A first-of-its kind economic impact report indicates that, between 2011 and 2016, the immigrant population in the Long Beach area increased by 14.3 percent. Released last week– aligned with national Citizenship Day and Welcoming Week– the New Americans in Long Beach report includes several statistics that show the immigrant population impacted the local economy significantly.
The City of Long Beach is one of 25 cities selected by New American Economy for the 2017-18 Gateways for Growth Challenge, according to a press release. The challenge is a competitive application process in which local communities receive tailored research on the contributions of immigrants, direct technical assistance to develop multi-sector plans for welcoming and integrating immigrants or matching grants.
Director of State and Local Initiatives for New American Economy Kate Brick said that this is the second year for the Gateways Growth Challenge and that 50 communities applied in 2018.
“[Immigrants in Long Beach] have a huge share of spending power because immigrants are such a large share of the population,” Brick told the Signal Tribune by telephone following the press release. “Immigrants are more than a quarter of the population– 26.6 percent. So, you can sort of see how there’s a correlation between their share of the population and the huge economic imprint that they have locally.”
On top of the key findings of the report, Brick added that the immigrant population in Long Beach is responsible for the population growth in general in the Long Beach area between 2011 and 2016.
“The other thing that’s important to note about Long Beach is that immigrants are really helping drive population growth,” Brick said. “Had it not been for immigrants, the city would have actually seen a slight decrease in the population over the five-year period that we looked at, which is, I think, important to know because having a stable and growing population is really essential to economic growth. Had it not been for the immigrant community, we wouldn’t have seen that robust population growth.”
The New Americans in Long Beach report has been approximately one year in the making, according to Eric Romero, project manager for the Long Beach Economic Development Department. Romero said the newly released report was prompted by the Blueprint for Economic Development, which was adopted by the City of Long Beach April 2017.
“The city, for many years, did not have a strategic vision for how it was going to create jobs, grow businesses and provide opportunities for our residents, so the mayor and city council requested city staff from the economic development department to work with the economic development commission, which is an advisory group to the city council, to start to develop that vision,” Romero told the Signal Tribune. “We went through a series of different community meetings and went out and made sure we had key baseline info for our citywide economy, and those reports were provided by Beacon Economics to inform that decision-making process.”
Romero said the most current data available at the time the compilation of the New Americans in Long Beach report began was from the 2016 U.S. Census American Community Survey, which has a time lag.
The report indicates that immigrants in the Long Beach area are more likely to be entrepreneurs. Immigrants account for 35.9 percent of the area’s entrepreneurs and are 18.5 percent more likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to be business owners, according to the report. The more than 8,400 immigrant entrepreneurs in Long Beach in 2016 generated $162.1 million in business income.
“A lot of [the local, immigrant entrepreneurs] are your typical kind of retail brick-and-mortar storefronts, but the kind of services or products that they provide may range from your cornerstone bodega, where people go to get some, you know, drinks, vegetables and things of that nature, to a wick store to a travel agent for example,” Romero said. “It really ranges, and I think we’re working to try to better understand all of our assets that we have and better understand who makes up our entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, this was really an effort that came from the blueprint and part of the city’s and our department’s larger effort to start to collect more data, better understand that data and then make it available and ultimately get to a point where we can start to make decisions based on that data and have it influence our programs and services.”
Both Brick and Romero told the Signal Tribune by telephone that there is no breakdown available for which industries the immigrant entrepreneurs are pursuing by category due to the limited sample size used for this study. Brick said “the population that we looked at for Long Beach and Signal Hill is 481,172.”
Additional key findings of the report include:
- Immigrants in the Long Beach area earned $3.4 billion in income and paid more than $1 billion in taxes in 2016. Of that, $833.4 million went to federal taxes and $280.7 million went to state and local taxes, leaving them with $2.3 billion in spending power.
- In 2016, the immigrant population accounted for 26.6 percent of the total population, 32.6 percent of the working-age population and 32.1 percent of the employed labor force in the Long Beach area.
- Immigrants were responsible for the creation or preservation of 5,895 local manufacturing jobs. Immigrants, who represent 49 percent of all manufacturing workers in the Long Beach area, help keep manufacturing jobs on U.S. soil by bolstering the local workforce, allowing companies to stay and create jobs in the area.
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Romero said he is unsure if the City of Long Beach will apply for the next phase of technical assistance available through New American Economy at this time.
