Henry Olsen argues in the Washington Post that California could go the way of New York:
Since 2000, more people left California than moved there from other parts of the country, causing the state to lose a House seat after the 2020 Census for the first time ever. That outward flow of people is turning into a flood. The state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people between July 2020 and July 2022. Outmigration to other states fueled the decline: Almost 900,000 more people have moved to other states from California in the past three years than have moved in. . . .
This looks eerily similar to the reasons behind New York’s precipitous decline in the 1970s. New York, like California, was once the epitome of American aspiration and growth. But its leaders grew complacent and allowed a toxic brew of high taxes, spiraling crime and rising homelessness to rock the state. New York City’s population plummeted by more than 800,000 people — or roughly 10 percent — between 1970 and 1980. The state lost five House seats in the 1980 Census, and the city’s population did not fully recover until changes in tax and crime policy in the 1990s made the city attractive again.
New York’s demographic decline took a very long time, and probably is still ongoing, as the state’s losing residents even faster than California. New York has lost House seats and Electoral College votes in every census from 1940 through 2020, and it almost certainly will again in 2030. California, for most of that period, has been one of the big winners, along with Florida, Texas, and Arizona, while Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio have followed New York’s downward trend. Indeed, Pennsylvania has lost seats in ten consecutive censuses. New York and Illinois have lost seats in eight out of the previous nine.
The signs are fairly dire for the Golden State, which was once the leading edge of the American future but now looks to be increasingly past its prime and out of step with the mainstream of the country. But, while census trends seem to be unfavorable, it may be premature to assume that the high outflows of 2020–22 will continue, for two reasons.
One, the pandemic and its unique lockdown dynamics are behind us, so there are likely to be fewer people fleeing that specific, dramatic shift in government policy. Second, the pandemic was essentially a temporary experiment in closed borders, from which we have been gradually emerging. From 2014 through 2019, more than a million people per year obtained lawful permanent residence in the United States, around half of whom were new arrivals; the number of new arrivals granted that status dropped to 268,153 in 2020 and 227,206 in 2021. California, as the No. 1 destination for immigrants, added 135,181 lawful permanent residents in 2021, of whom 40,019 were newly arrived in the United States. In the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, it had added 193,093 new lawful permanent residents, of whom 86,701 were newly arrived. The number of new arrivals in the state was between 93,725 and 121,233 every year from 2012 through 2018.
It is possible that the dip in 2019 reflects a downward trend that will continue in California even after a full year during which all pandemic-era immigration restrictions are lifted. But, for now, the 2020–22 period simply laid bare the extent to which the state relies on a steady influx of arrivals from foreign lands to make good the population losses it suffers from Americans fleeing it. Whether California can get back to levels of immigration sufficient to stanch the bleeding remains to be seen.