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60 Chapter 4 Hard Times in the Barrios L OS ANGELES had undergone thirty-five years of well-documented globalization by 2000. Global restructuring created the Pacific Rim trading area, of which Los Angeles became the second-ranking city behind Tokyo. During this transition, manufacturing industry left southern California for the Pacific Rim, leaving behind high technology, aerospace, defense, and immigrant-staffed sweatshops.1 The real wages of native-born manufacturing workers stagnated and declined in the protracted egress of jobs.2 New jobs in service industries employed many of those displaced from manufacturing, but usually at lower wages.3 On the other hand, growing information services and management occupations increased the proportion of high-wage earners in the labor force. As a result, economic inequality increased in Los Angeles. As elsewhere, newly rich millionaires became more prominent on the high end and desperately poor, unskilled immigrants at the low end of the income distribution.4 Declining Immigration In this southern California region, where the pace of globalization was feverish, was Latino migration really demand-driven throughout the period as, according to globalization theorists, it should have been, or did it become supply-driven? If demand-driven, the immigrants’ earned incomes and economic welfare should have kept pace with native incomes; if supply-driven, they should have dropped. The actual trend of immigrants’ incomes affects how one explains Los Angeles’s diminishing share of the total foreign-born population of the United States. If immigrant incomes were declining, it is plausible to attribute their diminished share of the region’s population to local economic hardship. The two largest categories of immigrants in Los Angeles were Latinos and Asians, but Mexicans alone accounted for two-thirds of the foreign population . When combined, Asians and Latinos accounted for 82 percent of international migrants in 1995.5 Between 1970 and 2000, the foreign-born Hard Times in the Barrios 61 increased from 11 percent to 36 percent of the population of Los Angeles County.6 Except for non-Hispanic whites, all the immigrant groups in southern California fielded increasing immigration cohorts in every decennial year between 1970 and 2000. As a result, the foreign-born population of the city of Los Angeles quadrupled between 1970 and 2000, reaching an apex of 6.8 percent of the total foreign-born population of the United States in 1990 (table 4.1). However, in the 1990s, even though the national foreign-born population increased by 11,332,684 that of the city of Los Angeles increased by only 176,055. As a result, Los Angeles’s share of the national foreign-born population dropped from 6.8 percent in 1990 to 4.9 percent in 2000, a decrease of approximately 28 percent. In hard numbers, the city’s foreign-born population in 2000 was 1,512,720 rather than 2,114,800. In other words, thanks to the drop in its relative attractiveness to foreigners, the city had 602,080 fewer immigrants in 2000 than it would otherwise have had. In the case of Mexicans, the immigration cohorts grew consistently in size between 1980 and 2000, nearly quadrupling the foreign-born Mexican population. But the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area share of the total U.S. population of foreign-born Mexicans declined in this period, from 31.7 to 16.7 percent. Although the area was still the largest settlement of Mexicans in the United States in 2000, its share of the nation’s total Mexican-origin population had fallen 50 percent since 1980. Of course, this decline reflected the dispersion of Mexican population from traditional settlement regions discussed in chapter 2. But the local demographic consequences merit separate attention. If the Los Angeles metropolitan area had retained its 1980 share, metropolitan Los Angeles would have had a Mexican-origin population of 2,491,068 instead of 1,530,280. The difference would have added an additional 960,788 foreign-born Mexicans to the metropolitan population. This additional Mexican population would have represented a 10-percent increase in the total population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Table 4.1 Foreign-Born Population, City of Los Angeles and United States Year United States Los Angeles Los Angeles as Percentage 2000 31,100,000 1,512,720 4.9 1990 19,767,316 1,336,665 6.8 1980 14,079,906 804,818 5.7 1970 9,619,302 410,870 4.3 1960 9,738,091 311,677 3.2 Sources: Gibson and Lennon...

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