2024 SOILA Report
State of Immigrants in Los Angeles 2024
Amidst a pivotal election year, the 5th Annual State of Immigrants in Los Angeles (SOILA) County report uplifts remarkable strides made across Los Angeles County to advance immigrant inclusion by highlighting the realities that immigrants experience in our county—through rigorously produced data analysis—and by providing local leadership with enough direction to make tangible and meaningful change.
Different from previous years’ SOILA reports, through a publicly available online survey, we turned to immigrant communities themselves to share with us how they are feeling and faring in the county. We used that data to understand the perspectives of immigrants and their descendants, as well as to build our recommendations for this momentous year.
Immigrant Inclusion Pillars
Past SOILA Reports
In SOILA 2023, we offer recommendations to push for a new phase of immigrant inclusion that utilizes investments to their fullest capacity and pushes for more to ensure that immigrant Angelenos can Achieve their potential; feel Empowered to engage in civic life; and experience a sense of Welcome in our region. This report finds that efforts to help immigrants and their communities thrive are successfully becoming more expansive and inclusive, as is the case in budget conversations and the increased access to broadband. But advocates shared the need for more conversations at the county level to include diverse perspectives in decision-making processes, such as Indigenous groups and newer refugee and asylum seekers. A key component of inclusion is language access. When disaggregating by immigration status, undocumented households were most likely to be linguistically isolated at 37%, demonstrating the need to ensure all immigrant Angelenos have access to adequate translation and interpretation services.
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The 2022 report highlights the standing of immigrants in L.A. as the effects of the pandemic continue to be felt, including in the context of major, system-altering changes stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The report continues to build on the previous two SOILA reports and attempts to shed light on pressing facets of immigrant life. Moreover, evolving from our prior focus on immigrant integration, and in better alignment with community organizers and immigrant communities, this year we use “immigrant inclusion” as our analytical lens. This approach emphasizes the role of immigrants in building power and creating their own life narratives and stresses the linkage between the barriers to full inclusion immigrants navigate and broader struggles for racial and economic justice.
The 2021 report builds on the framework from SOILA 2020 by making immigrant integration the focus while examining how the data is now colored by the various impacts of COVID-19. Our second SOILA report attempts to better understand how immigrants are faring economically, if they are connected to and engaging in civic life, and how L.A. County creates a welcoming environment, within the challenging context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This report documents how immigrants are faring economically, if they are connected to and engaging in civic life, and how L.A. County creates a welcoming environment. It admirably attempts to cover many, if not, all facets of immigrant life and provides a base for further inquiry, action, and forthcoming work for L.A. County immigrant-serving institutions. Despite the important role of immigrants in our community, there has been an absence of a comprehensive, compassionate response to immigration on the federal level. There have been a slew of explicitly anti-immigrant federal policy changes including: determining eligibility for naturalization based on public service utilization, lowering caps for refugee resettlement, raising naturalization fees and enacting other restrictions, and attempting to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
Immigration Summit Over the Years
The Summit serves as the annual release of the SOILA report, unveiling data on how immigrants in L.A. County are faring to refocus the attention on how key players in Los Angeles and beyond can continue advancing a pro-immigrant agenda. Explore what happens at the Summit, where we amplify a bold, intersectional, and immigrant-centric policy agenda.
