Poverty Catchments: Migration, Residential Mobility, and Population Turnover in Impoverished Rural Illinois Communities Matt Foulkes Department of Geography University of Missouri K. Bruce Newbold School of Geography and Earth Sciences McMaster University ABSTRACT Research has thoroughly documented how out-migration of the educated and skilled from rural areas leaves behind a poorer population and creates pockets of rural poverty. Recently, studies have recognized that the poor are also geographically mobile and that poverty migration patterns can reinforce rural poverty concentrations. In this process, certain impoverished rural communities in economically depressed regions receive a dispropor- tionate share of poverty migrants, concentrating poverty in certain locations. This paper examines the conditions and processes through which poor rural communities become likely destinations for a highly mobile segment of the rural poor and near-poor. Utilizing case studies of depressed rural Illinois communities, it investigates how the interplay of community factors and the behavior of migrants transforms rural communities from residentially stable to highly mobile, impoverished places. Research has documented the devastating effect of out-migration on rural communities. In this process, young, highly skilled migrants leave rural areas that offer little opportunity, migrating to urban and suburban areas. Their out-migration leaves behind an older, less educated, and low skilled community that struggles to meet increased social service needs with a shrinking tax base (Cushing 1999; Fuguitt, Brown, and Beale 1989; Lichter, McLaughlin, and Cornwell 1995). Coined the ‘‘brain drain,’’ this highly selective out-migration has helped to explain the creation and persistence of pockets of poverty across rural America. However, there is increasing evidence that the remaining population in poor, declining regions also exhibit high rates of geographic mobility. Using Census data to measure migration between counties, Nord and others (Nord 1998; Nord, Luloff, and Jensen 1995) found * This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-0002397. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Direct correspondence to: Matt Foulkes, Department of Geography, University of Missouri, 8 Stewart Hall, Columbia, MO 65202; email: foulkesm@missouri.edu Rural Sociology 73(3), 2008, pp. 440–462 Copyright E 2008 by the Rural Sociological Society