Why Los Angeles has avoided the migrant crisis

LOS ANGELES — By the time the first bus of migrants from Texas arrived in Los Angeles in June, the Democratic leaders who run the city were surprised it had taken so long for Republican governors to send people their way.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida had already chartered flights of asylum-seekers to Sacramento, Calif., and liberal areas like Martha’s Vineyard. Over the course of a year, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas had already sent thousands of migrants to New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., by chartered bus.

Texas has since made Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, a regular destination, sending a total of 14 buses carrying 562 people over the past three months. During the same period, thousands of other recent immigrants have traveled to Southern California on their own.

But unlike in other major metro areas — particularly New York, where Mayor Eric Adams recently warned that the migrant crisis “will destroy” his city — leaders in Los Angeles are not sounding alarms.

Instead, the city has quietly avoided the kind of emergency that has strained shelters and left officials pleading for federal help in New York, Chicago, and Massachusetts. Los Angeles officials are relieved to have avoided major problems, especially considering that their city has faced so many other challenges lately, from a homelessness emergency to a prolonged Hollywood labor strike.

“As a city that is not very far away from the border, we’re used to people coming here seeking refuge and shelter,” said Hugo Soto-Martinez, a City Council member whose parents immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico decades ago and worked as street vendors. “Luckily, we have the infrastructure.”

Officials at homeless shelters in Los Angeles report that they have not seen a significant increase in recent migrants seeking temporary housing. Immigrant aid groups say they have been able to develop an efficient process to help the migrants who arrive on the buses sent by Texas, usually a few dozen at a time.

A major reason California has avoided a crisis is that the state no longer attracts as many migrants as it did decades ago when it was a top destination for people moving to the United States. Starting in the 1990s, the state’s high cost of living, coupled with a plethora of job opportunities in the Sun Belt and elsewhere in the country, led border crossers to seek other destinations.

Although Los Angeles is home to the largest population of immigrants without legal status in the United States, most have been living in the city for at least a decade.

The migrants arriving by bus from Texas are just a small fraction of the more than 1,000 recent immigrants each week who head to the Los Angeles area to start new lives in California — a number that has stayed steady for years.

Most of them initially stay with relatives, who help them find work, housing, and schools for their children. As a result, they are unlikely to seek emergency shelter or other city resources, immigration experts said.

Those arriving in Los Angeles tend to be Central Americans and Mexicans, who have been migrating to California for decades and have built up strong communities in the region, providing a ready support network for new arrivals.

“LA may have absorbed a large number of immigrants organically, as have these other cities, over the years,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center.

Those fleeing their home countries in the current migrant wave include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, who, like others from Caribbean nations, have traditionally migrated to the East Coast rather than to California. The biggest group is Venezuelans, who have not historically migrated to the United States at all and who do not have well-established networks in California.

Homelessness remains a problem in California, which has nearly one-third of unhoused people in the country. In the capital, Sacramento, a city prosecutor is suing the city over failure to clean up homeless encampments, escalating a monthslong dispute.

District Attorney Thien Ho announced the lawsuit Tuesday during a news conference, noting the homeless population in the city has jumped 250 percent in the last seven years. A group of residents and business owners also filed a companion lawsuit against the city.

Ho said his office had asked the city to enforce local laws around sidewalk obstruction and create additional professionally operated camping sites, but that the city did not.

Ho said the city is seeing a “collapse into chaos” and an “erosion of everyday life.”

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said Ho was politicizing the issue. The city has added 1,200 emergency shelter beds, passed ordinances to protect sidewalks and schools, and has created more affordable housing, Steinberg said in a statement.

In Los Angeles, leaders have walked a fine line between welcoming the few families who have arrived on the Texas buses and condemning Abbott’s moves as a cruel political stunt. While migrant waves have not overwhelmed the city, the City Council last month voted to pursue legal action against Texas.

Soto-Martinez said it was important to push back: “You can’t just let a bully do that to you.” The measure he proposed to investigate Abbott passed unanimously.

Immigrant aid workers in Los Angeles say they are locked in a kind of chess match with Abbott: They are glad to help as many vulnerable families as they can, but they do not want to prod Texas into sending more people to Los Angeles as a stopover on their way to other places.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.