A Brief History of Californian Migration
160 Years of Migration Data in the Golden State
As part of the prep for my new Podcast on the history of American migration, I’ve been assembling detailed sets of data on topics for specific episodes. So, spoiler, there will be an episode on the history of migration in California. And it will contain lots of information, and especially narrative, that isn’t in this post. But in the meantime, I figured it’d be fun to build on my recent post exploring migration in the 1850s with a post demonstrating the usefulness of the different methods I demonstrated for estimating historic migration. As I’ll show, using the birth-stock method in tandem with the growth anomaly method can produce informative results.
Estimating Californian Migration
We Can See Some Neat Trends
The chart below shows my best estimate of the annual net domestic migration rate into California. If click in the top right corner and go look at the visualization on Silk.com, you can see all the sources from which I derive this “best estimate.” You’ll see the handful of Censuses that direct measured migration, the native-born population growth residual, the ACS, IRS SOI, and PEP series, my birth-origin method, and a similar method adopted by the Census Bureau in the first half of the 20th century for several decennial censuses. As you’ll see, there are some serious differences in these sources, but, especially in terms of the trend, if not always the level, they are in fact really similar. I’ve got multiple confirmations from very different sources in most years, and take a kind of central estimate of those sources in order to come up with one, simple, easy-to-understand “best guess” at what California’s net migration looked like.
Okay, cool. So this is the net migration rate. It shows that, early in California’s history, net migration was really, really high. Between 1850 and 1860, California averaged about 5 or 6% annual population gains due to migration alone. This was the result of the mining boom of course, but also ranchers and farmers heading to the newly opened lands recently taken from Spain, as well as government workers sent west to bring the new territory into the fold, and businessmen and laborers by the end of the 1850s, headed to California to build towns, cities, industries, and, of course, railroads.
The Odd Post-War Period
What Held Back California’s Post-Civil War Growth?
But a funny thing happens after the 1860s. Despite California’s pleasant climate, rich soils, growing economy, and its newly-forged transcontinental rail-link, net migration was more-or-less flat through the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, then dropped off sharply during the economically tumultuous 1890s.
This is really kind of weird. In the 1880s, California probably had lower migration than Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, North Dakota, or Washington. It was essentially tied with Arkansas, New Mexico, and Utah.
Now sure, those were all frontier states too, so of course we would expect to see high net rates, because they’ve got low starting populations.
But it’s not just a rates issue. California drew probably about 120,000 net migrants in the 1880s. But Washington and Oregon drew almost 300,000, and were even less accessible than California. The Dakotas drew 250,000. Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico together drew another 250,000 or so.
Let me put this another way. If we take all the states with over 1% net migration in the 1880s, they’ve got 6.7 million residents, of whom 864,000 were in California in 1880. Yet these states received 2.2 million net migrants, of which just 120,000 went to California. So it’s not just a case of these frontier states having small populations. Even states with smaller populations and equivalent isolation, like Washington and Oregon, outperformed California in the 1880s.
Then in the 1890s, a rough economy leads to California barely breaking even, and possibly even going negative in some years.
I won’t get into detailed reasons for this here. I will when I get to the post-Civil War period in the Podcast, so look forward to that.
California’s Golden Age
1900 to 1970: The Best Migration Years Anywhere Ever Had
After the anemic 1890s, California comes roaring back. Indeed, I don’t think any comparably sized state has ever had so persistent and overwhelming a net migration record as California from 1900 to 1970. California received essentially 70 years of constant positive net migration, with a brief interlude during the post-WWII demobilization.
There are lots of reasons of this. Oil, movies, growing west-coast manufacturing, urbanization, military and naval investments, growing trans-pacific trade, and agriculture were the key drivers of growth until the 1930s. The rise of refrigerated rail cars in the 1880s and 1890s eventually came to California too, allowing its fertile valleys to export produce further than ever before, even as its urban centers became hubs for export to concession ports in China or European colonies in South Asia. California’s lax intellectual property laws allowed the new movie industry to avoid patent suits from Thomas Edison’s firm, and, combined with the nice weather and cheap real estate, allowed a new cinema industry to flourish. High transport costs for manufactured goods created a kind of built-in protective tariff for California firms, and so local manufacturing grew when it otherwise might have been choked off by competition. And by the time those transport costs began to fall in the 1930s, a new industry came to California.
California had been a major oil producer, and a site of significant military and naval bases, for quite some time by the 1930s. Theodore Roosevelt in particular was concerned with Pacific naval power, and thus was interested in California.
But by the late 1930s, the rising threat of a militarized Imperial Japan gave California a new and unprecedented economic stimulus: the military-industrial complex. That big migration bump you can see in the 1930s is partly economic migrants from the Great Plains like the Okies, but mostly (and by 1938 essentially completely) driven by the massive demand for laborers in California’s war industries. California would serve as the military and industrial base of operations for the Pacific Theater of WWII, and as such millions of people moved there for the war industries, and millions more traveled through before deployment into the Pacific.
After the war, demobilization let to a short spasm of out-migration, but it didn’t last. The net effect of war-industry migrations was probably something like 1.0–1.4 million permanent migrants into California. Keep in mind, in 1930, California had just 5.7 million residents.
And war kept on giving to California. The aerospace industry rose to succeed the emergency war-time industries, while the millions of GIs who passed through California got subsidized home loans to buy the housing springing up all over suburban California. And then the Federal government paid for all of them to go to school in California, just as the state government set up a huge university system. Financing a massive educational system is easier when the Federal government shells out the entire cost to students. In this sense, the GI bill can be seen as a subsidy to states investing in higher education, as they tended to receive these educational migrants.
By exposing millions of Americans to the pleasant climates of California during a pre-universal-air-conditioning time, then using Federal funds to create jobs for these Americans ex nihilo, then using more Federal funds to bankroll a massive expansion of education, then using still more Federal funds to build a transportation network making travel and migration easier, we can reasonably state that California’s migratory success from the 1930s to the 1960s was as much a product of Federal favor as local competitiveness. And as soon as defense spending began to slow its rise, and as local cost of living rose due to local policy choices, and as wages began to stagnant causing local tax burdens to be felt more acutely… well… we get the migratory stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s, and then, of course, the 1990s.
California’s Dark Age
1990 to Present: California’s Amazing, Awful, Wonderful, Worthless Decades
I’m aware a lot of people see California since 1990 as highly successful. In many ways, it is. Silicon Valley in particular is something to be proud of. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s success has been an insufficient supplier of wages and employment, in terms of enabling the population of California to continue living in California.
The decline of the textile industry since the 1990s, cutbacks and geographic reshuffling in the defense and aerospace industries, and the ever-increasing burden of local regulations, price inflation, and taxation have made California relatively uncompetitive versus other states. There’s a key process to highlight here.
California’s robust university system and innovative economy allow it to continue to attract many of the best and the brightest, many of those with the most earning potential. As it happens, these people also often have somewhat more pro-redistributive political preferences, so tolerate relatively high tax burdens. These taxes are used to continue financing universities, but also for fairly generous public support programs. These programs enable the eligible poor to remain in California despite fairly high cost of living. As long as many mid-tier manufacturing jobs remained in California, middle-class people could stick around too. However, with the decline of much of California’s manufacturing sector, this middle class, and especially the lower end of it, has begun to hollow out, hence why California has among the fastest-rising income inequality in the nation. Furthermore, reliance on progressive income taxes extracting revenues from the very wealthy exposes California to extraordinary budgetary volatility: high income people have volatile incomes as well. The result is fairly wild swings between apparently cataclysmic budget shortfalls, to suddenly almost excessive budget surpluses.
Conclusion
With careful management, that system can be sustained. Whether it will be is another question. As of 2014, California has nearly climbed out of the negatives. Early data from 2015 suggest a slight worsening of net migration again, but we’ll see. I don’t know what the future holds for Californian migration. And I’m sure readers will find plenty to quibble with in my analysis here. As such, I eagerly invite comments, criticism, responses: as I said, I am in the process of researching for my Podcast episode about California. So if you think I’ve missed something critical (or if you’ve got an explanation for the post-Civil War period’s oddly low migration), please tell me.
And, of course, check out more info on the Podcast here.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
