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Why were nearly a million immigrants deflected out of L.A.?

BY IVAN LIGHT

According to conventional wisdom, cities and metropolitan areas cannot affect how many immigrants settle in them. This conventional wisdom seems unsound in light of the fact that Los Angeles effectively deflected nearly a million Latino immigrants to other metropolitan areas in the United States from 1980 to 2000.

During that 20-year period, the nation’s immigrant population increased from 14 million to 31 million, but the percentage of immigrants living in the Los Angeles area declined from 6.8% to 4.9%. As a result of this relative decline, some 600,000 fewer immigrants lived in L.A. than would have been the case without the decrease. The same relative decline affected the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area. Its share of the national Mexican immigrant population declined from 32% in 1980 to 17% in 2000 — about 961,000 fewer immigrants.

Why did nearly 1 million immigrants settle elsewhere? There are two interlinked reasons. The first is migration networks. Because immigrants prefer to settle where others known to them have previously settled, they tend to cluster in a few localities. This explains why the L.A. region had 31% of the nation’s Latino immigrants in 1980 but only 5% of the U.S. population.

However, their large numbers created economic hardships for immigrants who had to compete for jobs and housing as their wages declined and their rents rose. As many immigrants left Los Angeles, rents came down and wages increased — but not before the bad news had reached potential immigrants in their homelands.

The second reason behind the deflection of a million immigrants is public policy. California’s minimum wage was much higher than the federal minimum wage in the late 20th century, reaching 112% of the federal level in 2000. A high minimum wage drove low-wage jobs out of California. At the same time, both L.A. and state authorities intensified their enforcement of industrial laws. The trigger for this was the infamous 1995 “El Monte case” in which dozens of Thai workers in a sweatshop were exploited like slaves.

Many garment firms shut down or relocated to escape penalties, prompting their low-wage immigrant employees to leave, too. Successive mayors appointed “blue-ribbon” housing commissions to investigate the alarming spread of slum housing. Enforcement shut down some slum tenements and forced others to upgrade. These changes increased rent pressure on the lowest-income residents, mainly immigrants. Finally, “NIMBY (not in my backyard) movements” successfully opposed affordable housing plans in many suburbs.

Although these policy choices were neither consciously anti-immigrant nor coordinated, they systematically deflected immigration from L.A. By itself, this story is a curious episode of local history. But from it we can extract important lessons for immigration control.

After all, what Los Angeles did unintentionally, other cities can do by design. More speculatively, were the federal government to strictly enforce housing and industrial laws while raising the federal minimum wage, the entire nation would arguably become less accessible to low-wage immigration. Then there would be less need to build security fences, militarize the border or issue national identity cards.

Light is professor of sociology and the author of “Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles.”