Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [42]
In the banlieue outskirts of Paris or the apartment-block immigrant quarters of Amsterdam and Berlin, in the Bangladeshi East End of London or in Pakistani Bradford, in the barrios of Los Angeles and New York or the immigrant suburbs of Washington and Atlanta and Sydney, the people renting the apartments and buying the houses and running the shops are mainly former villagers. The act of sending regular payments back to the rural village is central to the economies of all these neighborhoods. And the Los Angeles arrival city does this at a scale unlike almost anywhere else in the Western world. At least half a dozen L.A. banks specialize in providing mortgages, denominated in U.S. dollars in minuscule sums, so that Central American migrants can buy homes in their original villages. It is a booming transnational property trade, driven by a population who aspire to entrepreneurship, education, and home ownership.
Los Angeles stands out as the premier arrival-city cluster of the United States, with almost half its population born in other countries (and predominantly in rural areas), a position equalled in North America only by Toronto, which plays a similar role in Canada. Los Angeles is described by demographers as a “gateway city,” which is to say that it is a broadly successful arrival city: its poor neighborhoods send out successful middle-class and upper-working-class migrants to wealthier neighborhoods at rates similar to their intake of poor villagers. People move through its neighborhoods: L.A. flushes out at least a third of its population each decade, becoming an entirely new city in each generation. A major study of the city’s immigrants shows that they arrive very poor, with poverty rates approaching 25 percent, but that these rates fall sharply, especially during the first decade of residence, generally to less than 10 percent.4 Nevertheless, the neighborhoods themselves often stay poor or even get poorer. Since about 1990, poverty rates in immigrant-dominated neighborhoods have remained at about 20 percent, despite these gains in the migrant population’s fortunes.
This, as the Los Angeles sociologist Dowell Myers has explained, is actually a result of the American arrival city’s success: Because it is constantly sending its educated second generation into more prosperous neighborhoods and taking in waves of new villagers, in a constantly reiterated cycle of “arrival, upward mobility, and exodus,” the neighborhood itself appears poorer than it really is. “At a given point in time, measurement of residents’ characteristics includes the most disadvantaged newcomers to a city but not the more advantaged ‘graduates’ from the place,” Myers says. “When the influx of disadvantaged newcomers is growing or when the departure of upwardly mobile residents is increasing, the city’s average economic status will decline over time. This leads to an odd paradox: The downward trend for the place is the opposite indicator of the upward trend enjoyed by the residents themselves.”5 This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city’s immigrant districts are poorer or more desperate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need—a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. Rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation, and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions, such as social workers, public-housing blocks, and urban-planned redevelopments.
Yet, it is clear to anyone who visits them that these neighborhoods are not on a downward spiral, but rather are becoming platforms for personal, family, and village transformation. The amount of investment in these urban tracts is formidable. In the 1990s, home ownership levels among Latino immigrants in the city reached 45.3 percent, a particularly amazing figure given the comparatively high prices of L.A. property and the very low neighborhood incomes. The university completion rate among