California added 335,000 people over the past year, including more than 35,500 in San Diego County, the report showed. Those numbers are up from previous years because losses due to migration to other states dropped dramatically both statewide and in the San Diego region.
Job and housing growth are key reasons people are staying put, said John Weeks, a demographer and professor of geography at San Diego State University.
“The incentives for staying are better than they have been recently,” Weeks added. “Once you’re here, you want to stay. Of course, I’m biased. But there isn’t a better place to live.”In San Diego, as throughout California, a large share of growth is driven by international migration (both legal and undocumented) and a major fraction of all births are to immigrants. At the same time, the pattern has shifted in recent years:
With foreign immigrants arriving in growing numbers in the Midwest, South and East Coast, however, California “is no longer the major destination” that it used to be for people from Mexico and Central America, Weeks, the San Diego State professor noted.
He and others said the lower costs of living and expanded immigrant networks in other parts of the country are convincing new arrivals to bypass California.This is all very different from the 1950s through the 1970s, when domestic in-migration, in particular, was driving the demography of the state.
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