During the Great
Depression, some 1.3 million Americans—epitomized by the Joad family in
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"—flocked to California from the
heartland. To keep out the so-called Okies, the state enacted a law
barring indigent migrants (the law was later declared unconstitutional).
Los Angeles even set up a border patrol on the city limits. Soon the
state may need to build a fence to keep latter-day Joads from leaving.
Over the past two decades, a net 3.4 million people have moved out of
California for other states. But contrary to conservative lore, there
has been no millionaires' march to Texas or other states with no income
tax. In fact, since 2005 California has experienced a net in-migration of households earning more than $200,000, according to the U.S. Census's American Community Survey.
As it happens, most of California's outward-bound migrants are low-
to middle-income, with relatively little education: those typically
employed in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, hospitality and to
some extent natural-resource extraction. Their median household income
is about $40,000—two-thirds of the statewide median—and about 95% earn
less than $80,000. Only one in 10 has a college degree, compared with
30% of California's population. Roughly 40% of the people leaving are
Hispanic. Even while California's Hispanic
population has grown by more than 1.5 million since 2005, thanks to high
birth rates and foreign immigration, two Hispanics have moved out for
every one that has moved in from another state. By contrast, four
Hispanics from other states have settled in Texas and Arizona for every
three that have left. It's not unusual for immigrants or
their descendants to move in pursuit of a better life. That's the
history of America. But it is ironic that many of the intended
beneficiaries of California's liberal government are running for the
state line—and that progressive policies appear to be what's driving
them away.
For starters, zoning laws, which
liberals favor to control "suburban sprawl," have constrained
California's housing supply and ratcheted up prices. As Harvard
public-policy professor Daniel Shoag documents in a working paper, land
restrictions became common in high-income enclaves during the
1970s—coinciding with the burgeoning of California's real-estate
bubble—and have increased income-based segregation and inequality...
California's
staggering labor and energy costs—it has the nation's most stringent
fuel and renewable standards—have helped kill hundreds of thousands of
manufacturing jobs in California's interior. Note: Those are jobs that
traditionally served as entry points to the middle class. The Golden
State has shed a third of its manufacturing base over the past decade.
And while the U.S. has added nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the
past two years, California's heavy industry continues to erode. Campbell SoupCPB-0.72%
announced in September that it was closing its 65-year-old plant in
Sacramento, which employed 700 workers, and shifting production to North
Carolina, Ohio and Texas. ChevronCVX-0.06%
is moving 800 technical positions—in other words, jobs that aren't physically stationed on California rigs—to Houston...
Non-manufacturing businesses are also moving or expanding operations where labor, land, energy and capital are cheaper. ComcastCMCSA+0.15%
announced in the fall that it is moving 1,000 call-center jobs out of California because of the "high cost of doing business." Facebook,
FB-0.25%eBayEBAY-0.34%
and LegalZoom have opened up Texas offices in the past few years, while PayPal, Yelp and Maxwell TechnologiesMXWL+0.57%
have pushed into Phoenix.
Meanwhile, small businesses that can't
leave California so easily have been slow to invest because they are
financially squeezed. Rents are prohibitive, and Sacramento takes 9.3%
of every dollar over $49,000—and 13.3% over $1 million—that an
individual or small business owner earns.
Recall, however, that the Okies—poor as they may have been—provided a
gigantic pool of labor that fueled California's postwar boom and helped
transform the Golden State into the world's eighth-largest economy. The
Democrats who have had firm control of the state during its years of
decline would do well to remember that a society's most valuable asset
is always its people, regardless of their wealth or clout. Ms. Finley is an editorial writer for the Journal.