Illinois will NOT let a County become part of Missouri

A county in southern Illinois is trying to leave the Land of Lincoln and become part of Missouri, but the state won't let it. Why do they want to leave, and why won't the state let them?

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According to My Journal-Courier, Jersey County will remain a part of Illinois and not be allowed to become part of Missouri. In an article on My Journal-Courier, they say...

"Jersey County put up an effort to secede from the state of Illinois with a desire to join its neighbor to the west, Missouri...But in an opinion written by the Illinois Attorney General Oct. 17, Kwame Raoul...said no...citizens in many Illinois counties for years have been seeing if it's at all possible to divide the nation's 24th largest state (by land area) into two. Leaving the Chicago area as its own state and the rest of the state to the counties outside of the region of America's third largest city."

To read more about Jersey County's attempt to leave the Land of Lincoln for the Show-Me State, click here!

If you don't know, Jersey County is very close to St. Louis, and is home to about 21 thousand people according to Wikipedia. And I am not surprised that counties in southern Illinois along the Mississippi River are attempting to leave the state of Illinois, and I am equally not surprised that the state of Illinois says...NO. There is no way that Illinois will kick Chicago and the suburbs out, and there is no way that Chicago and the suburbs will leave the Land of Lincoln willingly. The city and suburbs benefit from the state as a whole, it's a numbers game. According to Wikipedia, Illinois has 12.8 million people, and Chicagoland (aka Chicago and the surrounding suburbs) makes up 9.8 million people... As much as we can complain that Illinois is NOT Chicago...the numbers say that yes, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Illinoisans are Chicagoans/Chicagolanders. This is their state, and even though they live in the northeast part of the state, they aren't going to give up the rest of it just because we aren't happy with their politics.