The Economist runs a story that says Los Angeles is losing illegal immigrants to places like San Bernardino and Riverside counties. That's been noted before, but this piece discusses how losing undocumented people can signal bad news for the region's economy:
Just under 1m illegal immigrants are thought to live in Los Angeles County. That is twice as many as in any other American metropolis. Yet the number may have peaked. This month the Urban Institute, a think-tank, estimated that the county lost some 15,000 illicit residents between 2002 and 2004. In the same period America as a whole added more than 1m. Los Angeles's illegal immigrants are relatively old (only 42% are under 30, compared with 49% nationwide) and more likely to have American children. That suggests many will soon become citizens.
[...]
The migrants are lured partly by a boom in unskilled jobs. San Bernardino and Riverside Counties process much of the cargo that arrives in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As trade with China increases, so does the need for huge warehouses—one, currently under construction, is the size of eight Manhattan city blocks—and workers to build and toil in them. These two dusty, sprawling counties, together known as the Inland Empire, are doing something that is almost unheard of in America these days: creating manufacturing jobs.
[...]
In some ways, the disappearance of illegal immigrants is good news for Los Angeles. It takes pressure off public services: the proportion of schoolchildren who are classified as “English learners”, for example, has fallen from a peak of 47% in the mid-1990s to 41% today. And it makes it easier for the city's large Hispanic population to rise into the middle class. As a group, Hispanics had been weighed down by poorly educated new arrivals.
Yet the fact that people are being drawn away from places like Los Angeles is worrying, too. Illegal immigrants are the canaries in the economic coal mine, sensitive to the slightest changes in the job market. Their presence in a city may cause problems, but their departure suggests that a place is losing some of its economic dynamism.
That's always readable Economist-speak. But I wonder how this meshes with L.A. economic databanks.
* On another note, I've just come across two excellent Mexi blogs that I will visit in the future. Say hello to The Unapologetic Mexican and The Mex Files. Also, I recently took a look at the intriguing new Chimatli and, while I'm on the subject of related sites, I extend long-overdue props to The Sickly Season and Chanfles. Eastside-oriented artful blogging is alive and well.