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Old 04-02-2010, 07:45 PM
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Jeanfromfillmore Jeanfromfillmore is offline
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Default It's a lie: State's foreign-born population declines

State's foreign-born population declines
by Tony Castro Staff Writer
Posted: 03/31/2010 07:03:45 PM PDT


For the first time since the Gold Rush, more of the state's residents were born in California than outside its borders, says a study released to coincide with today's official U.S. 2010 Census Day.
The historic turnaround marks the first decline in the state's foreign-born population - particularly from Asia and Latin America - since a major change in U.S. immigration policy in 1965, the USC study reported.
Surging unemployment, high housing costs and increased immigration enforcement are among the reasons cited for the shift of foreign-born residents out of the state.
As the economy declined, so did the number of immigrants seeking new lives in the Golden State, the authors wrote.
"The fact that the majority of the state's population is homegrown is really the surprising trend we found," Dowell Myers, a USC professor and urban demographer who co-authored the study, said Wednesday.
"It went unnoticed and unheralded until it caught our eye in the past year. This isn't growth by in-migration. This is the native-born sons and daughters of the state who are going to be the middle-age leaders in another 20 years."
Myers and co-author John Pitkin, a senior researcher at USC, challenge previous predictions that foreign-born residents in the state would rise to 30 percent of the population by 2020. Instead they forecast that the number of foreign-born residents could fall this year to close to the 2000 level of 26.2 percent.
Analyzing data from previous census reports and population surveys, Myers and Pitkin estimated that the state's foreign-born population had risen only 1.2 percent since 2000 and began its decline in 2008.
"The growing California homegrown majority represents the future of the state, no matter what their parents' origins," Myers and Pitkin said in the report. "They are the future workers, taxpayers, home buyers."
In their "California-born" population, the authors include the children of immigrants and of long-time Californians.
The report was met with interest among California watchers, some of them surprised by news of a homegrown majority.
"We've always been to a large extent a state or a country of immigrants, and it's a fascinating shift in population, and it's good to hear there isn't a massive flight out of California," said Jessica Levinson, director of political reform at the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies.
But immigration reform critics say the report only muddies the issue of illegal immigration.
"That study may unfairly mingle illegal immigrants in with others," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform. "And you have to consider that 22 percent of all new births in California are to illegal immigrants."
FAIR and other anti-illegal immigrant groups argue that the undocumented cost California about $7 billion per year for services like public education and emergency medical care.
But some studies say they pay in more than that in taxes - plus, since many use counterfeit Social Security cards to get jobs, unknown amounts are paid to that system for accounts that they will never be drawn upon.
The presence of a California-born majority in the state marks a dramatic contrast to 1980, when not a single county in Southern California had a homegrown majority, the study said.
The USC study follows a report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that said the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States had dropped from 11.6 million in 2008 to 10.8 million last year.
It marked the second consecutive year of decline and the sharpest decrease in at least three decades.
California's illegal immigrant population, still the largest in the nation, declined by 250,000 to 2.6 million, according to that report. The state now accounts for just one-quarter of the nation's total illegal migrant population, compared with 30 percent in 2000.
According to the USC report, the decline of foreign-born population began sooner in Southern California than in other parts of the country in part because the 1990s recession hit the region especially hard.
"The resulting economic slump - a net loss of more than 300,000 jobs - had the effect of diverting immigrants to new destinations with better job prospects and cheaper housing," the study reported.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/latestnews/ci_14795929
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