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[Five chickens]

I have tons of food and booze, and a very good network of bedrooms and dining rooms.  But I'm still not attracting enough migrants, and I'm having trouble getting over 100 dwarves, following a series of bloody sieges.

Is there anything I can do to attract more idiots shorties to my fort?

[Corai]

Make the caravan a GIANT profit. And I mean GIANT. That helps.

Try spamming out a few addy items. That'll help.

Make sure noone dies. That helps.

[celem]

Its caravan profit thats key here as said.  The number that dwarves look at to determine the success of your fort and whether they want to move is created wealth-imported wealth.  Created wealth seems to be value of your fortress plus exported wealth, smoothing and engraving rooms in particular is an epic created wealth kick, building artifact furniture adds its value to the fort too (items in stockpiles are not fort worth, but if they are weapons held by a dwarf they seem to be, this is the origin of the displaycase mod so you can get artifact jewellery/toys/instruments etc into your wealth by building them).

Be aware that goblinite (anything dropped by hostiles) is all 'imported'.  I once heard that trading out imported items, that is those denoted ingame inside a bracket, does not count towards exported wealth and therefore created wealth since you had no hand in its construction.  I experimented a little by decorating all the goblinite which definately removes the imported tag but did not test in controlled conditions so cannot confirm that it then became exported wealth, or that it did not before, this should be regarded as anecdotal unless someone can confirm.

Immigrants do have other factors at play other than this raw number.  Im not certain of all of them but number of dwarf deaths definatly can disuade them.

Note, created wealth that your dwarves are so influenced by is also the number that goblins and MBs are watching, you want one, you get the other too.

Lastly remember there is a delay on migrants whilke they travel.  Ive had rollercoaster forts where my wealth climbs and falls rapidly (you do well, goblins come and trash the place).  I tended to get huge migrant waves when my fort was in ruins and then tiny ones when it was successful.  Not because they work that way, they dont, but because they were leaving the mountainhome when i was successful to find ashes, or leaving to come to a hellhole, only to arrive at a palace.

[Five chickens]

To be clear: I want my exported wealth to be greater than imported wealth, right?  Also, does it matter which caravan makes the profit?

Thanks for the advice so far.

[krenshala]

As far as I know, it doesn't matter which caravan, but the dwarven caravan should be the one to aim for from a logical standpoint.  Basically, if you start exporting a butt-tonne of stuff to every caravan, or at least give them minimum 2:1 profit (e.g., Trader Proft is greater than or equal to the Value of what you are buying) then you should start seeing a bunch of migrants.

If you keep the dwarves that you have left alive with, minimal deaths, you should receive more migrants the following year.  At least, thats how it seems to go for me.  Also, block walls or smoothed engraved walls instead of rough stone walls (affects wealth totals).

This is all assuming you haven't changed the default population cap down from the 200 it starts at, of course.  If you have lowered it, change it back (or at least upward) and and save/restart DF to have it take affect.

[celem]

To be clear: I want my exported wealth to be greater than imported wealth, right?

Exactly.  It may not have been clear but by created wealth-imported wealth i meant minus, or subtract.  You want created as high as possible and imported as low as possible.  This is why its better to give traders extra profit over taking junk you really dont need just because your roasts are worth a lot.