WASHINGTON — Although the state's population continues to grow because of immigration, more people left California in the last half of the 1990s than moved in from other states, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today.
More than 1.4 million people in the U.S. migrated to California from 1995 to 2000, while 2.2 million left -- the highest migration numbers in the country. That exodus is "unprecedented," said Hans P. Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, an independent San Francisco research organization.
It was the first time since 1940, when the government started keeping statistics on domestic migration, that the state had lost more residents to other states than it gained, the Census Bureau said, although its overall population increased from 32.7 million in 1998 to an estimated 35.1 million in 2002.
In the mid-1990s, demographers had anticipated that the exodus of Californians in the early 1990s -- due in large part to recession, riots and natural disasters -- would slow, or even halt. But that was not the case, according to these new statistics, the most definitive available.
The largest numbers of people who left California moved to Nevada, Arizona and Texas -- about 200,000 to each state. Nevada and Arizona are the two fastest-growing states in the nation, the report said, followed by Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. Large numbers of people also left California for Washington and Oregon.
"Other Western states ... are becoming the California of the past, attracting domestic migrants, many of them from California," Johnson said. "The big picture is that California, by anyone's measure, is not attracting the numbers of domestic migrants that [it] used to attract. This is a dramatic change from a demographic perspective."
A June report from the California Department of Finance that used annual U.S. Census survey figures from March 2002 notes that "a greater number of persons annually leave California for other states than enter California from another state.... [T]he outward migration trend ... has been consistent."
There are a number of possibilities why Californians have headed elsewhere, including housing costs, economic factors and relocation of retirees, said U.S. Census demographer Jason Schachter.
Domestic migrants who left California in the late 1990s were more likely to be unemployed, less educated or living in poverty than those moving into the state, according to a report in 2000 by the Public Policy Institute of California.
