However, as the latest data again confirm, the state’s rate of population growth has been declining.
During the 1980s, thanks to high immigration and birth rates, California was expanding by 2-plus percent a year, adding 6 million residents in just 10 years. However, immigration, legal and illegal, is now a fraction of what it once was (we lose more people to other states than we gain) and births are declining while deaths are rising.
In 2017, the state report says, California added just 309,000 people. Numerically, that’s about half of the 1980s surge and our annual growth rate (.78 percent) is scarcely a third of what it was then.
View Article