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California And Texas Trade People

By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) 7.24.01 -- It ain't easy being a Texan in California these days.

Our governor has declared "a war on energy companies" from your home state, which he says bilked Californians out of billions and conspired to black out the lights. Our voters gave your man in the White House a collective nose thumbing in November.

Not that Texans care. They find it hard to take people seriously when they're too spaced out to realize their overpriced homes are sliding into the Pacific. It's not surprising California can't keep its lights on without help from Lone Star power companies.

What could these boastful states possibly share, other than taunts, jokes and insults? The answer, it turns out, is people.

No state sent more new residents to California than Texas in the 1990s, and no state sent more new residents to Texas than California. More than 210,000 Texans moved to California from 1992 through 1999, while 351,000 moved from California to Texas, according to statistics from the Internal Revenue Service.

True, California has about one-and-a-half times the people Texas has. But more Californians emigrate to Texas on a per capita basis than Texans to California.

"I think this cultural exchange program should continue until the two great states come to understand each other better," says famously Texan syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, who, incidentally, was born in Monterey, Calif.

It may seem obvious that the two most populous states would swap so many people. But it's not that simple, says William H. Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute in Southern California.

New York, the nation's third most peopled state, sent relatively few people to either California or Texas. If two states don't border each other, Frey says, there must be other reasons why they attract certain outsiders.

And so there are. The information superhighway connects Silicon Valley to its smaller, more affordable cousin -- Austin's Silicon Hills. The diaspora of blacks from Texas to California shipyards during World War II began reversing in the late 1980s, Frey says.

It would be hard to pick apart the cowboys from Central California and West Texas in a lineup. And with its smoggy air and endless highways, Houston might be called the Los Angeles of the rest of America.

Still, the power crisis has stoked an old rivalry.

"Unlike California, we've got power," quips Jeff Moseley, executive director of the Texas Department of Economic Development.

"I would encourage all Texans to move to California," jokes San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was born in Jim Crow-era East Texas. "The wise ones leave."

Then why does Texas win this vote-of-the-feet?

Affordability is a huge factor. Texas has no state income tax and a lower cost of living. A 15-acre spread with a new 3-bedroom house in Frisco, Texas, just north of Dallas, sells for $229,000. The median home price in San Francisco -- $524,000 -- buys just 2 bedrooms on a postage-stamp lot.

While the prices are different, some Californians find the Texas swagger a lot like home.

"There's a benefit being around people who are really proud of their state," says Josh Silverman, who moved from Berkeley, Calif. in January to work in the Texas-Mexico border town of Laredo. "I don't want to be around some Massachusetts sissy."

Silverman doesn't find all Texas stereotypes so enchanting. It's a social desert, he says, when you don't enjoy local "absurdities" such as skeet shooting, deer hunting, and square dancing.

Other Californians in Texas chafe under stereotypes. Texans often dismiss them as quaintly quirky, says Hollywood-born Sarah Cotton Nelson, who left with her Volvo in 1998 and now works for the Dallas Women's Foundation.

"No matter what I said seriously, people would say, 'Oh, Sarah, you're so funny,"' says Nelson, whose mother grew up in the Texas Panhandle.

It's a mutual provocation society.

"It's always like they're talking to a little child," says Lee Sullivan, a Web content editor who is proud to be Texan and happy to have moved to San Francisco in 1996.

The patronizing comments and even hostility have gotten worse since California's energy crisis, Sullivan says -- so much for California's liberal tolerance.

He hangs a Texas flag in his home office -- but now draws the shade so it doesn't attract unwanted attention. And he's hardly amused at the anti-Texas commentary on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, which allows users to "flip" a switch and send a blackout rolling over an image of the Austin skyline.

Indeed, seldom is heard an encouraging word as Californians send their energy dollars straight to the heart of Texas.

When the CEO of Houston-based Enron Corp., the nation's largest power wholesaler, slipped into the state for a speech last month, a San Francisco activist clipped his face with a sloppy berry pie.

It's a wonder that Enron sent anyone at all. Just before the visit, California's attorney general said he wanted to jail the company's chairman in "an 8 X 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi my name is Spike, honey."'

More often, though, Texans and Californians just live and let live.

That fact has frustrated Scott Russell, a recent graduate of Texas Christian University who saw his team lose its undefeated season in a game at San Jose State University last fall.

College football is an obsession in Texas, but can be a ho-hum affair in California.

"Nobody even talked trash to me," complains Russell, who signs his e-mails "Texan by the grace of God."

After two years in San Jose, Sullivan is moving back to Austin next month to get a master's in education -- again a traveler on the well-trod path between Texas and California.

I guess the states are doing a trade. 1.7 democrat to CA for 1 gun loving republican to TX. LOL

Yes! Give us one gun loving conservative and we'll trade you two bean sprout, tofu sandwich eating Berkeley freaks who spent the last 10 years in school and still haven't graduated.

The sad part is this:



See what kind of idiots we have to deal with? It's pretty sad when the state AG advocates homosexual rape in prison. If anyone needs to get butt slammed, it's that POS AG.


How many Texans can we get for these two?

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