| As the nation's largest destination for immigrants in general and Mexican nationals in particular, Los Angeles needs to prepare quickly to pay the piper for the economic benefits of low-income labor, two UCLA sociologists are warning in a recently published book.
"Los Angeles is able to absorb and employ even the least-skilled immigrants at a truly impressive rate, but it appears just as incapable of offering them a living wage," said Roger Waldinger, editor of "Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America" (University of California Press) and chair of the sociology department. "Serious trouble lies ahead unless we're able to develop the social infrastructure to ensure that the children of today's unskilled immigrants do considerably better than their parents."
Waldinger coordinated a team of researchers who used data from the 1994-1998 U.S. Current Population Survey to compare the educational backgrounds and employment and income levels in five U.S. cities that attract the most immigrants: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco.
With one-fifth of the nation's immigrants, Los Angeles is drawing the nation's largest share of low-skilled and poorly educated newcomers, Waldinger found. Thanks to informal social networks built over generations, even the least-skilled immigrants from Mexico -- Los Angeles' largest source -- quickly find jobs, he discovered, but typically not ones that pay living wages.
"The same social networks that help these immigrants find work also appear to funnel them into a narrow tier of the economy where newcomers quickly saturate demand and compete with each other, further driving down wages," Waldinger said.
The effect can ripple through at least three generations, noted Min Zhou, a UCLA sociology professor and contributor to the book.
Los Angeles, for example, has the highest dropout rate for second-generation immigrants of the five cities studied. And Los Angeles also lags behind every region but Chicago in college attendance among first- and second-generation immigrants. By contrast, San Francisco, buoyed by immigration of more skilled and better-educated Asians, ranks first in college attendance and claims the strongest high school graduation rates.
Los Angeles immigrants and their children also are at greatest risk for bottoming out altogether, Zhou found. Through the third generation, immigrants are more likely to become marginalized -- neither pursuing an education nor employment -- in Los Angeles than in any other U.S. immigration center.
"With more than half of the children of Los Angeles' immigrants now under 14, we're at an important crossroads," Zhou said. "Either the state moves quickly and decisively to ensure these children rise to the level of their peers, or we may be looking at a whole new underclass."
-- Meg Sullivan
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