July 9, 2014:  Lure of California – new waves of migration

California is the most populous sub-national entity in North America. California had the largest population of European Americans and the highest total number of Latinos in the U.S. The state also had the fifth largest population of African Americans in the U.S. and one-third of the nation's total estimated Asian American population. California's Native American population is the more than any state. 

The largest named ancestries in California are Mexican, German, Irish, English; there are 65 other ethnicities including Albanians, Haitians, Pakistanis, and Somalis. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco have large numbers of residents with English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Scandinavian ancestry.

 California also has the most Native American tribes, indigenous to the state or not, but the majority of known Californian Indian tribes became extinct in the late 19th century. The Cherokee Nation, for example is the largest tribe in the state -- a number of Cherokee descendants arrived as Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s and 1940s who migrated to the state's farming counties and urban areas.