With sprawling new housing tracts transforming the Inland Empire earlier this decade, word traveled to immigrants across the state. There were jobs -- lots of jobs.
Mexican native Ramon Granados got the news in the Northern California town of Watsonville. He moved to Riverside in 2004 and quickly was hired as an electrician.
"There was tons of work -- new apartments, new construction," said Granados, 25, a U.S. citizen. "Everybody wanted to come to this part of California."
He had a steady job for four years, working his way up to $17 an hour plus benefits for himself, his wife and their two children. But when the economy crashed last year, Granados was laid off. These days, he waits under a tree outside a Home Depot off the 91 Freeway, hoping for a day's work at $8 an hour.
"I'll do anything to bring food to my table," he said. "Here, I get at least a chance of getting a job."
Granados and fellow immigrants transformed the face of the Inland Empire. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants chased construction and service jobs and the chance to own a home in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the region's Latino population soared. Latinos were one-quarter of Riverside County's population in the 1990 Census, for example, and 43% by 2007.
Now, with the region's economy reeling from a brutal recession in which home construction has collapsed and unemployment rates have soared as high as 20% in some areas, its immigrant residents are among the hardest hit.
Economic data do not single out the recession's effects on immigrants, but researchers and employment specialists note that Latinos, including many immigrants, are heavily represented in construction jobs that have some of the Inland Empire's highest unemployment rates.
Joblessness among Latinos across California has surpassed all other ethnic groups, including blacks, for the first time since the economic downturn began, according to new data released by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
And UC Riverside professor Vanessa Estrada Correa said her research shows that Latinos tend to have more subprime mortgages than those in other ethnic groups and are overrepresented in neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates.
The shift of immigrants to inland counties in the years before the recession marked a fundamental change in settlement patterns, according to a recently released detailed analysis of immigrant movement by the Public Policy Institute of California.
