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California demographic shift: More people leaving than moving in


November 27, 2011

By Gale Holland and Sam Quinones

Read More: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,5338351.story

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Recent census figures show the state is losing more Californians like McCluer than it is attracting from other parts of the U.S. And the trend toward out-migration is looking less like a blip than a long-term condition. The proportion of Californians who had moved here from out of state reached a 100-year low of about 20% in 2010, and the decade measured by the most recent census was the first in a century in which the majority of Californians were native-born. The demographics of California today more closely resemble those of 1900 than of 1950: It is a mostly home-grown population, whose future depends on the children of immigrants and their children, said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

- Experts point to various causes of the turnaround, most of them rooted in a flagging economy. But exorbitant housing prices — too high for many struggling Californians despite a burst housing bubble — still play a role. "There's a lot of concern about driving out working-class families," said Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California. It was a different world in the 1950s and '60s, when roughly half of Californians were drawn from other states by jobs and by visions of crystalline blue skies in January and beach parties in September. The state's shining image was burnished by a public relations machine that pushed attractive suburban real estate and a wide-open field for business.

- As domestic immigration slowed between 1970 and 2000, foreign immigration filled in the gap. But since 2000, even the state's once-growing immigrant population has been frozen at 27% of total residents. Since at least 2005, more residents have left California than arrived here from other states. The outflow, driven by high housing prices before the bubble burst, slowed as the recession brought prices down, then ticked back up in 2010 as the job picture remained dim, census data show. And there is no sign of the old luster returning. Migration all over the United States has slowed to a crawl in this recession, and the exodus from Mexico is diminishing because of border violence and U.S. job shortages.

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