Inland area sees big drop in immigrants

[Jeanfromfillmore]

What parts of this are true? Any of it?

Inland area sees big drop in immigrants
09:12 AM PST on Thursday, December 16, 2010
By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise
The Inland area had among the nation's steepest declines in its immigrant population during the recession, a study released Wednesday found.
In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the number of foreign-born residents fell by about 29,000 -- or 3.2 percent -- between 2007 and 2009, to about 883,000. The decline followed years of constant increases in the immigrant population, driven in part by the construction industry.
Other areas hit hard by the economic downturn, such as Stockton, Fresno and Providence, R.I., also saw drops, while cities with lower unemployment rates, like Seattle and Raleigh, N.C., had a continued influx of immigrants, according to the report by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.
The study was based on an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau population estimates.
Yet the dependence in the Inland area and other high-growth regions on construction jobs led to a disproportionate effect on immigrants once the housing crisis hit, said Audrey Singer, a Brookings senior fellow and co-author of the report. Metropolitan areas with more diverse economies are still attracting immigrants, she said.
The Inland area's immigrant population will likely rise again once unemployment falls, she said. The Inland area's 14.2 percent unemployment rate remains far above most other metropolitan areas.
The report is yet another illustration of how immigrants are more likely than native-born residents to move to find work, said Todd Sorensen, an assistant professor at UC Riverside who studies the economic effects of immigration.
"People are attached to the places where they are born, and immigrants are detached from the places where they were born," Sorensen said. "People go where the jobs are."
The report did not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants because it is based upon population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, which does not query immigration status.
It is unclear where immigrants went once they left the Inland area. Some returned to their hometowns in Mexico or other countries, and others moved to lower-unemployment states where they have family or friends, like Texas and Nebraska, said Emilio Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Service Center, an immigrant-assistance organization.
Some immigrants left the Inland area solely to look for jobs, although some with jobs in California migrated in search of a lower cost of living, said Luz Gallegos, community programs director for TODEC Legal Center in Perris.
"People are losing their properties to foreclosure, and even the rents are still up there," Gallegos said. "Even if they're not getting paid a lot (outside California), they can afford it because the rent's lower and the living expenses are lower."
Gallegos and Amaya said that in 2008 and 2009, they regularly talked to immigrants planning to leave the Inland area. But they said the outflow appears to have stopped in recent months, in part because of hope that the Inland economy is turning around.
Some people are already returning to the Inland area, including undocumented immigrants who had moved to Arizona but are now coming back to California because of the crackdown on illegal immigration there, Amaya said.
When the Inland economy was booming, immigrants arrived by the tens of thousands. Between 2005 and 2006, the foreign-born population in Riverside and San Bernardino counties increased by 70,000, census estimates show. A year later, immigrants were leaving the region by the thousands.
Even before the recession, the growth of the immigrant population was slowing in California, as an increasing number of immigrants flocked to jobs in places in the Southeast and Midwest that previously had few immigrants, Singer said.
That growth continued even during the recession, with Jackson, Miss., seeing a nearly 50 percent increase in immigrants between 2007 and 2009 and Omaha experiencing a 19 percent rise. Those areas now have more established immigrant populations than before, which will attract family and friends to move there, she said.
Nationwide, the immigrant population rose 1.2 percent between 2007 and 2009 in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, the report found.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/...6.3a413e3.html