Los Angeles County, home to one of the nation’s largest population of immigrants, is losing its migrant base, which is moving elsewhere because of the high cost of housing.
One third of LA’s residents are immigrants. Nearly 45% of the workforce is foreign born, and just under 60% of the children have at least one immigrant parent. Over 800,000 Angelenos are undocumented, and over 1 million people in LA County live with someone who is undocumented.
“The future of the region depends on how immigrants do,” said Dr. Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California Dornsife, and lead researcher on the annual State of Immigrants in Los Angeles report.
Pastor is also the director of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.
Cost of Housing
“The thing that’s affecting migrants lives the most right now is high housing costs and the inability to stay here and make it economically,” Pastor told Ethnic Media Services, noting that migrants are choosing other cheaper states from which to restart their lives in the US.
The average monthly rent in Los Angeles County is about $2700, but the average wage for immigrant workers is roughly $19-26 per hour, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal. The MIT Living Wage Calculator notes an annual income of $76,610 is required to live comfortably in Los Angeles County.
Mayor Karen Bass released figures July 6 noting that the number of homeless people in Los Angeles County grew by 10% to an estimated 75,518 individuals as of January 2023, up from 69,144 in January 2022. Some 70% had no shelter and are sleeping on the streets.
Overcrowded Housing
The city of Los Angeles has the largest number of unhoused people in the US.
As she took office last December, Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness in Los Angeles. She has committed $1.3 billion to eradicating street homelessness, including getting people into motels while they wait for a spot in permanent housing. Bass has also fast-tracked the approval process for building affordable housing, among other solutions.
“I want Angelenos to see that tents are disappearing and not coming back,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Immigrants tend to overcrowd rather than going unhoused, Pastor told EMS, adding that it is not uncommon to see 4 or 5 people in a one-bedroom apartment. “We’re getting way too much overcrowding, way too much income being eaten up by housing costs,” he said.
Excerpts from the Interview:
EMS: Did the end of Title 42 significantly impact the number of migrants entering Los Angeles?
Pastor: The ending of Title 42 does not seem to impact the flow at the border. I think that we were all anticipating that Title 42 had restricted some of the flows and that its end would lead to a surge at the border, but it doesn’t seem to have been the case. We’ve got longstanding pressures for people to come to the United States. There is a lot of economic displacement, climate disasters and a variety of other things that are pushing people in particular out of Central America and then a lot of others from around the world.
So while it’s right to focus on Title 42, its ending, and… what we’re really trying to do in this report is focus more on the long term factors that lead people to migrate and then interestingly, whether or not they migrate to California.
In the fourth year of this report, we are paying attention to some of the broader issues that affect all Angelenos: housing, state of the economy, health care, ability to start a business, minimum wage unionization, and the education of children.
These are broad issues and it’s one of the reasons why we keep calling in the report for an intersectional approach to immigrant inclusion.
EMS: The report mentions that 36% of undocumented residents have no health insurance, despite our plan in California to expand access to undocumented residents. Why is that? Is there still the fear of public charge that continues even in the Biden administration?
Pastor: Our data is from the period 2017 to 2021. So I imagine that, currently, that percentage is a little better.
But I do think that immigrants are frightened to make use of resources that are available to them. And that’s not just undocumented folks, but even documented folks in mixed status families who are worried about what being connected to the government will mean for your undocumented family member.
72% of undocumented Angelenos have been in the country for longer than a decade. And that means there are a lot of people who are in situations where they make either too much money or the family makes too much money to qualify for MediCal. They’re not MediCal eligible, but they might still be in very difficult economic circumstances. And health care is very expensive. So I think that’s a part of the population that’s going to need to be considered as we move forward.
(EMS note: An individual seeking to qualify for MediCal must have an income below $18,756 for 2023. Immigrant advocates have suggested raising the income threshold to 250 percent of the federal poverty line, about $34,875 in annual wages.)
EMS: Are we lagging behind in providing culturally specific resources, given the huge demographic changes in who immigrants are?
Pastor: Yeah, I think there’s a tendency to think that if we deliver everything in Spanish, we’ve done our job. It is true that a very large share of Guatemalans and Hondurans are undocumented. But there are big numbers of Indian and Chinese who are undocumented. For the new undocumented, more than half are visa overstayers, people who came in on tourist or student visas. There is also a sizable Black population that is undocumented.
We need to be reaching people in languages that they understand and providing interpreters, particularly for important circumstances, dealing with legal authorities and government services.
Having everything available in every language can be quite difficult. But it’s one of the reasons why we need a county wide approach to some of these issues so that there would be a go to place for at least some of the smaller language groups to be able to get the interpreters and translators they need to be able to access the services that are necessary.
EMS: There is a huge shortage of culturally appropriate mental health providers and similarly in healthcare at large. What would you say about the need to create pipelines of people of color to better serve the immigrant population?
Pastor: This is a big concern of mine: there’s just simply mental stress and trauma that’s associated with being an immigrant, leaving your home, an uncertain journey, and for many, a risky and dangerous journey. And then you arrive in a place where you’re dislocated, don’t know the language and are scrambling to establish ties. That’s a lot of stress, often accompanied by mistreatment at work, and fear about being deported.
And when you couple that together with a common migratory ethos of ‘you got to be tough and get through this journey’ and the fact that Asian, Latino, and African cultures are not necessarily open in terms of talking about their feelings, then you really have this very difficult recipe for a lack of mental health support because you’ve got all these stressors coupled with cultural reluctance.
And then you meet a health system that you might be worried about being too associated with the government and doesn’t have a whole lot of people who look like you or understand the culture that you’re coming from. That’s really challenging in the face of an emergency.
