《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版

[2007.03.29][United States]Immigration in California: Escape from LA

Immigration in California
加州移民

Escape from LA
逃离洛杉矶

Mar 29th 2007 | LOS ANGELES AND SAN BERNARDINO
From The Economist print edition

Los Angeles is losing its illegal immigrants. That's bad news
洛杉矶的非法移民越来越少---这可不是个好消息。

FEW American neighbourhoods are so exuberantly Mexican as Boyle Heights in east Los Angeles. Paintings of the Virgin Mary adorn walls around César Chávez Avenue. Local shops advertise productos oaxaqueños. Immigrants from south of the border, particularly the kind who carry dodgy Social Security cards, still fetch up in the area. But not as often as they did, according to Nativo Lopez, a Hispanic political activist who keeps an office in Boyle Heights. “This is no longer the west coast Ellis Island,” he says.
博伊尔岗位于洛杉矶东部。当地墨西哥人数量之多，美国几乎没有其他地区可以与其相提并论。在凯萨查维斯街上，圣母玛利亚的画像装点着墙壁。当地的商店登载 着productos oaxaqueños的广告。来自边界南部的移民，尤其是那些携带着虚假社会保障卡的人们，仍停留在该地区。西班牙政治活跃分子罗培兹在博伊尔岗拥有一间 办公室。据他称，现在的移民比过去要少。“西部海岸爱利斯岛已不复存在了。”罗培兹如是说。

Just under 1m illegal immigrants are thought to live in Los Angeles County. That is twice as many as in any other American metropolis. Yet the number may have peaked. This month the Urban Institute, a think-tank, estimated that the county lost some 15,000 illicit residents between 2002 and 2004. In the same period America as a whole added more than 1m. Los Angeles's illegal immigrants are relatively old (only 42% are under 30, compared with 49% nationwide) and more likely to have American children. That suggests many will soon become citizens.
生活在洛杉矶县的移民数量不到100万，是美国其他城市移民人口的2倍。然而这一移民数量或许已达到了峰值。本月，城市研究所(Urban Institute)估计该县在2002-2004年间流失了1.5万非法移民。而美国总体移民数量在此期间却增长了100多万。洛杉矶的非法移民都比较 年长（30岁以下的移民仅有42%，而全国的这一比例为49%），他们在美国生育后代的可能性比较大。这意味着许多人即将成为美国公民。

There are two reasons for this change. The first is that people who steal across the border or quietly outstay their visas now avoid Los Angeles, just as they increasingly bypass other traditional gateways such as New York and Chicago. The number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, arriving in Los Angeles has fallen since 1990 (see chart). In that year one out of every six recent immigrants lived in the metropolis. By 2005 the proportion was one in 14.
这种变化源于两个原因。第一，跨国界偷盗的人，以及那些签证已过期却依然莫不吭声留下来的人，现如今都远离洛杉矶，转而绕道其他传统入口，如纽约，芝加 哥。自1990年起，来到洛杉矶的合法移民和非法移民的数量都在减少。1990时，每6个新移民中就有1个人住在洛杉矶，而到2005年，这一数字已降为 1/14。

Increasingly, Mexican immigrants instead head to midwestern and southern states such as Ohio, Georgia and Texas. Construction sites and meat-packing plants there used to recruit many Hispanic labourers from California and other American states, says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Centre. Now they are more likely to draw people from south of the border. Few people associate Dallas with illegal immigrants, but the Texas city has more of them as a proportion of its population than does Los Angeles.
越来越多的墨西哥移民涌入美国中西部和南部地区，如俄亥俄州，乔治亚州以及德克萨斯州。皮优拉美裔研究中心（Pew Hispanic Center）的人口统计学家杰弗里•帕塞尔说：过去这儿的建筑工地和肉类加工厂常常会从加州和美国其他州招募许多西班牙雇工。而现在他们则比较可能从边 界南部招聘人员。很少有人会把达拉斯和非法移民联系在一起，然而德克萨斯市人口中的移民数更甚过洛杉矶。

The second reason why the number of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles has levelled off is that many are leaving the city. Emilio Amaya, who counsels unauthorised immigrants in San Bernardino, 55 miles (90km) east of downtown Los Angeles, says that between two- and three-tenths of his clients report that they moved there from the city. San Bernardino is currently 56% Hispanic, and growing.
洛杉矶非法移民数量走低的第二个原因就是许多移民者正从洛杉矶撤离。圣伯纳迪诺距离洛杉矶市区55英里（90公里）远。该地区的一名非法移民顾问埃米莉噢 •阿马亚称，1/5到3/10的委托人说他们是从洛杉矶搬到这儿来的。目前，圣伯纳迪诺人口中有56%是西班牙人，并且仍有西班牙人不断涌入。

The migrants are lured partly by a boom in unskilled jobs. San Bernardino and Riverside Counties process much of the cargo that arrives in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As trade with China increases, so does the need for huge warehouses—one, currently under construction, is the size of eight Manhattan city blocks—and workers to build and toil in them. These two dusty, sprawling counties, together known as the Inland Empire, are doing something that is almost unheard of in America these days: creating manufacturing jobs.
该地区对从事简单工作的人员需求量很大，这在某种程度上吸引了移民者。洛杉矶和长滩港口的货物很多是交由圣伯纳迪诺和佛赛德县处理的。随着与中国贸易交易的日益频繁，对大型仓库和劳动力的需求也与日俱增。眼下一个正在建设中的大型仓库有8个曼哈顿街区那么大。工人们的工作就是建设仓库，以及在仓库建成之后卖力工作。圣伯纳迪诺和佛赛德无计划地占用山林农田建造厂房，县内尘土飞扬，人们把这两个县并称为“内陆帝国”。目前，这个“帝国”正在为人们创造在制造业工作的机会，而这在美国几乎是前所未闻的。

There are other good reasons to leave Los Angeles. Maria, who moved out before she became a permanent resident and is now studying for a citizenship test in a San Bernardino shopping mall, provides three. Housing is much cheaper there than in Los Angeles, she says. The schools are better. And local gangs, although they are growing, are not nearly as entrenched as they are in the big city.
当然，移民者离开洛杉矶还有其他原因。玛利亚在她成为永久居民之前就搬出了洛杉矶。为了通过公民入籍考试，她现在在圣伯纳迪诺的一个大型购物中心学习。她指出了三个离开洛杉矶的原因：一，这儿的住房比洛杉矶便宜；二，这里的学校也比较好；再者，虽然当地帮派的人数在不断增加，但他们远非像大城市的帮派那么顽固。

In short, illegal immigrants are leaving Los Angeles for the same reasons most people do. The difference is that their new neighbours are unlikely to welcome them with open arms. Several towns in the Inland Empire have passed resolutions against illegal immigrants and the companies that hire them. Wehirealiens.com, a website that collects allegations against employers, was founded by a software developer in Riverside County. By following jobs from cities to suburbs and small towns, illegal immigrants often move from staunchly Democratic districts to strongly Republican ones.
简而言之，非法移民和大部分人离开洛杉矶的原因是一样的。而非法移民和这些人的差别在于他们的新邻居对他们的到来未必会很友好。“内陆帝国”的几个城镇已 经通过了决议，反对非法移民，以及那些雇佣非法移民的公司。Wehirealiens.com是由河畔县的一名软件开发商创建的，站内收集了反对雇主的言 论。为了寻找工作从城市来到市郊和小城镇的非法移民经常会从民主呼声高昂的地区搬到共和色彩浓厚的地区。

Rob Paral, a researcher, has used census returns to estimate the numbers of illegal immigrants who were living in various congressional districts in 2005. His work supports the argument, often made by proponents of more liberal immigration laws, that illicit workers tend to reside in Democratic areas. But it also shows that this pattern is changing fast. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of illegal immigrants in California's Democratic districts grew by 8%. In Republican areas the illegal population swelled by 36%.
研究人员罗伯．帕罗尔曾依据人口统计表估计了2005年居住在各选举区的非法移民的数量。他的这项研究支持了那些建议放宽移民法律的人士的观点，即非法劳 工往往会居住在民主党地区。但研究也表明这一情况正在快速转变。2000到2005年期间，居住在加州民主党地区的非法移民增加了8%，而共和党地区增加 了36%。

The same trend is evident elsewhere. The 15th congressional district in Harlem, one of the most invincibly Democratic places in New York or anywhere else, seems to have shed illegals. So has the district on the northern edge of Chicago that elected Rahm Emanuel, a powerful Democrat. Meanwhile, the number of illegal immigrants went up by 50% in the mostly suburban Illinois constituency of Dennis Hastert, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. Indeed, across America, where comparisons are possible, Democratic districts added undocumented residents at half the rate of Republican ones. That helps to explain why Republican candidates talked so much about illegal immigration before last year's mid-term elections.
同样的趋势在各地都可见。美国第15界选举区哈莱姆是纽约乃至其他地方中民主色彩最浓厚的地区之一。该地区似乎曾驱逐过非法移民。芝加哥北端的一个区域也 曾有过同样的行为。很有影响力的民主党人士兰姆•伊曼纽尔就是在该地区选举出来的。非法移民的数量那时在大部分偏远的伊利诺斯选举地区增加了50%。美众 议院前共和党发言人丹尼斯•哈斯特是从该选区脱颖而出的。从美国各地的情况来看，民主党地区移民增加的速度确实只有共和党地区的1/2。这就解释了共和党 候选人在去年中期选举前大肆谈论非法移民的原因了。

In some ways, the disappearance of illegal immigrants is good news for Los Angeles. It takes pressure off public services: the proportion of schoolchildren who are classified as “English learners”, for example, has fallen from a peak of 47% in the mid-1990s to 41% today. And it makes it easier for the city's large Hispanic population to rise into the middle class. As a group, Hispanics had been weighed down by poorly educated new arrivals.
从某些方面来看，非法移民的离去对洛杉矶而言也是个好消息。一方面，减少了公共服务的压力。比如，20世纪90年代中期被归为“英语学习者”的学童比例为47%，而现如今只有41%。另一方面，这也使得城市中庞大的西班牙群体可以更容易得跻身中产阶级行列。因为那些受教育不多、新涌进城市的移民让西班牙群体很是压抑。

Yet the fact that people are being drawn away from places like Los Angeles is worrying, too. Illegal immigrants are the canaries in the economic coal mine[1], sensitive to the slightest changes in the job market. Their presence in a city may cause problems, but their departure suggests that a place is losing some of its economic dynamism. After all, most cities, if they could choose, would rather have San Bernardino's problems than Harlem's.
然而，移民者正从洛杉矶等地驱逐出来的这一事实也让人担忧。非法移民对于经济来说，就好比“矿井中的金丝雀”[1]，对职业市场的丁点变化都很敏感。他们的存在可能会给城市带来问题，但他们的离去也暗示了该地区的经济活力正在消退。毕竟，如果可以选择的话，大部分城市宁愿自己像圣伯纳迪诺那样，也不愿成为第二个哈莱姆。


[1] canaries in the coal mine：矿井中的金丝雀。金丝雀拥有非常高的新陈代谢率，它们对于有毒气体比人类要敏感的多。因此以前在煤矿和金属矿井中，矿工们会把金丝雀带到矿井 里。因为当有毒气体泄漏时，金丝雀马上就会死去，可以起到危险预警的作用。

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