Every single state in the country sent fewer people to California in the first two years of the pandemic than the prior two years, even as many of those same states saw more Californians move in, according to a Chronicle analysis.
New England had the greatest decrease in California movers of any region, with Vermont, Connecticut and New Hampshire among the states that saw the biggest drops.
The findings come from consumer credit data collected by the California Policy Lab, a research group based out of the University of California. The data, called the University of California Consumer Credit Panel, tracks movements of the approximately 90% of Californian adults with active credit information every quarter. It includes Californians (and ex-Californians) that have moved both within counties and to and from other states.
The data goes through the third quarter of 2021. To analyze moves over comparable time periods, we looked at data from the first seven quarters of 2018-19 and compared them to the same period in 2020-21.
The Chronicle has previously used the data to show that “net domestic migration” to California — the number of people moving into the state minus the number leaving within the U.S. — went down during the pandemic. San Francisco also saw negative net domestic migration.
But while moves from California to other states have increased, the data shows that most of the state’s net migration decrease came from fewer people entering the state, not more people leaving. In fact, every state had more Californians enter it than residents of that state that left for California in the first seven quarters of 2020-2021.
Internal migration is down in the U.S. overall during the pandemic, so the number of people moving to any U.S. state likely declined in this period. But data from the United States Postal Service suggest it the decline in incoming residents was particularly large in California.
“It’s more about [declining] Calentrances than [increased] Calexits,” Natalie Holmes, a research fellow at the California Policy Lab, previously told The Chronicle.