The Economist: Escape from LA - Los Angeles is losing its illegal immigrants. That's bad news

Get ready America - they ruined LA, they destroyed the American homebuilding industry, they're jobless and pissed, and now their coming to a community near you.

Here come the illegals...

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.

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.

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.

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.