THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF DISCUSSION in the last few days about California losing population. Reader Craig Will says it’s wrong, and sends this link.

UPDATE: Jeff Wolfe emails:

I was skeptical of the California population data Craig Will pointed you to, since it comes from the state of California. So I looked up the data from the U.S. Bureau of Census, which has less incentive to cook the numbers.

Here’s the Census Bureau data for California for the year 7/1/2001 to 7/1/2002:

Net Births & Deaths: 295,598
Net International Migration: 326,917
Net Domestic Migration: -108,595

So, to overgeneralize, you could say Mexicans would rather live in California, but Californians would rather live elsewhere in the U.S. The only state with a bigger negative domestic migration last year was New York (-170,828). New York’s total net migration (domestic and international) was -24,436.

The Census data is in a .csv file that can be downloaded here: link.

Hmm. This is certainly more consistent with what I’m hearing.