When the U.S. Census Bureau recently revealed a small increase in California’s population, it came as a welcome sign to some that the state was growing again. The data even showed a slightly reduced level of out-migration.

Good news, right? Unfortunately, not good enough.

Last year’s count still leaves the state’s numbers below where they stood in 2020, and its growth rate is below the national average and well below that of key competitor states: Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6%; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15% to nearly 30%.

And the prognosis for California’s future growth is not good, given that most of the recent uptick seems to have been the result of the historic immigration surge during the Biden years. Under President Donald Trump, the door for many foreign-born newcomers has been slammed shut.

Although some businesses and immigration proponents rue Trump’s actions, it’s not as if large numbers of immigrants are always a plus. The Congressional Budget Office in 2024 noted increases in immigrants in the U.S. as favorable to the economy overall, but the current newcomers appear to come from poorer countries, many are undocumented, and in the short term at least, that could put stress on local economies and on the salaries of low-income workers who compete with them for living space, jobs and social services.

Worse for California, the slight decrease in out-migration last year doesn’t come close to fixing what’s been a decades-long exodus.

The numbers tell the story. From 2020 to 2024, the state added 934,000 international migrants, compared to a net domestic migration loss of 1.46 million residents. California’s out-migration has come to resemble the pattern long associated with Rust Belt states. Over the last 24 years, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California.

State planners don’t see a turnaround in the offing, either. Consider that in 2007, demographers projected that California’s population would grow from 36.5 million to 60 million by 2050. But today, the 2050 projection is for just 40 million Californians.

People are leaving, or not coming to California, for rational reasons — and most of them are economic. One 2020 study showed that minorities, including Asian, Latino and Black people, generally enjoy higher real incomes and home ownership in Southern or some heartland cities than in the East or West coast metros. These groups have been flocking to Dallas, Houston, Atlanta or Miami rather than California in search of opportunity. Even given the influx of immigrants to California, the foreign-born population of cities in Texas, Florida and parts of Ohio, North Carolina and Tennessee has been growing faster than San Francisco’s, and L.A.’s foreign-born numbers are declining.

Long a beacon for the young and ambitious in particular, today California ranks toward the bottom in attracting all newcomers from other parts of the country. Rather, many affluent young professionals are migrating out of the state. In 2022 California lost more than 200,000 net migrants 25 or older, the bulk of whom had either four-year or associate degrees, while that cohort’s numbers surged in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Florida and the Carolinas.

One recent survey identified the five best regions for young job seekers; four of the five were in the South. Many young people, thinking about their future lives, choose areas where family formation is higher, such as Utah, Texas and, again, the Southern states. From 2008 to 2022, California’s fertility rate (the number of children a woman will have in her lifetime) dropped from 17th highest in the nation to 40th.

This suggests that California’s competitors will continue to add workers faster in the future than the Golden State. California still has the most foreign-born residents in the U.S. and it dominates in terms of the well-off, including retirees, but even this demographic group is moving on. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on IRS data for 2022 that showed that affluent migrants took almost $24 billion out of California, paralleling losses in such states as New York, Illinois and New Jersey.

To Angelenos who get stuck in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic every day, the prospect of a diminished population might seem enticing. Yet the decline in population and the specifics of who is leaving or not coming suggest that the state will be facing risky deficits down the line. Fewer young, energetic residents — and their children — doesn’t make for a bright future. As John Maynard Keynes said of the challenges of overpopulation, the “chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to lose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

California already suffers a significant shortage of skilled workers that is expected to get worse. Companies don’t invest where workers are not readily available.

The state must address the reasons for its fading attractions. Its security- and wealth-creation machine for ordinary citizens is stalled, largely because of housing costs. Add to that reduced economic opportunity and long-term stagnation seems assured.

The youthful energy that made the state the most remarkable region on the planet isn’t a given. It is time to stop and read the data and figure out how to restore the promise of our once Golden State.

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Joel Kotkin is a contributing writer to Opinion, the presidential fellow for urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin.

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