Los Angeles: The New Ellis Island

By 10:30 a.m., the Northwest Orient jumbo jet was in its berth at Los Angeles International Airport, simmering down after the 13-hour flight from Manila. It had disgorged its captain, crew and 284 passengers, including the unbearably excited young Santiagos.

The five siblings, ages 24 to 33, were about to join their parents, whom they had last seen in 1979. They stepped through the passport stamper's booth and up to the desk of the Immigration and Naturalization Service official, a sympathetic woman, for fingerprinting and more stamps. They carried their things (a portable tape player, a jar of noodles soaked in vinegar, bath slippers) past the Department of Agriculture inspector and out. The young Santiagos had never been to Los Angeles, let alone the U.S. And yet, as of last Thursday afternoon, they were here to stay.

Los Angeles is being invaded. Two hours after the Santiagos arrived a Pan American jet landed with 76 Vietnamese refugees on board. And all those immigrants standing in anxious L.A. airport queues, mainly Asians, are only the western flank. At the INS checkpoints to the south in San Diego, nearly 2,500 Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans are waved through each month. Many more, perhaps 50 times the legal arrivals, slip quietly over the border.

Each immigrant, whether he crossed the Pacific on a 747 or the Rio Grande on a compatriot's shoulders, is bristling with old-fashioned ambitions. Each harbors a plan, or at least the rough vision of a better life. More and more head for the new ethnic metropolis. "Los Angeles," says Rand Corporation Demographer Kevin McCarthy, "has become the natural embarkation point to the U.S. There's no-question that it is the new Ellis Island." L.A. has no central processing facility like Ellis Island, or any Pacific Coast Statue of Liberty, no romantic symbol for every country's immigrants. But during 1982, according to Rand estimates, more than 90,000 foreign immigrants settled there, and since 1970, more than 2 million. The exotic multitudes are altering the collective beat and bop of L.A., the city's smells and colors. And a deeper transformation is under way.

Immigrants have landed there before, of course, though never in such numbers. "We find ourselves suddenly threatened," said the last Mexican Governor of California, in 1846, "by hordes of Yankee emigrants ... whose progress we cannot arrest." Southern California in particular has always been full of transplants becoming Americans.

But by 1940, only an eighth of Californians were foreign-born. Mainly other Americans were drifting into Los Angeles. They came seeking respite from the Dust Bowl and Depression, or for a glancing try at Hollywood success. Since World War II, the mass of U.S. migrants has grown larger but less purposeful. Lately they have seemed to hanker not so much for jobs as for a sunny, sexy L.A. way of life, as have the growing number of French (55,000) and British (50,000) émigrés.

The international hordes now streaming in from the west and south have, in contrast, no-nonsense ideas about what they want: a chance to work hard and make money. Laid back they are not. The newcomers seem almost eager to endure adversity in pursuit of their American