A lot of people are leaving California because living there has become such an intensely alienating experience. How do you get to know your neighbors when none of them speak English? Same for your co-workers. When you go to the store the clerks (all from other countries) ignore you to wait on their co-nationals instead. If you complain they look at you with an expression that says "why are you still here?" If you wish to remain in California then you will have to learn the languages of the immigrants in order to survive. I suggest learning Spanish, Cantonese, Mandaran, Tagalog, Hindi, Farsi, Urdu, Laotian, Vietnamese, Pashtun, Khosian, Hausa, Swahili and Zulu. That would be a good start.I live, work, shop, eat, etc in San Diego County. I frequently travel to Orange County, the Central Coast, Riverside, and the Bay Area. Apart from the fact that store clerks are mostly non-native Americans, nothing you said above is in line with my experiences and observations.
Oh, one of my co-workers is a brilliant programmer who speaks perfect English, is a U.S. citizen with a TS clearance, and happened to come to the US from Vietnam via a boat in the South China Sea. She considers herself 100% American and loves this country and is raising her two children to love this country. The guy who comes in to clean our offices doesn't speak English, but he's polite and hard working.
I frequent many stores and restaurants where I'm served by immigrants and have NEVER been treated poorly and have always been served in sequence. They don't speak English very well, which is annoying, but they're courteous and hard working. The last bad experience I had in a place like this was from a pierce-nosed, tattoed white teen with an attitude who obviously didn't want to be there.
CA has lots of problems, but it's still a fantastic place to live. For those of you who don't live here, take Billy_bob_bob's description of life in CA with a grain of salt. If life in CA was as Billy_bob_bob described it, real estate values wouldn't be skyrocketing like they've been over the past 7 years.
You have had very different experiences that I had, that much is certain. One time I was working on a contract for a large Silicon Valley employer, I finished one project and went to a different department to work on another project. I was surrounded by Chinese engineers who stood around and talked nothing but Chinese all day long. If you asked them a question in English they acted like you were imposing on them. I found it was possible to go for days at a time without saying a single word to anyone, because nobody around me wanted to speak English.
Can you imagine how alienating that would be? Between that experience, and many other experiences I had while living there, I firmly believe my view is quite valid. Perhaps you have had better luck, but my experiences were so miserable that I would rather have a root canal without anesthetic before I would move back to California.