Los Angeles Area Adds Nearly 800 New Residents a Day – One-Third From Abroad.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach area picked up 782 new residents per day in 2001, nearly one- third of them from abroad, topping a ranking of 152 large metropolitan areas covered by a new survey, the Census Bureau reported. The data come from the American Community Survey (ACS), which will replace the once-a-decade census long form.

“The 285,457 people who moved to the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area form a population that is larger than all but 60 cities in the United States,” said Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon.

Chicago was second highest in the number of in-migrants; followed by New York; Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; and Atlanta (Table 1, CLICK above on More Images).

Los Angeles also was home to the highest number of in-migrants from abroad, followed by New York, Chicago, Miami and Houston (Table 2, CLICK above on More Images).

“Planners and policy-makers have told us they need demographic information more promptly,” said Kincannon. “This is another example of how quickly things change and why we can’t wait 10 years to get important data for communities.”

The Census Bureau plans to phase in the ACS over the next several years, with the yearly data on demographic changes replacing the long form in the 2010 census. The ACS currently provides information on metropolitan areas of 250,000 or more people. Eventually, it will produce annual long-form-like data on topics such as household income and commute time to work for areas as small as census tracts (4,000 average population).

About 6-in-10 people who moved to Wichita, Kan.; and the Johnson City-Kingsport-Bristol, Tenn., metro areas came from nonmetropolitan communities, the highest percentage of any areas in the survey. About half of the new arrivals in Springfield, Mo.; Jackson, Miss.; and Toledo, Ohio, were from nonmetropolitan areas (Table 3, CLICK above on More Images).