Yes, California Loses People to Texas
By the thousands, every year, for many years.
This morning, I was asked to look at migration linkages between California and Texas. I’ve touched on this before, but never done anything exhaustive. Once again today, I am not going to give this topic the treatment it deserves. To look at as huge a topic as migration between two of the largest and most politically different states in the union in detail requires a mountain of work I am not prepared to do today. Instead, I’ll prove just a few informative charts, maps, and statistics that I hope can be useful to people who think, read, and write about TX-CA migration.
Quick spoiler: I’m not gonna talk about taxes beyond this paragraph. If you want to have your fight about taxes, go elsewhere. I am a strong believer in endorsing the academic consensus. On this issue, the extant research shows pretty consistent effects: higher taxes do push net migration somewhat more steeply negative, but the direct effect of tax shopping is small and, when you exclude border-metros and look at exclusively long-range migration, taxes have an even smaller impact. All interstate migration probably offsets something like 10–30% of revenue from tax increases. Restricting to non-bordering states probably drops you into the 0–15% range. It is possible that lower taxes could alter the rate of investment and business formation in a state economy as well, however. If lower taxes encourage job growth, then lower taxes could indirectly boost migration, not because migrants care about taxes, but because lower taxes create jobs and migrants want jobs. Most academic research on state taxes suggests that lower taxes have a small-to-moderate positive impact on state GDP, output, FDI, investment generally, and business formation; the effect on employment of these changes is not always clear-cut but usually positive. Finally, a very small number of firms relocate in any given year. These relocations account for an extremely small share of total employment but do, in general, favor lower-tax states. All of that together means that, yes, a state with lower taxes will usually have less negative migration. That said, there can be extreme variations in a state’s tax burden for a given business or migrant based on how a state’s tax policies interact with a business or migrant’s earning/spending profile. Because different states have different tax bases and rates, it is not always clear to a non-expert which areas actually have lower taxes. For all of the above reasons, I am not going to get into whether the Texas-California relationship specifically is driven by taxes. The answer is likely to be, “Kind of,” which is boring.
Pick A State Loses Thousands of People to Pick Another State Every Year
Net Migration Is Not Usually Enormous
The first thing we need to address is the size of migration. From 2005–2015, somewhere between 350,000 and 490,000 Texans have moved to California.
Woah! I thought we were talking about a “California Exodus” to Texas!? Those sound like big numbers! Nearly half a million Texans went to California? Surely that proves —
Nothing. It proves nothing. The reality is that there are large migration flows between every state and every other state, and when we’re talking about two huge states with diverse economies and growing populations and high immigration, yeah, there are gonna be big bilateral flows.
So when I tell you that somewhere between 670,000 and 840,000 Californians moved to Texas from 2005–2015, you know not to immediately freak out. Yes, those numbers are large, but they are not that large. In fact, when we adjust for population, in turns out that, on average, about 0.16% of Texas’ population has moved to California each year, while about 0.18% of California’s population has gone the other way. These are not huge numbers and are not even close to the largest relative people-movements out there. Many states persistently lose much larger shares of their population to other states than California does to Texas.
That said, the net of all this is that Texas gained somewhere between 180,000 and 470,000 people from California from 2005–2015. That means that, on average, for every 4 Texans who moved to California, 7 Californians moved to Texas. That’s a pretty substantial exchange.
Let’s look at the numbers on it.
The above chart shows ACS and IRS migration data. For the ACS data, I have provided the error band. The figures I quoted above were all from ACS data.
IRS data shows high CA →TX migration in 93/94, then a decline to the late 90s, then a rise up to a peak around 06/07, then a trough more recently, then a spike in 13/14, then a drop in 14/15. But we need to be wary of IRS data, especially in recent years. The IRS is not trying to measure migration for the whole population; their sample leaves at least 60 million Americans unmeasured. They have also significantly changed how they process their data several times in the last few years.
And more to the point, the IRS data frequently bounces around at the edge, or even beyond, the ACS range. In 04/05, 09/10, and 14/15, IRS data fell outside the confidence interval for ACS data. This means that IRS data most likely reflects a substantively different population for sampling than ACS does; i.e. the tax-filer population is very, very unlike the whole population. It seems plausible that the CA →TX net flow is somewhat more positive for Texas/negative for California than IRS data shows.
That said, both sources do show one common trend: Texas’ peak migration from California was around 2004–2007, and has declined since. While Texas continues to draw many more Californians than California draws Texans, it is not as lopsided as it used to be.
Aside from the bilateral relationship, we can also look at ACS, IRS, and Population Estimates-measured total net migration:
The above chart reveals several things. First of all, while the Texas ACS estimate is quite similar to the Texas PEP and IRS estimates, the California ACS estimate is persistently lower than PEP or IRS estimates, and has been since 2009. I don’t know why that is, but it does seem to suggest that there is some population that ACS is catching that IRS/PEP are not.
The other thing to note is that California’s net negatives are much larger than Texas’ net positives, and the correlation between the two is limited. In other words, California’s problem isn’t Texas — California’s problem is California.
From here, we can then look at the number of Californians and Texans living outside of their home states. I track this data using IPUMS from 1850 to 2015.
As you can see, the Texan diaspora actually shrank from 1970 to 1980, while the Californian diaspora rose. The Texan-born disapora has grown since then, but not nearly as rapidly as the Californian-born diaspora.
We can also look at just these diasporas in the two respective states.
As you can see, the population of Texans living in California peaked in 1980, and has been declining ever since. This is a pretty remarkable trend considering that the total number of people living in the US but born in Texas has risen dramatically since 1980, and given that the total number of Texan-born people living outside Texas has also risen at a steady pace. California’s loss of Texan-born people is, therefore, a fairly unique experience. Meanwhile, the population of Californians living in Texas has continued to rise unabated, as a steady stream of Californians moves east to the plains. In about 2000, the Californian diaspora in Texas became larger than the Texan diaspora in California, a fairly remarkable trend.
We can then look at how large a role Texas and California play in each others’ diasporas more generally:
As you can see, California’s share of the Texan diaspora has fallen by an extraordinary amount. In the 1950s, fully 1 in every 3 Texans living outside of Texas lived in California. Today, it is 1 in 7. Meanwhile, Texas’ share of California’s diaspora has risen at a slow but steady clip. The result is that California still plays a larger role for the Texan diaspora than Texas does for the Californian diaspora, but their roles are becoming more symmetric with time.
There’s another quirk we can look at. The Census Bureau tracks self-reported ancestry data, and we can look at how many people report a given ancestry identifier by area. One of the ancestries Census tracks is “Texan.” There are actually many such “American ancestries” that Census tracks, but many have too few respondents to rise above privacy-reporting thresholds, and still others have too few to rise above other minimum statistical requirements, and still others are lumped into the “United States” ancestry group. But “Texan” is kept separate because it is vastly larger than the others (for reference, the last time we got breakouts of these minor ancestries, in 2000, “Kentuckian” and “Appalachian” also made the top-5 list for specific American ancestries, with about 10,000 people each). So here’s a rundown on Texan ancestry:
Now, I don’t know what you want to make of that. But I saw the data was available so I figured I’d include it anyways.
Conclusion
I’m sure this post was unsatisfying to many readers. I didn’t go into a lot of depth. I didn’t give you any maps. I didn’t explore why these migration flows exist. But, again, that’s largely because, with this topic, it’s kind of all-or-nothing. Either do a 5-part blog series, or just skim the surface.
But that’s not all. I know that a thorough analysis of Texan or Californian migration topics could get me clicks; I don’t really care. Texan and Californian policymakers have large in-state think-tanks and universities staffed with experts. Their cities have huge communities of data-minded people who ought to get off their butts and do this work themselves. The cities that don’t have these resources are the cities that don’t get you as many clicks when you write about them. For example, Huntington-Ashland. There is very little reward in terms of personal celebrity or metrics to writing about the less-well-known cities. However, it is the pointed neglect of interest in these “2nd tier cities” that causes “urbanists” to be rightly tarred as out-of-touch elitists who don’t care about “real America.”
So, for those of you thinking, “Man I really wish you’d do a big piece on San Francisco!” that’s unlikely to ever happen. But if you’re thinking, “I wish I could get somebody to do a detailed study of my city of 500,000 people!” let me know! I’ll be on the case in a jiffy!
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. 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.
