“The census determines federal funding for the next ten years and drives reapportionment and redistricting,” the California Secretary of State office said in a statement on Twitter. “We must stay vigilant. The citizenship question is just the latest red flag.”

The U.S. conducts a census every 10 years with its stated purpose of providing “current facts and figures about America’s people, places, and economy.”

But the most notable purpose is determining each state’s population to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, as that number is set at 435.

Illegal immigrants are included in the population count but the census has not asked a citizenship question since the early 1950s.

While the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau takes every year to gain a better understanding of changing social and economic climates, does ask a citizenship question, the ACS is not used for apportionment purposes.

And despite the Census Bureau being bound by a confidentiality requirement regardless of whether a new question is added, progressives fear that undocumented immigrants will still choose not to answer to avoid admitting their undocumented status.

Mike Levin, a Democrat running for the congressional seat in California’s 49th district, said the move was more evidence of “Trump’s policy war on California.”

Furthermore, the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, recently received a letter from a group of Democratic lawmakers calling the request “deeply troubling.”

“This chilling effect could lead to broad inaccuracies across the board, from how congressional districts are drawn to how government funds are distributed,” the letter read.

But the Department of Justice argues that a question on citizenship would lead to better enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“To fully enforce those requirements, the Department needs a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected,” the December 12th letter, written by DOJ general counsel Arthur Gary and obtained by ProPublica, reads.

“The U.S. Census Bureau is evaluating the request from the U.S. Department of Justice and will process it in the same way we have historically dealt with such requests,” a bureau spokesman told CalWatchdog. “The final list of questions must be submitted to Congress by March 31, 2018. Secretary Ross will then make a decision. Our top priority is a complete and accurate 2020 Census.”

Currently, California holds 53 congressional seats, the most in the country.

The request is just the latest installment of the conflict between California and the Trump administration, as the Golden State is continuing to place itself at the center of the so-called “resistance” against the president’s larger immigration agenda.

Driven by rising out-migration and falling birth rates, California’s population growth has stalled, leading analysts to consider a possible forecast of a so-called “no-growth” period in the future.

Although Americans nationwide have been flooding south and west for years, the Golden State has become an exception. Nearly 62 percent of Americans lived in the two regions, Justin Fox observed from Census figures. “That’s up from 60.4 percent in the 2010 census, 58.1 percent in 2000, 55.6 percent in 1990 — and 44 percent in 1950. The big anomaly is California, which is very much in the West, yet has lost an estimated 383,344 residents to other states since 2010.”

“The state’s birth rate declined to 12.42 births per 1,000 population in 2016 — the lowest in California history,” the San Jose Mercury News noted, citing a state Department of Finance report. “In 2010, the last time figures were compiled, the birth rate was 13.69 per 1,000 population.”

Changing habits

Cultural and economic changes — familiar to Californians who have followed the debate around jobs, families, adulthood and the millennial generation — were responsible for the dip, Finance Department demographer Walter Schwarm told the Mercury News. “There are a lot of people who could be having children but are choosing to do something else,” he said. “People want to establish careers. They’re looking to pursue degrees, they’re getting out there and finding their place in employment,” and, in the case of couples hoping to start families into their 30s, it becomes “harder and harder to conceive.”

Relatively speaking, however, California’s figures have remained strong. The state hit its in-state birth low at a time when the United States experienced “the lowest rate of population growth of any year since the Great Depression,” the Washington Post recently reported, referencing other Census figures that show deaths reaching a 16-year high. “The nation grew by 0.695 percent between 2015 and 2016 to 323.1 million, down from 0.732 percent the previous year — the lowest increase since the 1937-1938 period, when it was 0.60 percent,” according to the paper. 

“Immigration also declined, though for the past three years immigration levels have been higher than they were since before the recession of 2007-2009. But the fall in the natural increase, from 4.07 to 3.84 per 1,000, reflecting fewer births and more deaths, is the lead cause — and the trend is likely to continue, Frey said.” 

Global ripples

But the immigration issue has not abated politically as flows of labor and patterns of conflict have morphed over the years. In a reminder of California’s place at a nexus of increasingly global migration, Mexico’s own authorities have strained in recent months to cope with an influx of African and Caribbean migrants to borderland cities. Baja state governor warned last month that the situation in Tijuana was “becoming overwhelming. Just in the last two weeks a large group of people from Haiti arrived, at the same time that the United States reduced the number of interviews for asylum,” he lamented, according to Mexico News Daily.

An uncertain balance

Taken together, the large demographic trends of the past several years have changed the impact of California’s population on social services budgets, with benefits for the elderly increasing in demand but others sinking in the aggregate. “The state’s public schools are seeing no growth in their overall student population, and some districts are seeing declines,” Dan Walters observed at the Sacramento Bee. “Were we growing at a 1980s clip, we’d need three times as many new housing units.” 

But the uneasy balance could be upset by a sharper slowdown in the immediate future. The state’s current growth rate, Walters added, “is scarcely a third of the nation’s fastest-growing state, Utah, which posted a 2.03 percent gain between 2015 and 2016. It’s also less than half of the rate in rival Texas.”

A recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau analyzing statistics from the latest American Community Survey showed the Millennial Generation is struggling to find full-time employment, obtain affordable housing and reach financial independence. The problems are particularly bad here in California.

Young Californians are not only worse off than their parents’ generation, but they’re doing worse than their counterparts in the rest of the country.

“Many of the differences between generations examined within these latest data reflect long-term demographic and societal changes,” said Jonathan Vespa, a Census Bureau demographer. “Three decades of decennial census statistics combined with the latest American Community Survey statistics give us a unique view of how — and where — our nation is changing.”

Better educated but worse job climate for young Californians

Among the five years of data, the most striking statistics are in the area of employment. Despite being better educated, young Californians are earning less money than their parents and are less likely to have full-time employment.

In 1980, 71.1 percent of Californians aged 18 to 34 were employed — better than the national average of 69.3 percent. Today, California’s employment rate of young adults is lower than the national average at 62.1 percent.

Tom Allison and Konrad Mugglestone of Young Invincibles write, “The great recession hit young workers hard, leaving roughly 5 million young adults unemployed five years after the downturn officially ended.

Young Californians earning less today

Of those young people working full-time, wages are down in 2013 inflation-adjusted dollars. Thirty-four years ago, the average Californian earned $36,961 dollars per year. That median wage has dropped to $35,734 per year for the average Californians aged 18 to 34.

As Slate recently wrote of U.S. Census data analyzed by the Young Invincibles, “For Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, annual income earned from wages has fallen in four of the top five biggest employment sectors — retail (down 9.9 percent), the leisure and hospitality business (down 14.65 percent), manufacturing (down 2.87 percent), and professional and business services (down 4.28 percent).” According to the study, the one exception is health care, which has remained nearly unchanged.

While Californians earn more than the national average, much of the wealth has been concentrated in the Bay Area, which skews California’s statewide figures.

In San Francisco County, the average full-time worker, between the ages of 18 and 34, earned a median annual salary of $59,580 — more than double the average wages in rural Madera and Modoc counties. The average young worker in the tech-dominant San Jose metro region earns $51,149 per year — 52 percent more than their counterparts in the Los Angeles metro area.

Millennials can expect lower wages  throughout  their working lives. Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at Yale University, found that college graduates that enter a weak economy suffer lower wages throughout their entire careers.

“I find large, negative wage effects of graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I also find that cohorts who graduate in worse national economies are in lower-level occupations, have slightly higher tenure and higher educational attainment, while labor supply is unaffected. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative and persistent.”

Price of housing top in nation

While wages have declined for millennials, the cost of housing has continued to increase.

California is home to three of the most expensive major cities for housing in the country: Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. The most expensive city in the country, San Francisco, has an average median home price of $744,400 and requires an annual salary of $145,500 to pay the nearly $3,400 mortgage, according to Business Insider. That’s double Seattle and Chicago and more than three times the cost of Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.

The city of San Jose estimates the average apartment in San Jose rents for $2,230 — up by 49 percent in the past four years.

“Housing costs in the peninsula, from San Francisco to San Jose, have doubled in the last five years,” writes Kerry Cavanaugh of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s even worse in San Francisco, which recently surpassed New York City as the most expensive rental market in the nation.”

More Californians live with Mom and Dad

Unsurprisingly, due to these increased housing costs, millennials in California are more likely to live with their parents than those in the rest of the country or previous generations.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau report, 34.5 percent of Californians aged 18 to 34 are living with a parent who is the householder. That represents a dramatic shift from 1980, when just 1 in 5 young Californians lived with their parents. Then, fewer Californians lived with their parents in comparison to the rest of the country. Now, more Californians live at home than the national average.

“Housing is typically the largest share of household expenditures and raising its price reduces discretionary incomes, while increasing poverty,” writes Wendell Cox, principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.

Poverty, too, has increased among young Californians. Nearly one in five Californians aged 18 to 35 lives below the poverty line, an increase from 1980.

“Let’s say you’re a kid out of college and your first job, you’re getting paid $40,000 a year,” Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, told the Los Angeles Times. “You want to live in a safe neighborhood in Los Angeles, with decent access to jobs, transit, et cetera. You’re looking at $1,400 to $1,500 a month in rent. So that means you’re paying $18,000 a year out of your $40,000 just in rent.”

The U.S. Census Bureau analyzed five years of demographic, economic and housing data collected between 2009 and 2013.