COLUMN ONE : L.A. Keeps Its Lure: A Better Life : Despite the stories about drugs, gangs and freeway shootings, 340,000 newcomers will have settled in the county this year.

Parris Buford had ample reason to avoid Los Angeles. His mother wanted him home in Arkansas, close by her place in West Memphis. When Buford talked about heading to Los Angeles to pursue a physics degree and a better life, she recited dire tidbits from the national news about gangs, drugs and murder.

He delayed his decision by enlisting in the Navy, then flew out to a base in Long Beach. There, he encountered, firsthand, his mother’s fears. Jumped by gunmen at a downtown bus stop, he scrambled for cover as bullets whistled by.

Yet when Buford became a civilian last June, he moved promptly into a small stucco house in South Los Angeles--one more newcomer among hundreds of thousands migrating to Los Angeles this year.

At a point when Angelenos are growing disenchanted with their city’s worsening indexes of crime, housing costs, congestion and other urban ills--factors that spurred 300,000 to move elsewhere in 1989--the prospect of limitless opportunity endures as Los Angeles’ most powerful lure for those hoping to start their lives over. This year, 340,000 newcomers will arrive, joining more than 3.5 million migrants who alighted in the county over the last 10 years, a tide of humanity unmatched by any American city since New York at the turn of the last century.

Who are these people, and why do they keep coming?

While sheer volume and shifting variety defy generalization, it is known that of those entering Los Angeles from outside California last year, Mexico was the top place of origin, followed by Texas, the Philippines, New York, Illinois, Korea, El Salvador, Arizona and Iran. Domestic migrants are often educated, single, professional and young, say population experts. Immigrants, too, are young, but have more families. Domestic migrants are more than 70% white; nearly half of all immigrants are Latino.

One bond, however, appears to unite growing numbers of newcomers. Many among the latest arrivals appear to be moving for financial opportunity alone, say migrants and those who study and counsel them. They arrive warier than earlier waves of more optimistic migrants, who often came blinded by visions of sun, beaches and plenitude.

Old dreams of paradise still linger, but migrants reaching Los Angeles in 1990 come well-versed in the city’s fraying quality of life. They have learned from a confusing diet of fact and rumor supplied by relatives living in Los Angeles and by television and other media sources in their hometowns and homelands.

“All the horror tales of life in Los Angeles in the 1980s had to leak out at some point,” said Norman M. Klein, a California Institute of the Arts mass culture specialist who has examined the selling of the Southern California dream over the last century. “The old images have already adjusted here. Now we’re beginning to see them adjust out in the heartland and other countries, only not quite as fast.”

When Sue Williams, a relocation counselor, meets with clients mulling moves to Los Angeles, she tries to offer a soothing narrative of the city’s advantages, displaying stacks of detailed map transparencies of the city to pinpoint the best places to live.

But first, Williams must allay fears about freeway killers, earthquakes and two-hour commutes.

“Clients come to us with legal pads full of concerns,” said Williams, who works with the National Relocation Assistance Corp., a firm aiding Americans considering moves to Los Angeles and neighboring localities. “They have to disgorge all the negatives before we can even start to help them.”

While warnings about Los Angeles’ problems come through loud and clear, so do promising reports of jobs and economic opportunities. “In the decision calculus of migrants, Los Angeles still ends up as an attractive place to live,” said Rand Institute population researcher Kevin McCarthy.

Accordingly, say population experts, the number of newcomers to Los Angeles County has been rising steadily over the last few years. In 1990, those ranks will increase again slightly--about 2%, said Nancy Bolton, a demographic consultant with the UCLA Business Forecasting Project. About 220,000 migrants from the rest of the United States and 120,000 newcomers from foreign countries--legal and illegal--will wend their way into the county by year’s end, Bolton said.

Each year, their numbers are nearly neutralized by the ranks of residents leaving Los Angeles for other destinations--most often other Southern California counties where housing costs are cheaper. The result has been a net migration gain of about 700,000 in Los Angeles County over the last decade.

“We are losing older people and middle-class families trying to escape the urban environment,” Bolton said. “Many are the young elderly, people 55 and over who are retiring early.”

As growing numbers of residents flee, Los Angeles’ yearly net gain due to migration has dropped to almost zero, Bolton said. The county’s population continues to grow, but only because of its high birthrate--largely among newly arrived immigrant families, according to David Heer, a sociologist with USC’s Population Research Laboratory.

Still, demographers acknowledge, the ebbing net figures belie the continuing allure Los Angeles holds out to those who hope for a better life--even at the expense of their own comfort. “The dream that first brought people out here still exists,” said David Hensley, director of the Forecasting Project. “It’s just that people are now coming with their eyes open.”

A recent survey of 800 Southern California business firms by the recruiting firm of Russell Reynolds Associates found that executives pondering offers to come to Los Angeles are far more preoccupied with the region’s negative quality-of-life factors--housing costs, traffic congestion, drugs, gangs and earthquakes--than were recruits of five years ago.

Harry Usher, a former Los Angeles Olympics official and now a Russell Reynolds recruiter, frets that as negative perceptions of Los Angeles--particularly the exorbitant cost of housing--harden among the nation’s executive caste, the city may suffer a depletion of its upper strata of civic leadership.

Yet in recent months, as evidence of recession mounted in other regions, Usher and Russell Reynolds officials witnessed new glimmers of interest in Los Angeles among their recruits--further evidence of the enduring sway of job prospects.

Ron Kerr, 36, an Arco personnel adviser living in Dallas, was considering a job offer in Los Angeles when he made the mistake one night of going to see “Colors,” the violence-laden film about the city’s gang culture. Kerr left the theater shaken.

“I thought: Holy Moly! Are those Bloods and Crips real?” Kerr said later. “It intimidated me. I had the sense that gangs were everywhere.”

But a career move--as signs of recession surfaced--was too tempting to turn down. Kerr now lives in Westlake Village, the San Fernando Valley suburb that Arco employees call the company’s “Texas ghetto” because of its popularity as a place to live for former Texans.

Kerr is fortunate among Los Angeles’ newcomers. He works for an enlightened company that helps migrating employees by lending them down payments on new homes here and defraying losses incurred in selling their old houses. And he has found suburban seclusion in Westlake Village, far from Los Angeles’ urban ills.

“I don’t see gangs out where I live,” Kerr reported with some relief. “I’m told that they’re localized.”

Migrants on the low end of the economic scale possess few of Kerr’s advantages. Many who come here in search of a boost upwards find themselves trapped in the very communities they were warned to avoid.

One 28-year-old laborer whose family subsisted on fitful construction jobs in San Antonio for two years, was told in letters sent by Los Angeles relatives that he was “better off in Texas.”

They were right. Moving in the spring of 1989, the illegal immigrant who asked that his name not be used said that he found steady work as a gardener. But he, his wife and two sons now occupy a one-bedroom unit three blocks north of MacArthur Park. Their grimy windows are barred. Crack and marijuana are on sale every night down the street.

Knowledge of what lies ahead serves more to heighten apprehension than to prevent migrants from moving. Refugees from strife-torn cities in El Salvador arrive edgy about the gangs that their young countrymen join in Central Los Angeles. Korean families about to move worry about Rolex watch bandits and badger California relatives for the names of local schools where their children can avoid the temptation of drugs.

When those fears come true soon after arrival, some newcomers quickly sour on the city that their forerunners portrayed as an American Eden. Disturbed by accounts of Los Angeles’ gangs and crime in Manila newspapers, Amelia Gunio, 44, now cringes in her family’s mid-Wilshire tenement apartment when she hears the whipping sounds of police helicopter rotors.

“That means there was a holdup and the police will be here,” said Gunio, 44, a Filipino schoolteacher who emigrated with her husband, Edilberto, and their two sons last March. Edilberto, 43, shrugged when asked about crime. It is worth the family’s long-anticipated move, he said.

Amelia has none of her husband’s faith. Already, she pines for a new home in Texas or Washington, D.C., where she has sisters. “When I hear the helicopter noises, I wish I could be somewhere else,” she said.

Sometimes, migrants simply refuse to believe warnings from their newly disillusioned Los Angeles relatives. Chris Melendez Johnson, an immigration counselor, told of a middle-aged Romanian emigre who wanted to send expensive gifts home to family members hoping to join him in Los Angeles. He was embarrassed because he could only afford to send packages of cheap cloth, nylon and other trinkets.

But the man’s relatives “were ecstatic,” Johnson said. “They refused to believe how hard it was for him here.”

Other newcomers keep silent or lie about their dashed expectations. “People send home pictures of themselves standing next to expensive cars and houses that belong to someone else,” Johnson said. “They don’t want their relatives to worry. They don’t want to seem like failures.”

Parris Buford’s relatives started worrying long before he settled in a crime-ravaged neighborhood in South Los Angeles last June. Even now, his cousins, who live in other sections of Southern California, refuse to stop over for even the briefest visit.

“They say it’s too violent to come down,” Buford said, smiling sadly.

A freckled, strapping 23-year-old, whose sole remaining affectation from six years of Navy service is calling strangers “sir,” Buford has only recently become accustomed to life away from the sea.

An engineer’s assistant trainee at the Hughes Aircraft Co., Buford might not only be without a house, he would also be without his new job had he heeded his relatives’ warnings--and his own inner reservations--about moving to Los Angeles.

“People watch the news back in West Memphis. They’re not stupid,” he said. “If you’d been getting all the horror tales I heard over the past few years, you’d hesitate, too.”

His earliest impression of Los Angeles came from television, culled from 1970s detective shows--”Barnaby Jones” and “Cannon.” “If people died, it was always for a reason and usually because they were bad,” Buford said. “Nice people never got hurt.”

Televised images of Los Angeles still work their magic on migrants who want to believe, particularly those who pay scant attention to news or have poor access to media reports about life in Los Angeles.

“The Los Angeles we see on television is a comforting, protective place,” said culture specialist Klein. “Even when we’re bombarded with all the negative reality about gangs, smog, earthquakes, we’re getting another message, too: ‘It’s great here. The sky is always blue. You’re a fool not to come out and try it.’ ”

After an early visit in 1979, Buford began thinking seriously of moving to Los Angeles. “In my family, Los Angeles was always the promised land,” he said. “I figured there were better chances for work here. That’s what this city’s all about, right?”

Buford deferred his plans to move by enlisting in the Navy in 1984 after graduating from high school. He vowed that he would decide only after he finished his hitch, but when his mother learned that he was being sent to Long Beach Naval Station for training, her worries about Los Angeles began to surface in baleful comments about gangs and earthquakes.

The warnings were not without reason, Buford soon learned. A week after he arrived in Long Beach, he walked into a holdup.

“Get out of my face,” Buford told one gunman. Guns fired as he and his crew mates fled, but no one was injured. Unnerved, Buford kept close to his ship for the next two months.

The incident became ammunition for Buford’s mother. When she saw news reports about crime in Los Angeles, Buford got phone calls. She fretted about drive-by shootings and updated her son on the Night Stalker murders and, later, the freeway shootings. West Coast cousins and family friends chimed in with their own cautionary tales.

Buford began to have second thoughts.

“I got worried that some idiot could shoot me for no reason,” Buford said. “See, I’m hardheaded and I got a smart mouth. My first reaction is to tell people where to stick it.”

Yet when he watched the same news reports that worried his mother, Buford “had a hard time believing what I saw. You hear about them killing each other like dogs, but they’re out there . It’s not in your house.”

By last August, Buford was balancing pros and cons. Los Angeles was hardly ideal, crime was bad. But Buford was intent on going to college and obtaining a science degree. He wanted to live in a city where a physics major could have his pick of electronic research jobs.

Los Angeles, more than any other city, seemed to meet the test.

“You could tell when you went through the want ads,” he said. “Jeez, they were thick.”

His mother, who owns a small real estate agency in West Memphis, took a final stab at keeping him in Arkansas. She offered to help him buy a home there and even pay his tuition at a Los Angeles college if he agreed to move back later on.

Buford held firm. By last February, he had married, quit the Navy and bought a house. He had only meager savings for a down payment, but was able to persuade at least one lender to help--his mother, it turned out, who finally gave him her blessings.

These days, Buford has no illusions about life in Los Angeles. Gang members own his neighborhood. Gunfire is more regular at night than bird calls the morning after. At times, he and his wife, now pregnant, have heard shots fired inside the house right next door.

But Buford had no trouble finding work, even if it meant taking a night job for several months as an airport shuttle driver. The pay was low, but Buford liked driving at night, learning the streets, navigating the fastest routes back and forth from the airport.

Often, he found himself driving newcomers like himself.

Watching them in his rear-view mirror, Buford learned to recognize newcomers by the questions they asked, their stares at passing landmarks, the way they clutched maps and scraps of paper bearing the addresses of their new homes.

“They always know where they want to go,” Buford said. “They just don’t know how to get there.”