California, Here They Come
Some planned their moves with meticulous care, plotting over many years to swap dank skies for California's enduring sunshine. Others decided on a whim over wine: Goodbye, Queens; hello, Temecula.
Some were drawn by age-old lures -- opportunity, a shot at reinvention -- while others fled homelands steeped in poverty and pain.
And then there were those who simply fell in love. With a woman. A landscape. Or even, like Pegah Hashemi, an idea.
The architectural designer landed near Hancock Park last August, from Iran via stints on the East Coast. In the chaos and crowds and freewheeling culture of Los Angeles, she finally found a home.
"Any other place you go, there's a majority and a minority," said Hashemi, 27. "But there are so many immigrants here that the majority disappears. It's liberating. You can grow in whatever direction you want."
Even as real estate prices rise to fearsome heights and freeways become impassable, even as wildfires consume some homes and rampaging mud swallows others, even as experts declare the state ungovernable and a major earthquake inevitable, the refugees from New York and Manila and Tehran, from Texas and Nepal and Washington, D.C., continue to come to California.
For all the attention focused of late on illegal immigration, California is by far the favorite destination of legal immigrants to the United States -- about 200,000 in 2005 alone. Moreover, although the numbers fluctuate with the economy, the Golden State remains a powerful domestic magnet as well, with about 600,000 people from other states arriving here last year.
No matter how taxing life sometimes seems here in the most populous state in America, newcomers still outnumber defectors, drawn by varying notions of the California dream.
"California is one of the very few states whose allure has never faded," said Marc Perry, chief of the Census Bureau's Population Distribution Branch. "The faces of the immigrants change, the tongues they speak change, but the people keep coming."
Why do they come? One of the strongest and most enduring reasons is the sunshine itself. "A Climate for Health & Wealth Without Cyclones or Blizzards," boasted an 1885 booklet from the Chicago-based California Immigration Commission.
It worked then. It works now. Just ask Thu Hoang, 43.
This winter, Thu and her husband, Hung, were visiting relatives in the San Fernando Valley. They decided to take a weekend jaunt to San Diego. Lunchtime brought them to beautiful, wealthy La Jolla.
