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  • Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles
  • Cecilia Menjívar
Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles. By Ivan Light. Russell Sage Foundation. 2006. 272 pages. $35 cloth.

In this provocative book, Ivan Light puts forth a forceful argument to explain both the engine behind Mexican and Central American migration [End Page 1158] to southern California since the 1980s, and the reasons behind the geographical dispersion of these immigrants to other U.S. destination points. Using data culled from various sources and a hold-no-punches style of writing, he begins by taking issue with theorists of global restructuring, particularly Saskia Sassen and Douglas Massey. He argues that such theories, which assume that migration is demand-driven, cannot explain the declining incomes of migrants or continued migration in spite of lower demand. Instead, he contends that a supply-driven or network-driven theory is more appropriate. Globalization theorists were wrong about unskilled immigrants, he claims, but right about highly skilled ones. Here he follows closely (and cites) Steven Camarota's observation that a market-driven theory of immigration is "passé." Along these lines, Light affirms that even if initially migration flows from poorer countries are demand-driven, they degenerate into supply-driven flows. And this, he notes, is the root of many evils – those that assail the lives of the immigrants as well as those that beset the otherwise comfortable life styles of native-born residents. Thus, he writes, the intolerable conditions of life among poor immigrants and their eventual deflection to other cities represents an indictment of globalization theorists that painted an overly saccharine picture of endless and painless Third World migration. "They [the theorists] promised a party that would never end,"(169) he asserts.

Light goes on to argue that the dispersion of Central American and Mexican immigrants from Los Angeles to other U.S. areas is due to the city's increasing intolerance of their poverty. The immigrants' dilapidated and overcrowded housing, their low-wage jobs, low educational attainment, and life styles that included the purchase of old cars that then were parked and repaired on set-backs or small driveways were all "telltale signs of network-driven migration."(62) Indeed, he notes, identifying immigrants' living conditions offers a way to differentiate demand-driven from supply-driven immigration: when migration is demand-driven, immigrants' living standards do not decline, but when migration is supply-driven, immigrants' living standards trend downward, and "soon fall below the minimally acceptable legal and subjective standard of decency."(13) To make this point, he introduces the comparative case of Asians, demand-driven immigrants, who came to invest in business and real estate and to work in highly skilled occupations. Asians' living standards are much higher and thus, he argues, "foil" the Latino case. In contrast, Mexican and Central American immigrants lacked homeland banks, coethnic entrepreneurs and international real estate developers to prearrange their housing. Instead, the author notes, these immigrants "crashed into the housing status quo with no resources except their willingness to overpay and overcrowd."(129)

The distinction between demand- and supply-driven migration, Light argues, is important because it has policy implications. Thus, in his view, [End Page 1159] the proliferation of poor, supply-driven migrants' lifestyles were "eyesores" that eventually drove the City of Los Angeles and Angelinos themselves to pass and enact ordinances and to take a proactive stand to protect themselves from more of this kind of migration. When a locality has been "fully colonized,"(17) municipal-level policies deflect migration to other locales, and poor immigrants go to colonize them to begin the process again. He calls the process "sequential absorption and deflection," and it happens when countries admit more poor immigrants than cities can decently house or employ, so that cities then absorb some migrants but deflect others. But deflection is not an official policy and thus deflecting cities should not be blamed. In his view, "low-value workers contribute little or nothing to economic growth, and possibly divert public resources from productive uses."(59) Local ordinances, even police harassment of the migrants, while at times "ugly," represent "mobilization in support of poverty-intolerant law enforcement,"(157); they are...

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