California Is Seen in Rearview Mirror

"The No. 1 reason people move to and from California is because of jobs," said Johnson, who wrote that report.

The link between migration and the health of the state's economy was evident in regional growth patterns.

"In the early 1990s, the movement was concentrated out of Los Angeles," Johnson said. "Now, with the dot-com bust, a lot of the movement is out of the Bay Area, Northern California."

The state's continued high cost of living also chased Californians to more-affordable states, Johnson said.

One of them is Debbie McCandless, 47, who packed up her Arcadia home and moved to Nevada to raise her 4-year-old daughter closer to other family members. She found an affordable house in one of Las Vegas' newer suburbs, southwest of the city and 10 miles from the nearest grocery store.

"It definitely is slower-paced here; there's not as much traffic," she said. "There just aren't as many people. I really prefer that lifestyle."

Now a substitute teacher in the Clark County schools, McCandless found fewer white-collar jobs available in Las Vegas than in Southern California, where she worked in information technology for Arco.

But she is reaping the benefits of cheaper housing costs, having upgraded from a $355,000, two-bedroom townhouse in Arcadia to a $223,000, four-bedroom house in Las Vegas.

"Here," she said, "you can get a lot more ... for your dollar."

And there are thousands more like her. "Everybody I meet has been here less than three years," McCandless said, calling the trend a "mass exodus."

From 1995 to 2000, 22 million people moved from one state to another, more than half of those relocating to a different region, said census demographer Rachel Franklin.

In another report being released today, the Census Bureau spotted national trends of people leaving the Northeast and the Midwest for the West and the South.

The south Atlantic region, which stretches from Delaware to Florida, experienced the most growth. The West, from Colorado to Alaska, underwent almost zero net growth, with about the same number of people coming and going from the region.

Growth in the West was lopsided, however; the Mountain states -- Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Nevada -- gained a net 724,000 people, and the Pacific states along the coast, including Alaska and Hawaii, lost nearly the same number.