California: “People moving out; people moving in.”
– The Temptations, “Ball of Confusion”
Right now, more people are moving OUT of California than are moving IN!
Why?
According to the L.A. Times:
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 Brookings Institution.
Although many of the causes relate to the economy in California, exorbitant housing prices (STILL exorbitant after the burst of the housing “bubble”) make housing unaffordable for many struggling Californians.
In the 1950s and 1960s, “domestic” immigration from other states by those who were drawn by jobs and a great climate meant that approximately HALF of Californians came from other states! Between 1970 and 2000, this domestic immigration slowed and was replaced by foreign immigration. Since 2000, the percentage of foreign immigrants has remained STEADY at 27% of the total residents of the state. Since at least 2005, more residents have left California than have arrived from other states of the U.S. The “outflowing” of people increased in response to the cost of housing, then slowed as the recession brought down housing prices, and then increased again in 2010, according to census data, as the employment picture remained bleak.
Migration all over the U.S. has slowed as the result of the (largely business-induced) recession, and the flow of people from Mexico has slowed as the result of fewer jobs in the U.S. and violence on the border. Another fact for the “demographics-dim” businesses that exported jobs from California and laid off Baby Boomers is that California is now dependent on ITS EXISTING POPULATION for maintaining its economic engine, and this fact of a more static population necessitates the education and training of California children to replace Baby Boomers as they retire (or are laid off prematurely by business management that doesn’t understand demographics). Yet, tuition and fees at the Cal State system have TRIPLED since 2002-2003!
I haven’t said it for awhile in this blog, but once again, “Are business people stupid?” 
And the answer is still the same, “Only some….”
Historian and author Mike Davis, who teaches at UC Riverside said:
“A steady-state California is both a contradiction in terms and a recipe for decline.”
The L.A. Times article ends, significantly, with personal anecdotes of folks who have left California, but who share an overriding goal:
To move back….
-Bill at
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