The food? Too heavy. The traffic? Not so bad. The weather? Don't get transplanted California residents started. There are a lot of them in Texas these days.

More than 363,000 Californians moved to Texas over the past five years, helping the state grow more than twice as fast as the nation as a whole since 2000, census figures show.

California has sent more new residents to Texas than any other state in recent years. But the pipeline is tightening, part of a national slowdown in migration - from one house to another, from one county to another, and from state to state - that demographers say is a lingering sign of the recession.

California's population is still growing, up 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, thanks to a strong birth rate. But for the past decade, more people have moved out than in.

In 2010 alone, almost 70,000 Californians moved to Texas. Lloyd Potter, director of the Texas State Data Center, said there historically has been movement back and forth between the two states.

Texas' relatively strong economy - with 8.5 percent unemployment compared with 11.9 percent in California - gets most of the credit, he said.

It drew California natives Sandra Zalman and Ted Rubenstein, who moved to Houston from Los Angeles in 2009.

Zalman, 32, had completed her doctoral degree at the University of Southern California and was cobbling together an academic career as an adjunct faculty member at several institutions when she was offered a faculty job at the University of Houston.

"I guess driving was the No. 1 thing that marked my Southern California experience," she said.

Rubenstein, an architect, quit his job to accompany his wife, and eventually found work, too.

"The economy is better," she said of Texas. "Rents were lower. We noticed that immediately."