Full Citation
Title: Three Demographic Waves and the Transformation of the Los Angeles Region,1970-2000
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2004
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Abstract: This paper uses decennial census and other data to measure the scale and timing of the waves of immigration, births, and domestic out-migration that affected the six-county Los Angeles region between 1970 and 2000. It examines the relationships between these demographic waves and describes their cumulative impacts on the size and composition of the regions population through 2000. The peak years for immigration were 1988 to 1990 and for births, 1991 and 1992. Between 1990 and 2000 the region lost 2.05 million migrants, or 13 percent of its population, net, to the rest of the U.S., substantially more than earlier estimates that were based on less complete data. As a result, the demography of the region has been transformed. It can no longer be understood as a microcosm of the nation, as it could as recently as 1980. In the Los Angeles region, the baby boom generation is no longer the largest, as it had recently been in Los Angeles and still is in the rest of the U.S.; two later cohorts now outnumber baby boomers, immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1980 and 2000 and children born in the region in just the 15 years from 1986 to 2000. As a result, models of a typical metropolitan area no longer apply, because they do not represent the distinctive behaviors and impacts of large cohorts of foreign-born adults and their mostly native-born children. Since demography shapes much of human activity, the transformation poses a challenge both to demographic analysis and a wide spectrum of economic and planning models whose embedded assumptions about population may no longer be valid.
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Authors: Pitkin, John
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Publication Number: Working Paper PDRG04-07
Institution: University of Southern California
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Publisher Location: Los Angeles, California
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare
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