Migration

For those who bring a ghoulish curiosity to their scrutiny of Southern California's environmental decay, I offer the case of the raven. The evolution of the raven to Frankenstein status may not be a major milepost of our decline, but it's a sign of something. You might put the raven in the same league with the solemya clam. Connoisseurs of this sort of thing will recall that the solemya clam was discovered thriving in the sewage sludge at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay.

The news that Mexican immigration to the United States has come to a virtual halt has me thinking about all the ways that will change things. It will affect politics, culture, labor and the nation's racial climate. And it will also change how we see each other and ourselves as Americans and as Californians, me included. I'm one of those mythical native Californians you might have read about. I was born near the corner of Sunset and Vermont in Hollywood. My father was born in L.A. and baptized, as was I, at La Placita Church downtown.

This Thursday, the swallows formally make their storied return to San Juan Capistrano. But how do they and all the other migrating birds find their way thousands of miles to their winter and summer grounds? Scientists have found they do it much the way man has historically navigated around the world: the position of the sun and stars and familiar landmarks. They also take note of distinctive smells and the Earth's magnetic field.

  Stay-at-home mom Swati Rastogi watched her daughter Krisha play with plastic monkeys as son Dhruva lined up model cars in their two-bedroom apartment surrounded by Hindi and English alphabet posters. Dhruva, 3, asked whether Pakistan is part of India. He was informed that it's not. "I don't know where that comes from," she said, watching attentively. That's a rarity for Rastogi, who leaves little to chance when it comes to her children's education. Although China and its diaspora receive lots of attention for hyper-parenting since last year's publication of the book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," Indians aren't exactly wallflowers in the child-rearing department.

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires. Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States. Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Every year, shorebirds flap thousands and thousands of miles to the Northern Hemisphere, then back to the south. It's an exhausting round trip. Yet some sandpipers and plovers head deeper into the Arctic, tacking as many as 2,000 miles onto their journey. Why they do it has long puzzled biologists. "Why wouldn't they go in the low Arctic instead of the high Arctic? Why would you go so far north? It just increases the risk of getting lost or getting cold," said Allan Baker, senior curator of ornithology and head of the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Millions of monarch butterflies have arrived in Michoacan state after their yearly 3,600-mile journey from the Great Lakes, officials said.

Across the globe, millions of people are on the move. Today, about 100 million live outside their countries of birth. Their motives are many, but the most popular one is economic opportunity. Refugees fleeing war or persecution doubled in number in the turbulent 1980s, but they still represent only a minority of all migrants. These are some of the discoveries in a new report, "Global Migration: People on the Move," by Population Action International in Washington, D.C.

The Vatican adds a paternal voice to growing concern about international migration with a six-day conference opening Monday entitled "Solidarity in Favor of New Migrations." European Community President Jacques Delors will be the keynote speaker at a conference offering testimony to the emergence of migration as a hot global issue. Other speakers on the Vatican agenda include Sadako Ogata, U.N.

For more than 20 years, Susan Woods enjoyed the pleasures of cosmopolitan life. The bedroom window of her Manhattan Beach home opened onto the Pacific. Her dresses came from Rodeo Drive boutiques. Weekends were spent sailing a 30-foot sloop out of Marina del Rey.

It was a clear day off the Dana Point Harbor last weekend as one of the many leisure boats headed off to search for the coast's regular visitors these days: migrating gray whales. It didn't take long before the captain announced two large adults had been spotted. Squeals of delight rippled through the passengers. "Everyone turns into a 5-year-old child when they see one of these magnificent creatures," said Doug Thompson, onboard marine naturalist for an excursion with Dana Wharf Sportfishing and Whale Watching.

Simi Valley is a quiet suburban community and wants to keep it that way: No lights, no cameras, no porn studios. Not that adult-film producers are flocking over the hill from the porn-rich San Fernando Valley, but the fear is that they might. Angered by a recent L.A. requirement for on-set condom use, producers have made noises about leaving, and officials next door in Simi Valley are trying to thwart an invasion before it gets started. "The bottom line is we don't want to be known as the porn capital of the world," said Mayor Bob Huber, who is pushing for a local condom measure similar to one the L.A. City Council approved in January.

It's been called the largest migration in human history: An estimated 320 million Chinese will leave small villages and rural counties to start new lives in cities over the next decade and a half. It's the equivalent of everyone in the United States packing their belongings and changing addresses. Urbanization is the linchpin to China's development. It raises standards of living and encourages residents to become consumers. But as Tom Miller describes in his upcoming book, "Urban Billion" (Zed Books)

Inside Out & Back Again A Novel Thanhha Lai HarperCollins: 262 pp., $15.99, ages 8 and older The United States prides itself on being a melting pot, but the many immigrant stories that make up our uniquely American stew aren't always known and are even less frequently published by the mainstream press. Take Thanhha Lai, who, in her recent National Book Award winner, "Inside Out & Back Again," chronicles her family's move to the U.S. from her native Vietnam in 1975, shortly after the fall of Saigon.

North American dinosaurs may have migrated well over a hundred miles with the seasons, scientists have discovered after a close look at the ancient reptiles' teeth. A team led by Henry C. Fricke, a geochemist at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, studied the tooth enamel of Camarasaurus, a long-necked vegetarian sauropod that was common in western North America during the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. The animals, which were up to 50 feet long, would have had to eat constantly to sustain their large size, and some dinosaur researchers had suspected that they would have had to migrate to find sufficient food and water, Fricke said.

Twice a year, bar-tailed godwits migrate more than 7,000 miles so they can spend their summers in Alaska and their winters in New Zealand. Bar-headed geese fly about 2,000 miles between Mongolia and India, traveling at altitudes high enough to clear the top of Mt. Everest. Such flights are physically draining, requiring birds to expend enormous amounts of energy without stopping for food or water. For years, scientists have wondered how they do it. Now researchers think they've figured out how birds stay hydrated on their marathon journeys.

"Jobs Migrating Overseas, but It's a Two-Way Street" (James Flanigan, July 20) states, "The net number of jobs going overseas is overblown. The most thoughtful assessment is that 80,000 jobs will go overseas this year and 120,000 next year, says John McCarthy, a director of Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass." If outsourcing continues to grow at that rate (50%) 9,064,000 jobs will be shipped overseas in the next 10 years. The column also mentions Oracle Corp. as a positive example of how Americans need to accept the migration of our economy to Third World status.

Ultralight planes led a flock of whooping cranes into New Mexico, the latest leg of a journey to teach the majestic white birds how to migrate and prevent their extinction. The migration, which began in Grace, Idaho, was in the sixth day of an 800-mile odyssey to see if the whoopers will follow ultralight planes to winter nesting grounds at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, 80 miles south of Albuquerque. Just 371 whooping cranes are known to exist.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's new exhibit, " The Open Sea ," simulates the migration of ocean animals across the Pacific Ocean. The three-gallery, $19-million display replaces the Outer Bay exhibit at the attraction in Monterey, Calif. The dynamic intersection of fast and slow species plays out behind a panoramic, 90-foot window where tuna, mackerel, barracudas, sardines and sandbar sharks (new to the aquarium) mingle with turtles, stingrays and sunfishes on currents of plankton and jellies.

Can Google Inc. make friends? The Internet search giant, whose goal is to organize information, will try to organize people with a social networking service designed to rival the growing influence of Facebook Inc. Google+ is the company's most ambitious effort yet to keep Web users and advertising dollars from straying to social networking sites. The project, which Google has been quietly working on for months, has been championed by Google co-founder Larry Page, who, even before taking over as chief executive in April, made social networking a priority.