Some planned their moves with meticulous care, plotting over many years to swap dank skies for California’s enduring sunshine. Others decided on a whim over wine: Goodbye, Queens; hello, Temecula.
Some were drawn by age-old lures–opportunity, a shot at reinvention–while others fled homelands steeped in poverty and pain.
And then there were those who simply fell in love. With a woman. A landscape. Or even, like Pegah Hashemi, an idea.
The architectural designer landed near the Hancock Park neighborhood in Los Angeles in August 2005, from Iran via stints on the East Coast. In the chaos, crowds and freewheeling culture of Los Angeles, she found a home.
“Any other place you go, there’s a majority and a minority,” said Hashemi, 27. “But there are so many immigrants here that the majority disappears. It’s liberating. You can grow in whatever direction you want.”
Price may be no object
Even as real estate prices rise to fearsome heights and freeways become impassable, even as wildfires consume homes and rampaging mud swallows others, even as experts declare the state ungovernable and a major earthquake inevitable, refugees from New York and Manila and Tehran continue to come to California.
California is by far the favorite destination of legal immigrants to the U.S.–about 200,000 in 2005 alone. Moreover, though the numbers fluctuate with the economy, the Golden State remains a powerful domestic magnet as well, with about 600,000 people from other states arriving there last year.
No matter how taxing life seems in the most populous state in America, newcomers outnumber defectors, drawn by varying notions of the California dream.
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“California is one of the very few states whose allure has never faded,” said Marc Perry, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Distribution Branch. “The faces of the immigrants change, the tongues they speak change, but the people keep coming.”
Why? One of the most enduring reasons is the sunshine. “A Climate for Health & Wealth Without Cyclones or Blizzards,” boasted an 1885 booklet from the Chicago-based California Immigration Commission.
It worked then. It works now. Just ask Thu Hoang, 43.
This winter, Thu and her husband, Hung, were visiting relatives in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. They decided to take a weekend jaunt to San Diego. Lunchtime brought them to beautiful, wealthy La Jolla.
The French bistro they chose was soaked in sunshine. There were flowers everywhere. People looked happy.
They had just been served the wine when Hung proposed rearranging their New York-based lives.
“Let’s move to California,” he said.
An information technology manager for IBM, Thu has teams in India, China and North Carolina. Her bosses don’t care where she lives. Hung is a retired information technology executive and musician. In March, they came to scout out houses, choosing one in Temecula twice as big as their apartment in Queens. On April 28, they moved in.
“Six months ago we wouldn’t have known where Temecula is,” said Thu.
“It’s so beautiful here, it feels like a perpetual vacation,” Hung said.
Not everyone comes for the sunshine. Galina Angarova was wooed in part by what all that sunlight produces. Living in Moscow, she met and married a Northern Californian. They moved to San Francisco in August. She never wants to leave.
In the Siberian village where she was born, she said, “not a lot of things are available, even food. You will not find an avocado. . . . A lot of my friends don’t know what sushi is.”
Angarova, 30, is eating her way through San Francisco. “The number of good restaurants here on Fillmore Street,” she said, “exceeds the number of good restaurants in all of Moscow.”
Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, crunched census statistics to uncover reasons some people come and go.
California’s humming economy was the strongest draw; the unemployment rate in several big counties, including Orange, San Diego and Riverside, is significantly less than that nationally. More than a third of the arrivals from other states told the Census Bureau recently that they’re here for job reasons.
But an equal number said they had left California because they’d gotten a job elsewhere. An additional 5 percent of those departing in the last five years–134,000 adults–went in search of cheaper housing.
In a state where the ability to afford a house is at record lows, that’s not surprising. What’s truly puzzling is the 84,000 or so adults who said they were moving to California for a less expensive home. Maybe they’re all from Manhattan, or maybe it is just further testament to the state’s ability to induce derangement.
Migration between states is murky. The Census Bureau, using Internal Revenue Service data, calculates that, since 2000, California has lost 340,000 more people to other states than it has gained from them. But the state Department of Finance, using what it says are more accurate data from driver’s licenses, calculates a net gain of 366,000.
Sunshine and sea and sky are all very well, but in the end, opportunity is what really matters.
Think older men such as Pedro Pinto, 60, who left Jalisco, Mexico, this spring for the uncertainty of Los Angeles, where he hopes to find work and send money home: “I’m looking for a job, any kind of job,” he said through an interpreter at a labor center.
And young men such as Jason Hall, 28, who arrived in Fresno in August from New York City via Houston. “I wouldn’t come here if there were no jobs,” said Hall, whose in-laws live in the Central Valley. “Wherever there’s opportunity is where I’ll go.”
A computer systems analyst for the county of Fresno, Hall lives with his family in a small apartment overlooking the railroad tracks. But he has set his sights on bigger things. When law school starts this fall at the University of San Diego, Hall will be there, notebook in hand. His wife, Tenisha, 26, hopes to soon have her bachelor’s degree, eked out online while caring for their toddlers.
“I don’t ever see myself living in the middle of the country again,” Jason said. “I look out over the water and see limitless opportunity.”
Various experts project that the population will rise from 37 million to 48 million by 2030. So the state will require a lot more water, electricity, houses and space on the freeways. California has four of the 10 fastest-growing big cities in America, according to Census Bureau statistics released June 21, more than any other state.
Experts have been cautioning that California has to stop growing ever since the state was home to only Native American tribes, Spanish missionaries and a few trappers.
“Under no contingency does the natural face of Upper California appear susceptible of supporting a very large population,” wrote Lt. Henry Augustus Wise of the U.S. Navy.
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That was 1849, and the warnings have continued since. California historian Philip Fradkin remembers moving here in 1960 from New Jersey: “People were saying, `We’re going to be swamped.'”
Forty-six years and 21 million new arrivals later, Fradkin has joined the chorus. “At some point, I have no doubt we’re going to be swamped.”