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COURTESY OF: PASCKIE PASCUA, Philippine News and GMAnews.tv; January 05, 2009.
 " LOS ANGELES — Benito Toribio, 34, a former stocks clerk at a Home Depot in Cerritos, has just unloaded a garage-full of stuff and things to sell at Craigslist. His wife, Amina, 32, sets up another weekend of yard sales on their front lawn.
At the end of this month, the Filipino couple, with their seven-year old son Justin and pet beagle Monsoon, are moving to Ocean City, in the north Jersey shore, where Benito found new employment in a relative’s auto shop. He lost his job two months ago; since then, he has been struggling to keep up with monthly bills.
The Toribios will join the 135,173 other people who moved out of California during the last fiscal year. For a fourth year in a row, residents moving to other states outnumber arrivals from other states, according to a report released middle of last week by the California Department of Finance.
Although the above number is just a fragment of California’s 38 million population, the trend is significant due to the continued souring of the state's economy.
“I’ve always been a West Coaster since my family moved here from Manila in 1988," Toribio told Philippine News. “It’s not easy to be moving away from your home of many years, you know. But times are hard. I have to find security for my family."
His wife Amina used to work at Wal-Mart in downtown Long Beach but decided to quit when her work shift was cut to just 15 hours a week. “We were paying for a sitter for Justin. The money that I was earning wasn’t even enough to cover for that, so I decided to just give up my job. Siguro sa Jersey, there’s more opportunities. It’s a new life."
The movement out of California was last seen during economic hardships in the 1990s. The crisis at that time mainly revolved around the folding of the state’s huge aerospace industry; highly-trained workers lost jobs, and the local economy built around it crashed. In 1994, 362,374 more people left the state than those who moved in.
These days, foreclosures and the high cost of owning a house were exacerbated by loss of jobs. The current on-rush of domestic out-migration started in 2005 after six years of sustained growth—that was augmented by the housing bubble, which peaked in 2007 when median home values in Southern California reached $505,000.
But when the bubble burst, Californians confronted a new crisis — joblessness. The state’s 8.2 percent unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points higher than the national rate.
“California was fine before. Ngayon, wala nang ibibigay (Now it has nothing more to give) ," Francisco Marciano, 53, who used to work as delivery van driver at a local Kohl’s in Hermosa Beach, sighed. “Me and my family are moving to Arizona."
The Marcianos were New Yorkers from the time they moved to the U.S. from Davao City in 1990. In 2005, when “it was very enticing to go west and join most Filipinos," they moved to Newport Beach. Now, they are moving again.
Two weeks ago, Mang Kiko and wife Lydia, 44, both found jobs in Kingman, a sleepy town in the Mojave, with a 1.44 percent Asian population. Francisco got employed as stable caretaker in a horse farm, while Lydia was hired as sales staff by their former landlord who owns a garden and plant nursery in Hualapai Mountain.
According to truck rental company U-Haul International Inc., as of late November, 0.5 percent more rentals were hired this year to leave the state than to move into it — 0.2 percentage points higher than last year’s figure. The favorite states for new residences for ex-Californians are Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington.
The Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario area — one of the areas hit worst by the real estate collapse — features the highest unemployment rate of any large metropolitan area in the country at 9.5 percent, says an LA Times report.
The Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana area is fifth-worst at 7.7 percent. Majority of the 4 million Filipinos in the United States live in California.
Despite the trek out of the sunny state, a study released last week by the Pew Research Center indicates that most native Californians still opt to stay put in their home state.
Some 69 percent of native residents 18 and over prefer to remain here — showing stability exceeded only by Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.
The exodus out of California, however, is still regarded as a serious matter by policymakers, who blame the overwhelming effect of recession on many residents. A jolly-mannered Benito Toribio, however, refuses to accept the current economic crisis as paralyzing.
“I’ve long postponed joining my sister in Jersey, it’s a new life and I’m excited to see family," the ex-college basketball player in San Beda College in Manila says. “It’s a new adventure. May awa ang Diyos (God is merciful), we’ll get over this challenge. New year, new life." - Philippine News"
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