L.A. - The Capitol of

Ethnic Diversity in the U.S.
 

Los Angeles and its immigrants:  A background paper prepared for the Second International Metropolis Conference
Copenhagen, 25-28 September 1997

By Roger Waldinger

Immigrants to the United States have always been urban-bound. While one is tempted to argue that the situation is no different today, the urban attraction is in some sense greater than ever before. In 1910, when immigration from Europe hit its peak, the five largest US cities contained just over a quarter of the nation's 13.5 million foreign-born residents. By 1990, when a different set of areas topped the list of the largest metropolitan regions, just over half of the country's immigrants lived in these five largest urban places. Of course, the United States is a more urban society than it was 80 years ago. But relative to total population, the five largest urban places of 1990 are comparable to the five largest cities of 1910 in their share of the foreign-born. Still, geographical concentration remains the salient trait of contemporary immigration.

Comparing Los Angeles to the major immigrant metropoles of the past and present puts the distinctive features of today's immigrant LA into relief. Gazing backwards, contemporary Los Angeles is home to a far larger share of today's foreign-born population than the immigrant New York of yore. Large as it is, Los Angeles contains a relatively small portion of the nation's total population, indeed smaller than New York in the early 1900s. Consequently, immigrants are over-represented to a far greater degree in the Los Angeles of the 1990s than they were in the New York of the 1910s (see Figures 1 and 2).

Impressive retrospectively, contemporary Los Angeles also heads the 1990 list, standing out from the other major immigrant areas in more ways than one. In 1990, Los Angeles was home to 3.9 million immigrants, 400,000 more than New York, which stood at second place. Among Angelenos, the foreign-born proportion outranked all the other major cities by a good degree; only much smaller Miami, where 34 per cent of the region's population comes from abroad, pulls ahead of L.A. on this count. L.A. also exceeded the others as a magnet for the very recently arrived; the immigrant wave of the 1980s made up 13 per cent of the region's population, as opposed to 4 per cent for the USA as a whole.

The advent of immigrant L.A. also took place suddenly. Though Los Angeles had been home to a substantial foreign-born population at the earlier part of the century, the immigrant presence dropped sharply during mid-century, as a wave of domestic migrants - a largely white, conservative, Protestant group of midwesterners - flocked to Los Angeles in search of the good life. Thus, by 1960, just eight per cent of the region's population had been born abroad, with the great majority of the immigrants tracing their origins to Europe.

Foreign-born numbers began creeping upwards again in the 1960s, and then leaping ahead at an explosive pace, so that over the next two decades, Los Angeles would become the nation's most intensive immigration focal point. Not only did L.A.'s immigration rate - a flow indicator relating the number of immigrants arriving during a decade to the total population at the end of the decade - jump sharply in each decade since 1970, as Figure 3 shows; it also grew increasingly out of line with trends for the USA overall. Very large immigrant inflows, combined with net domestic out-migration during the 1970s, and reduced domestic in-migration during the 1980s, sharply boosted immigrant population shares: by 1990, immigrants comprised 27 per cent of the region's population and 33 per cent of those living in Los Angeles county. The alternation of internal and international migration waves is one of the crucial features distinguishing Los Angeles from New York - the other immigrant capital of the USA.

As Figure 4 shows, New York has retained a very substantial foreign-born population throughout the twentieth century; consequently, the very large immigrant inflows registered since the mid-1960s, have had a more modest effect on the foreign-born share of the city's population.

In a sense, the key to understanding immigrant L.A. is the border and its proximity to the city of the Angels. In 1990, 44 per cent of L.A.'s immigrants had come from a single source country - Mexico; another 9 per cent were comprised of arrivals from El Salvador and Guatemala (see Figure 5). Since many of the newcomers entered into the USA through the backdoor, L.A.'s role as the principal magnet for migrants from Mexico and Central America meant that it attracted far more than its share of unauthorized immigrants. The Los Angeles region accounted for a third of all the undocumented immigrants estimated to have been counted in the 1980 and roughly the same proportion of the population who obtained amnesty under IRCA. Notwithstanding the large number of amnesty applications, which temporarily diminished the pool of unauthorized immigrants living in Los Angeles, the undocumented population continued to grow in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

Though diversity is seen as a salient characteristics of current immigration to the United States, Los Angeles has known a different experience. High volume immigration from Mexico and Central America is clearly the differentiating factor; as Figure 5 shows, Asians have moved to Los Angeles in substantial numbers, but their numbers remain dwarfed by the Mexican and Central American presence. Overall, ten countries accounted for 70 per cent of all of the region's foreign-born residents, an unusual pattern, since elsewhere, immigrant origins are far more scrambled. The ten sending countries that dominate the flow to LA account for only 40 per cent of the immigrants living outside Los Angeles. Even an immigrant dense region like New York is far more in line with the overall national pattern than is Los Angeles. Dominicans comprised the single largest foreign-born group counted in the 1990 census, accounting for only 8 per cent of all immigrants living in New York, with Italians, at 6 per cent, Jamaicans, at 5 per cent, and Chinese, at 4 per cent, following behind.

Attractive as it may be for Mexicans and Central Americans drawn by the lure of el norte, Los Angeles also exerts its magnetic pull on Asia, the principal, though by no means unique source of its high-skilled, foreign-born arrivals. Starting from a relatively small base in 1970, the Asian population skyrocketed; as immigrants from China, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and India (in that order) poured into the region, Asians emerged as L.A.'s third largest group, outranking the older established African American population. The newcomers transformed Los Angeles into the capital of contemporary Asian America, pushing it well beyond the other major Asian American centers of New York, San Francisco-Oakland, and Honolulu.

With the exception of the Vietnamese and the much less numerous Cambodians and Hmong, the new Asians comprised a source of extraordinarily high-skilled labor, importing schooling levels that left natives far behind, as well as other endowments like capital and entrepreneurial talents that gave them a competitive edge. Though the most numerous, the Asians were not the only group of middle-class immigrants to gravitate toward L.A. New arrivals from the Middle East, many of them professionals and/or entrepreneurs, also converged on Los Angeles, yielding the largest regional concentration of Middle Easterners in the entire USA. . . .