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There has been a massive net outflow of reasonably well-to-do people from California (millions).
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Quote History Quoted:
There has been a massive net outflow of reasonably well-to-do people from California (millions).
If your figures are per year, I doubt them. Many tens of thousands to low hundred thousands I believe. A large fraction of those are retirees, who are selling their million dollar houses in California, and taking their 401k and pension from the big employers (Hughes, HP, Lockheed, IBM, Apple, ...), and settling in places that are (a) cheaper and (b) have lower taxes, or (c) where they still have family connections. Several colleagues of mine have moved to Tennessee, Ohio, Washington state, and Oregon, after retirement (I'm nearing retirement age myself, so I know a lot of people who are in their 60s).
Another large set of people move from the high-coast coastal areas (LA, bay area) to nicer and more rural areas (gold country, sierra foothills, Atascadero and SLO, Hollister).
The new arrivals are not what's causing the population growth. The replacements are mostly low income people and families in search of a better life (more money, opportunities).
There is a HUGE number of people moving into California, which is why the population is growing rapidly. A lot of those are young recent college graduates. The single largest group are CS and engineering majors, who go to work for Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, and so on. But even those big employers are hiring lots of PhDs, MBAs, technicians, cafeteria cooks, bus drivers, and so on. I would not call them "low income", since even a young software engineer with just a B.S. degree will be making close to 100K a year. Given housing prices in LA and in particular the bay area, that might feel like low income, but it is way above what statisticians call the poverty line. Relatively few of those are H-1 visa workers, since just about none of those visas are issued today, compared to demand.
As far as true low income is concerned (farm workers, gardeners, domestic help): There is actually a huge outflow of those. If you talk to people in agriculture (and I have quite a few friends who are in the christmas tree farm and fruit/nut orchard business), it's very hard to find farm labor right now. A lot of the illegal ones have returned to Mexico and other central american places, because the economy there has picked up, and they are afraid of tougher immigration rules (which have not actually happened, but the rhetoric is there). And with the growth in high-tech comes a huge growth in service jobs (cooks and dishwashers for all the Facebook and Google free eating places, plus gardeners for their well-groomed campuses, and janitors), which has wiped out the market for legal unskilled workers elsewhere. And while service jobs in high-tech are not well paid on the scale of software engineers, they are paid significantly better than they were before. The labor market in California is really wiped clean right now, with a huge demand for workers, and resulting inflow.