American • Bay Area Residents Leaving in Droves

Without immigration, the region’s population would shrink

By AARON GLANTZ on March 30, 2012

More people are leaving the Bay Area than moving here from other locations in the United States, according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

If it weren’t for a steady influx of people moving to the region each year from other countries, the Bay Area’s population would be in decline, the data show.

Approximately 400,000 local residents move out of the Bay Area every year between 2005 and 2009, while just 345,000 people moved here from other parts of the country — a loss of about 55,000 residents annually. But about 71,000 people moved to the Bay Area from other nations during each of those years, contributing to the region’s population growth.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/18wQp)

Nowhere is this population shift more pronounced than in Santa Clara County, where 24,000 new immigrants arrived as 83,000 residents left.

"The economy’s changed," said Russell Hancock, the president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a research group backed by businesses and local governments. "It used to be that a booming technology sector created all kinds of jobs and you would expect that all these people would come in as tech takes off, but now we only create these rarified jobs. We are not creating midrange jobs that create growth and employ large numbers of people."

Professor James Lai, who heads the ethnic studies department at Santa Clara University, blamed the gap on high-tech companies that, he said, preferred to hire immigrants on temporary work visas "because they are cheaper."

"We are seeing pockets of people in the older generation who are leaving because of affordability and, at the same time, college-aged Asians and others are leaving to go to college or find jobs elsewhere," he said.

Of the 400,000 residents who left the Bay Area, nearly half — 180,000 people — moved out of the state.

Many of the people who left the Bay Area headed to the Central Valley, where the cost of living is lower, or to warmer, more sprawling cities, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, the data show.

The new census data marks the first time in 12 years that the bureau has released regional migration information down to the county level.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/18wQp)

http://www.baycitizen.org/census-2010/s … ng-droves/

Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Apr 02, 2012 7:14 pm