Jim Carlton and Paul Overberg at WSJ:
The state’s population rose 0.6% in 2024, reaching 39.43 million by adding almost a quarter-million people, according to Census Bureau estimates…Yet California’s growth is tenuous. Without immigration, it would have shrunk significantly in the past year. Net immigration rebounded to more than 300,000 people in 2024, after plunging to as few as 44,000 in the worst year of the pandemic.
How President Trump’s immigration policies will affect this growth remains a crucial question. Migrant crossings along the California-Mexico border have nearly ceased. But California attracts immigrants from all over the world. Since 2010, the state has added 2.7 million immigrants, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Fully half have come from Asia, and slightly more than a third from Latin America. One driver of the influx: the H-1B visa program, which tech employers use to recruit talent. .. Applications for H-1B visas, however, have fallen by 25% from a year ago because of higher fees and companies’ fears that the Trump administration will be stricter. Though that won’t mean the program is shrinking—it is always oversubscribed—the decrease could indicate a wider slowdown in immigration amid a softer labor market.