Californians continue to flee the state.
That’s the message to be drawn from data on the
state’s population growth, newly released by the state Department of Finance.
The state
overall saw a net increase of about 350,000 residents over 2009, reaching an
estimated population of 38.8 million residents this year. But in a continuation
of a recent trend, more Californians left the Golden State for elsewhere in the
country than moved here from other states. Since 1991, the net loss of
Californians has totaled nearly 1.3 million.
This is one of the reasons California, for the first
time in its history, will likely not add any seats to its Congressional
delegation after this year’s census. Perhaps more insidious is the continuing
drain of productive, college graduates to other states (documented elsewhere), which has a profound
and long-term effect on our economic and social fabric.