As I posted below, here are the natural growth rates:

Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....

SF: 1.49

SJ: 1.59

That's not growth, it's decline.

Which is flat out insane given the economy

Your link 404s, and fertility rates are not measures of net new natural population growth. If everyone lives longer, you can still have more births than deaths with sub replacement fertility.

In any case, the California Department of Finance gives counts of births and deaths by county, and you are wrong: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

There's almost no natural population growth in the US. It's all coming from immigrants.

There was not a single year in 2010-2019 where California had more deaths than births.

From [1]:

> A rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain a population at its current level (immigration and migration aside). California and the nation had fertility rates near population replacement levels in 2008, but every state falls below those levels today. California has fallen faster than most, dropping from 2.15 to 1.52

Well below replacement rates on births. I imagine a very large portion of the births are immigrant births as well, which would push the rate even lower.

1: https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-plunging-birth-rates/

Why is everyone trying to infer net new births from fertility rates? We have the exact data: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

People can live longer, and natural population increase can persist long after fertility drops below replacement.