California’s brief population bounce back has given way to further population declines, showing that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is relying on illegal immigration to stem the embarrassment of the California exodus.
According to U.S. census data, Los Angeles County lost a net total of 54,000 people from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. Rob Pyers has compiled the county-by-county data, showing that California lost over 9,000 residents in 2025. California had been on a two-year population bounce back, gaining some 240,000 residents over 2023 and 2024 after losing over 400,000 over 2021 and 2022.
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It is not hard to see why this is playing out. After the pandemic began in 2020, Californians were run out of businesses and jobs and were forced to reckon with the fact that Democrats had made the state too unaffordable. That fueled the initial exodus of some 400,000 residents. The bounce back came in 2023 and 2024, when the immediate sting of the pandemic had eased.
But the real factor in the bounce back was illegal immigration, which then-President Joe Biden allowed to run rampant. We can see this proof in the fact that California had another net decline in 2025, under President Donald Trump. According to KTLA 5 in Los Angeles, the “biggest swings” in population decline were “along the U.S.-Mexico border,” including El Centro, California.
In other words, people are still leaving California because it is unaffordable, and the state’s population likely only had a brief recovery because of illegal immigration.
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The failures of governance in Los Angeles hammer home this point. Los Angeles County has lost over 300,000 residents alone since 2020, and the only year that the county added more residents than it lost was in 2024. Just as with the broader state, Los Angeles did not suddenly get better at governance to woo back thousands of residents in 2024. Both the city and the state were simply relying on Biden’s open border policies to replace departing California residents with illegal immigrants.
Newsom had tried to brag about California regaining population in the past two years as if it were proof that he was running a competent state (even though it still didn’t make up for the post-pandemic exodus). But the resumption of the state’s population decline proves that Newsom and California Democrats are running a failed state, trying to replace the residents they are driving out with a cheap-labor class of illegal immigrants to make the population numbers look better on paper.