came via the delivery room, while the other 140,000 or so most likely arrived via the interstate or the airport.
