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.”

Confronted with an impending hike to $15 in the California minimum wage, businesses, labor advocates and political analysts have all begun to shift strategies and tactics. Given current trends, the combined impact could be a smaller, more unionized workforce — that doesn’t always see the benefits wage activists have promised.

The consequences will be quick and could be dramatic. “Most state raises over the past decade, when there have been any, ranged from 1 percent to 3 percent annually. The law Gov. Jerry Brown signed will increase bottom-rung pay roughly 10 percent per year starting in January,” as the Sacramento Bee reported.

Manufacturing flight

One immediate result of the hikes has already appeared in Southern California, where the garment industry faces an especially rough road. Sung Won Sohn, former director of apparel company Forever 21 and economist at Cal State Channel Islands, told the Los Angeles Times a veritable “exodus has begun,” with manufacturers already tempted to shift garment production overseas to retreat from the Golden State still further. “The garment industry is gradually shrinking and that trend will likely continue.”

“In the 1990s, as borders opened up, foreign competitors began snatching up business from Southland garment factories. Eventually, many big brands opted to leave the region in favor of cheaper locales. Guess Jeans, which epitomized a sexy California look, moved production to Mexico and South America. Just a few years ago, premium denim maker Hudson Jeans began shifting manufacturing to Mexico. Jeff Mirvis, owner of MGT Industries in Los Angeles, said outsourcing was necessary to keep up with low-cost rivals.”

The problem, particularly acute for business owners who can’t automate jobs as readily as, say, fast food restauranteurs, was encapsulated by Gov. Jerry Brown himself, who signed the $15 wage into law despite clear reservations about its economic wisdom. “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense,” he said, defending the law on moral and sociopolitical grounds. A high minimum wage, Brown claimed, “binds the community together and makes sure that parents can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way.”

Incentives in tension

According to critics of the change, the tension involved in using poor economic choices to encourage good moral ones has driven labor unions themselves toward a predictable, if hypocritical, shift in their own policy objectives. Many of the same unions that agitated for a higher wage “have been quietly — and often successfully — lobbying cities to let employers who hire union workers pay them less than the mandated minimum,” as Quartz observed. “Unions say it gives them the flexibility to negotiate packages for their workers that supplant wages with health insurance and other benefits.

“Critics say that it’s a shrewd move by unions to drive up membership dues and ensure that their workers are the cheapest in town. The exemption gives cost-conscious employers little choice but to hire union, and workers who want jobs little choice but to join their local.”

At the same time, however, workers who have been rallied to the $15 cause have been swiftly pressed into service for pro-unionization demonstrations. “The demand from the original strikes in 2012 was $15 and a union,” said Mary Kay Henry, international president of the SEIU, according to the Times. “Underpaid workers in California are now on a path to $15, but we think the way we can make these jobs good jobs […] is through a union.”

In an added twist, some economists defending the wage hikes have raised the question of whether subsequent job losses are a price worth paying. Gov. Brown, in fact, has referred favorably to that view. “We understand that this can be difficult,” he said, as the Washington Post recalled. “But the fact is that there’s a principle called the living family wage, which is a doctrine that has been around for a long time, since probably before the 1900s, which is that you can’t expect someone to work if the wages for that work can’t support a family.”