Not the promised city: Los Angeles and its immigrants

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 68, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 253-269

  Waldinger, Roger ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

IMMIGRANT POPULATION; MIGRANTS EXPERIENCE;

UNITED STATES;

EID: 0040960810     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3641987     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. For an overview of Los Angeles and its ethnic transformation, see Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York, 1996); Roger Waldinger, "From Ellis Island to LAX: Immigrant Prospects in the American City," International Migration Review, 30 (1996), 1078-1086, represents an earlier attempt to think through the contrasts between our leading immigration cities.
2. For an overview of Los Angeles and its ethnic transformation, see Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York, 1996); Roger Waldinger, "From Ellis Island to LAX: Immigrant Prospects in the American City," International Migration Review, 30 (1996), 1078-1086, represents an earlier attempt to think through the contrasts between our leading immigration cities.
3. Lucie Cheng and Philip Yang, "Asians: The 'Model Minority' Deconstructed," in Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles, chapter 11; Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Georges Sabagh, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, "Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant," in ibid, chapter 12.
4. Lucie Cheng and Philip Yang, "Asians: The 'Model Minority' Deconstructed," in Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles, chapter 11; Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Georges Sabagh, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, "Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant," in ibid, chapter 12.
5. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, "The Making of a Multicultural Metropolis," in ibid, 13.
6. This essay draws on a number of statistical sources, most importantly the Public Use Samples of the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Censuses of Population, and a merged sample from the 1994-1997 Current Population Survey (CPS). For the most part, the temporal reference is the mid-1990s, unless specified differently. Through the remainder of the paper, data pertaining to either 1970, 1980, or 1990 come from the Census Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) files, while those pertaining to the mid-1990s come from the CPS. The Appendix to Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles, 471-480, provides details on the PUMS data. The Current Population Survey is a monthly survey of a national probability sample of approximately 60,000 households. In light of the limited size of the populations of greatest interest to this paper - immigrants, on the one hand, and residents of major metropolitan areas, on the other - I have sought to increase the size of these target populations by merging the March CPS samples from 1994 through 1997. However, the nature of the CPS precludes utilization of each year's full CPS sample. The CPS retains respondents during a two-year period, interviewing individuals for a period of four consecutive months, dropping them from the sample for the next eight months, and then re-interviewing them for another four consecutive months, after which time they are dropped from the sample completely. Consequently, half of the persons interviewed in any given month reappear in the following year's sample in the same month. To avoid duplicate cases, I have retained non-overlapping halves of the 1994, 1995, and 1996 samples, and included the entire 1997 sample. This procedure almost triples the size of the total sample.
7. Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), chapter 2.
8. See, for example, Edward W. Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1992: From Restructuring-Generated Crisis to Crisis-Generated Restructuring," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1996), 426-462.
9. For a detailed analysis of the socioeconomic charateristics of the "old" new immigrants, see Susan Cotts Watkins, ed., After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (New York, 1994).
10. Ruben Rumbaut, "Ties that Bind: Immigration and Immigrant Families in the United States," in Alan Booth, Ann C. Crouter, and Nancy S. Landale, eds., Immigration and the Family: Research and Policy on U.S. Immigrants (Mahwah, N.J., 1997), 3-46.
11. Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley, 1996), chapter 2.
12. See, for example, Stanely Lieberson and Mary Waters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York, 1988).
13. John Kasarda, "Cities as Places Where People Live and Work: Urban Change and Neighborhood Distress," in Henry Cisneros, ed., Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation (New York, 1993); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, 1996).
14. John Kasarda, "Cities as Places Where People Live and Work: Urban Change and Neighborhood Distress," in Henry Cisneros, ed., Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation (New York, 1993); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, 1996).
15. See Allen J. Scott, "The Manufacturing Economy: Ethnic and Gender Divisions of Labor," in Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles, chapter 8.
16. Vilma Ortiz, "The Mexican-Origin Population: Permanent Working Class or Emerging Middle Class?," in ibid., chapter 9; David Lopez, Eric Popkin, and Edward Telles, "Central Americans: At the Bottom, Struggling to Get Ahead," in ibid., chapter 10.
17. Vilma Ortiz, "The Mexican-Origin Population: Permanent Working Class or Emerging Middle Class?," in ibid., chapter 9; David Lopez, Eric Popkin, and Edward Telles, "Central Americans: At the Bottom, Struggling to Get Ahead," in ibid., chapter 10.
18. On the ethnic niche, see Waldinger, Still the Promised City?, especially chapter 4; on the operation of immigrant networks in the Los Angeles economy, see Waldinger, "Black/Immigrant Competition Re-assessed: New Evidence from Los Angeles," Sociological Perspectives, 40 (1997), 365-386.
19. On the ethnic niche, see Waldinger, Still the Promised City?, especially chapter 4; on the operation of immigrant networks in the Los Angeles economy, see Waldinger, "Black/Immigrant Competition Re-assessed: New Evidence from Los Angeles," Sociological Perspectives, 40 (1997), 365-386.
20. As quoted in Roger Waldinger, et al., "Helots No More - A Case Study of the Justice for Janitors Campaign," in Kate Bronfenbrenner, et al., eds. Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
21. For a pessimistic, highly influential assessment, see Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth," Annals, No. 530 (1993), 74-96; for a second opinion, see Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlmann, "Second Generation Decline? Immigrant Children Past and Present - A Reconsideration," International Migration Review, 31 (1997), 893-922.
22. For a pessimistic, highly influential assessment, see Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth," Annals, No. 530 (1993), 74-96; for a second opinion, see Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlmann, "Second Generation Decline? Immigrant Children Past and Present - A Reconsideration," International Migration Review, 31 (1997), 893-922.
23. See Stephen J. Trejo, "Why do Mexican Americans earn low wages," Journal of Political Economy, 105 (1997), 1235-1268.
24. On the differences between first-and second-generation aspirations, and the effects of those differences, see Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (New York, 1979).
25. This was hypothesized by Herbert Gans in "Second-generation decline: scenarios for the economic and ethnic futures of the post-1965 American immigrants," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15 (1992), 173-192.