The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.
Historically, particularly in the Marxist canon, the belief was that the proletariat would demand change and overthrow the bourgeoisie. This is a very different story from what is happening in Los Angeles. The unrest here is not primarily a movement of organized working people, but the outgrowth of a heavily racialized politics pushed to the extreme by a small, but militant radical core. This structure has long characterized LA’s disorders. In the city’s past riots, notably the 1965 Watts conflagration and the Rodney King outbreak in 1992, the predominant color of protest was black. This year, it is brown, reflecting the salience of immigration and the fact that Latinos now represent roughly half the area’s population.
LA County, whose population approaches 10 million, is the epicenter of a nationwide demographic shift. Home to over three million immigrants, an estimated one million of whom are undocumented, hailing overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America. This part of the county’s population is increasingly marginalized, poor, and economically disillusioned.
The economic situation reflects a collapse of opportunity. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, Los Angeles now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state and among the worst among the country’s big cities.The city, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost industrial jobs over the past decade at a higher rate than ALmost ANY major metro areas. Latinos represent the vast majority of the labor force for California’s declining construction and manufacturing industries. In past decades, these industries have provided newcomers with opportunities to gain skills, buy a home, and even start their own business. Now, recent immigrants confront a landscape of failing schools and dilapidated parks. Things are particularly bleak for Latinos; Los Angeles ranks at number 105 out of 107 on the 2020 Latino Upward Mobility Index.
This all comes at a time when Los Angeles, as a recent Chapman University study reveals, severely underperforms the nation in terms of producing high wage jobs. Even Hollywood entertainment, one of the state’s high-end industries, has lost jobs due to technological changes and incentives offered by other states and countries, depriving young Angelenos as well as migrants of high-wage opportunities.
The increasingly multiracial middle class, families, and the upwardly mobile flee the city, leaving Los Angeles divided between the economic underclass, highly paid professionals, and what Harold Meyerson calls the “new middle class” of public employees. In this economic configuration, LA Latino incomes and home ownership rates (adjusted for cost of living) are among the lowest in the nation.
Read the rest of this piece at Compact.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: by Jonathan McIntosh. Immigrant rights march for amnesty in downtown Los Angeles, California on May Day, 2006. Wikimedia under CC 2.5 License.
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