State’s Allure for Immigrants Wanes

It’s no surprise to Rene Castillo that many immigrants are eschewing California for places like North Carolina, Massachusetts and the Pacific Northwest. He’s thinking about going to Indiana himself in a few months.

“There’s already so many people here looking for work, it’s hard to find steady jobs that pay much above the minimum,” said Castillo, tape measure in his pocket, as he and other day laborers trolled languidly for jobs Tuesday among motorists in the HomeBase parking lot on Slauson Avenue in Ladera Heights. “People say life is better elsewhere.”

Although California remains the No. 1 destination for foreign immigrants, the state is not quite the magnet that it was a decade ago.

“California is no longer the promised land that it was for immigrants,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer and urban planner at USC. Myers is the coauthor of a study released Tuesday that finds that the pace of foreign immigration to California has finally slowed after three decades of rapid growth.

The attitudes of people like Castillo help explain why. Word of saturated job markets in California, and of opportunities in other states, has traveled rapidly to the towns and cities of Mexico and Central America, which generate the bulk of immigrants to California.

Pioneering immigrants have set up beachheads in such far-flung locales as Seattle and Minneapolis and New York, informing their compatriots and urging others to join them. Networks have developed among villages in Mexico and neighborhoods in Brooklyn, small towns in Pennsylvania and rural enclaves in Georgia. Drive-by hiring centers, long a flash point for controversy in California, have popped up in suburbs on the East Coast, and in the South and Midwest.

Many low-wage immigrants have left California and relocated elsewhere in the country after becoming fed up with the often rough-and-tumble job market, even amid an economic boom.

“Sure, a lot of the young people go to the two Carolinas, to Washington, to Virginia,” said Jose de Jesus Lopez, a 52-year-old native of Mexico who was seeking day jobs in the parking lot on Slauson. “They hear there’s more jobs, that the patrones [bosses] pay better.”

The problem is not a lack of jobs here, the immigrants say--indeed, the region’s unemployment rate remains very low. And low-wage employment in construction, restaurants, hotels and elsewhere is relatively plentiful, even for those here illegally.

But the glut of low-skilled workers drives wages down. “There are so many of us here that the work we do has no value,” complained Hector Tome, a father of four who says he refuses to work for less than $10 an hour. Others in the parking lot take a similar stand, rejecting jobs that pay less.

Not all immigrants are ready to move, of course. California retains an allure for many. It is the part of the United States they know best, the place they arrived first. The weather is mild, and they can speak Spanish most everywhere they go.

Most of those seeking work at the parking lot hiring station here have resided in Los Angeles for 10 years or more. Some have wives and children here. Most said they had no intention of leaving, even if their wage-earning potential might improve elsewhere.

“I have relatives in Boston, and they say there’s a lot of work there, but I don’t want to leave,” said Maximiliano Martinez, a 33-year-old native of El Salvador. “I’m settled here: I have my apartment, my things, I don’t want to pick up and leave.”

Others say they doubt that opportunities really are greater elsewhere.

“I think a lot of those who leave here have false illusions,” said Adolfo Estrada, 26, who said he has lived in the United States as an illegal immigrant since he was 17.

Estrada, a fast-talking, street-smart Guatemalan with a quick sense of humor, has worked in a chicken factory in Arkansas and picked apples in Utah, among other adventures. In his view, life is not much better for immigrants elsewhere.

“People think they’re going to find great jobs outside of California--I thought so myself--but the situation is not much different, particularly for those of us without papers,” Estrada said as he eyed passing cars for motorists seeking help. “Personally, I keep coming back to Los Angeles. The city has a little spark to it, no? It’s my home now.”

But the charms of Los Angeles have dimmed for Rene Castillo. After 16 years here, Castillo said, he is fed up with the irregularity of work and low wages. Friends have told him about opportunities in construction in Indianapolis; he is considering moving in a few months.

“I think it’s worth a try,” said Castillo, a short man whose expressions bespeak his frustration with the life of a day laborer here. “It seems to me it’s getting harder and harder to find work here.”

The USC study indicates that a growing number of people share his view.

About one-quarter of all Californians are now foreign-born, by far the highest proportion in the nation and more than double the national median of 10%. But the nation’s immigrant population is dispersing throughout the country in search of opportunities, the study and census surveys show. Meantime, the native-born population of California is rising steadily, in part because of the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

Largely because the number of immigrants is beginning to level off, the USC study says, poverty has begun to decline among California’s foreign-born multitudes after increasing for more than two decades.

“The better off the immigrant population is,” Myers said, “the better off all of California is.”