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Originally Posted by pdxtex
it not that california isn't growing, it is, but its much slower than it was even 20 years ago. and its trending in the wrong direction. outmigration of us citizens is higher than its in migration of us citizens. sure people moving there are having some kids but the majority of people moving to california are still from other countries.
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First of all, it's entirely possible the total number of foreign immigrants moving to California is greater than the total number of Americans moving to California, but I don't know that is true. The stats I've seen on natural increase indicate it's unlikely, but if you've got statistics then I'd love to see them.
The most recent Census Bureau data I can find on a Saturday night and after a cocktail
shows about 450,000 Americans moved into California and about 575,000 Californians moved to other states in 2010. That amounts to a domestic deficit of about 125,000, which is less than one-third of one percent of California's population. Even if I were to concede the net domestic outmigration had tripled since then, a tremendous jump, it would still only amount to slightly less than 1% of the total population.
Meanwhile the state continues to grow, due mostly to natural increase--literally the production of hundreds of thousands of new Americans annually--and so none of this seems to me like a bad omen for the state's future, nor any meaningful 'trend in the wrong direction.' An adult Californian, or a transplant from some other state, is no more inherently important to this state's future than is a newborn Californian or a newly-arrived computer programmer from India.
In a place like California, people come and people go. The numbers I've seen represent the kind of flux I would expect to see in a state this large and this dynamic--and yes, this expensive in the coastal urban areas--which happens to be surrounded by other dynamic states that are very attractive on their own merits. California is the oldest population center on the West Coast. Of
course people are going to move from here to the less developed surrounding areas--isn't this the story of American growth?
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its kind of the gateway state as they end up getting priced out almost from the get go. california has kind of regulated itself to death and within a generation or two, the only people who can afford to live there will either be extremely rich retirees or people on state assistance. the middle class is getting squeezed out and we know where they are all going. texas, colorado, washington, oregon and even florida. those are the folks you want to stay...anyway, time will tell.
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Yes, time will tell. California has certainly had its ups and downs, but the state's demise has been greatly exaggerated since at least the 1970s. The American middle class is getting squeezed in general and there are great problems here as there are elsewhere, but I think the claim there is an exodus of the middle class from California of such magnitude that it will disappear entirely from the state within a couple decades--rooted only in annual domestic outmigration rates amounting to less than 1% of the overall population, and despite the fact the state continues to grow overall--seems greatly overblown. Color me unimpressed.
I've said this before and I'll say it again--cities like Austin and Portland and Las Vegas have grown a great deal due to in-migration from California, and 60,000 or 100,000 new arrivals in a decade represents a huge influx in the less populous destination states. It must be a really glaring change. Yet those numbers represent an insignificant loss from a state with nearly 40,000,000 residents. It might seem to the Portlander that 50% of state of California is moving in, but it's closer to 0.05%.
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