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Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in the 2005 Mayoral Elections in Los Angeles and New York
by
John Mollenkopf, Ana Champeny, Raphael Sonenshein, and Mark Drayse
Prepared for Panel 30-3, “Group Mobilization, Partisanship, Ideas, and Leadership: The
Los Angeles and New York Mayoral Elections of 2005,” 10:15 AM, Saturday, September
2, 2006 at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia
Introduction
The nation’s first and second largest cities provide a home to highly diverse populations that give
rise to some of the nation’s most interesting local politics. Both cities are the highly dynamic cores of
strongly performing regional economies with global reach. New York distinguishes itself in the global
system of cities in terms of its financial markets, corporate headquarters, high level corporate services,
the mass media, and large public and nonprofit sectors, but also has a history of garment manufacturing,
port-related activities, and the consumption of goods and services. Los Angeles has a roughly similar
profile, perhaps with less capital market activity and more emphasis on the entertainment industry, high
technology, and competitive manufacturing.
Los Angeles is a relatively new city and New York an old one, but both had large populations by
1950. Los Angeles continued to grow, while New York at first seemed to be following the downward trend
of other old northeastern cities, but then broke from that pattern and grew after 1980. Both cities had
predominantly white populations with substantial black minorities in 1950 that have since been
transformed by new immigrants. Each, on its own, has become a major national magnet for new
immigrants – with New York City having 8.1 percent of the nation’s foreign born and the City of Los
Angeles 4.8 percent in 2005. Adding in the surrounding metropolitan areas, LA has 16 percent of the
total foreign born and New York 14.8 percent. Thus almost one out of every three immigrants in the
nation lives in or near these two cities. The demographic trajectories of the two cities were roughly similar
between 1990 and 2000, with native whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians declining in both cities and