One out of every five residents in the Inland Empire – nearly 1 million people – is an immigrant, and that population is growing.
Yet the region of Riverside and San Bernardino counties isn’t necessarily associated with immigration. Instead, it’s sometimes connected to white flight, or older communities where people flock for lower-priced housing.
A report released this week by UC Riverside’s newly created Center for Social Innovation is looking to change that. The 20-page report – billed as a first-ever detailed look at immigrants in the Inland Empire – offers demographic information that reveals a complex, growing world of immigrant communities in the two counties and contrasts those groups with similar immigrant populations throughout Southern California.
While most of the data comes from the 2016 American Community Survey, it also pulls together history and brief profiles of some community members, along with some comparisons to the rest of Southern California and the state. The report also identifies policy issues and includes recommendations.
A key takeaway is that the makeup of immigrant populations vary widely throughout the region.
While most of the Latinos in both regions are Mexican or of Mexican heritage, Los Angeles has a much larger cluster of immigrants from Central and South America, compared to the Inland Empire, which is home to a higher percentage of Mexican immigrants.
Likewise, the Asian population of the Inland Empire differs from Asian communities in other parts of Southern California.
For example, the report found that Filipino-Americans and immigrants from the Phillippines comprise roughly one in three Asians in the Inland Empire and nearly one in four Asians in Los Angeles. But in Los Angeles, the biggest part of the Asian population — also about one in three — is Chinese.
“This region is rapidly changing,” said Javier Hernandez, director of the Inland Coalition for Immigration Justice, which collaborated with UCR’s new center and the California Immigrant Policy to craft the report.
Latinos represent a greater share of immigrants in the Inland Empire than in the rest of Southern California: 69 percent in each of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, compared to 56 percent in Southern California and 51 percent in California overall.
Just over half of the Inland Empire immigrant population are not U.S. citizens.
The number of immigrants has grown, especially in Riverside County, and the share of immigrants becoming citizens in the Inland Empire has increased over the last decade, from 39 percent in 2005 to 48 percent in 2016.
Overall, Latinos were more likely (70 percent) to have been born in the United States, while Asians were more likely (64 percent) to be born outside the United States.
“Being an immigrant is not synonymous with being Latino and being Latino is not synonymous with being an immigrant,” Ramakrishnan said.
The report’s authors said they hope the information can be built upon in future projects, and become a resource and provide needed data on immigrant communities in the region, for the general public and immigration advocates.
Among the report’s recommendations: more public and private investment to help immigrant communities.
“There are a lot of important efforts underway in the region to make sure that immigrants are better integrated into policymaking and decision making. But funding for these efforts still lag behind funding in places like Los Angeles and Orange County,” said Ramakrishnan, who is also associate dean of the UC Riverside School of Public Policy.
The UC Riverside report also offers some details that break down populations within the two county region.
The Coachella Valley, for example, is probably best known as a music venue. But it also is a key employment base for seasonal agricultural workers, who primarily are immigrants, said Erick Lemus, Coachella Valley organizer of the California Partnership, a coalition focusing on economic justice.
“Coachella Valley is sometimes not celebrated for its true agriculture and artists,” Lemus said.
The report found that while immigrants are employed in seasonal agricultural work in the eastern Coachella Valley in Riverside County, immigrants in western San Bernardino County are more likely to work in transportation and logistics.
“The region has not been welcoming to immigrants for many years,” Hernandez said.
But, he added, that’s beginning to change.