Indicator
Pollution Burden:
A welcoming place includes safe and healthy neighborhoods, free of pollution and toxins, where immigrants can live and thrive.
Each indicator page features a series of charts, insights and analysis, case studies, and related indicators.
Insights and Analyses
In 2022, according to the national equity atlas, California ranked 6th among states for the highest air pollution exposure index scores for cancer risk. In 2023, the air pollution exposure index score for the state was 73, meaning that the state has more exposure than 73 percent of U.S. tracts nationwide.
Immigrants living below the poverty level in California had a slightly higher air pollution exposure index score than average at 75 in 2023.
In 2023, Latino and multiracial immigrants had the highest air pollution exposure index at 77. Agricultural workers in California – about 90% of whom are immigrants – are often exposed to various forms of air pollution, including pesticides, wildfire smoke, diesel emissions from farming equipment, and fugitive dust laden with particulate matter. A study in Environment found that between 2017 and 2021, counties in the San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast regions saw an average annual pesticide use of up to 29.3 million pounds – a particular concern of coalitions like Californians for Pesticide Reform. Pollution exposures of all types can significantly raise workers’ risks of developing respiratory and cardiopulmonary conditions, presenting particular issues for those who face greater barriers to healthcare like undocumented status or a lack of access to needed Indigenous language services.
According to a 2015 community-based participatory research study focused on Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County and the Bay Area, the average concentration of black carbon – which can cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease, cancer, and birth defects – was higher in Vietnamese immigrant communities in the Bay Area than the statewide average.
Many of California’s largest refinery and port operations are located in historic immigrant communities, exposing Latinx immigrant communities in Barrio Logan and Wilmington and AAPI immigrant communities in Richmond to a host of air pollutants like diesel particulate matter, sulfur oxides, and nitrogen oxides.
Imperial County – the county with the sixth highest proportion of immigrants in California as of 2021 – has some of the worst air quality in the country, jointly caused by agricultural emissions and the desiccation of the Salton Sea. Census tracts in the Imperial Valley also have some of the highest rates of asthma in the state, according to CalEnviroScreen.
A 2021 nationwide study studying childhood exposure to PM2.5 at home and school found that while second-generation white children face no greater exposure than subsequent generations, Latinx immigrant children experience no significant drop in exposures until the third generation – highlighting the intergenerational inequities to pollution exposure based on immigration status and race/ethnicity.
Ensuring the Availability of Emergency Air Quality Information During Wildfires in Indigenous Migrant Languages
In December 2017, the Thomas Fire broke out in Ventura County – ultimately burning for over a month and becoming the largest recorded wildfire in California history at the time. For weeks, dense smoke greatly degraded the air quality of the region. But during the disaster, Ventura County initially did not release emergency alerts in languages other than English, according to a 2019 state audit, leaving local immigrant-serving organizations like Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) and the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) to fill the gap in providing emergency air quality and evacuation information in Spanish and Indigenous languages. Despite the fact that one in three residents of Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties spoke a non-English language at home, emergency services were only translated into Spanish after ten days and were never translated into Indigenous languages like Zapoteco or Mixteco for the over 50,000 Indigenous people from southern Mexico living in the affected counties, according to a 2020 report by Michael Méndez and organizers from MICOP and CAUSE. That report also highlighted the particular danger posed to outdoor agricultural workers in the region – 46% of whom are from a Mexican Indigenous migrant group, according to the 2010 California Indigenous Farmworker Study – who continued to work in dense smoke for days due in part to a lack of information in their languages from their employers or government agencies about the unfolding disaster.
To address this inequity, CAUSE and MICOP partnered with Líderes Campesinas, the Public Health Institute, and the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District to launch updates to Ventura County’s emergency alert system in late 2022 to include alerts in both Mixteco and Zapoteco. This new resource can now notify Indigenous immigrant farmworkers who speak these languages when air quality in the region reaches unhealthy levels due to wildfire smoke, so that they can take appropriate steps to protect their health and advocate for improved working conditions. Even so, work remains to expand the availability of official information to other Indigenous languages spoken in the region, like Purépecha, Nahuatl, and Maya languages. To learn more about the ongoing advocacy work of CAUSE and MICOP, visit their websites.
Community-based planning processes like Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) and California Green Zones can provide immigrant communities with better environmental health conditions, while also contributing to a stronger local economy.
In California, the disproportionate placement of industrial and transportation infrastructures in communities of color – including immigrant communities – have led Black, Brown, and Indigenous residents to experience greater pollution burden and environmental health hazards than white residents. This has often been the result of the exclusion of these communities from planning processes – but some programs are working to change that. The Transformative Climate Communities program, administered by the state’s Strategic Growth Council, is a place-based funding program that seeks to “empower the communities most impacted by pollution to choose their own goals, strategies, and projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution” – and has awarded significant funding to places with large immigrant communities like South Stockton, the Inland Empire, and Barrio Logan in San Diego. A 2024 report by The Greenlining Institute and the USC Equity Research Institute found that TCC was a strong model for funding community-driven climate projects, and called out the program’s strength in catalyzing local collectives between governments, communities, and nonprofit organizations to achieve tangible progress in addressing environmental injustices.
One of the co-sponsors of the legislation that established TCC in 2016 was the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA), whose California Green Zones program is another place-based initiative that “uses community-led solutions to transform areas overburdened by pollution.” “Green Zones” where CEJA and their partners have done such work include Fresno, where residents have asked for green spaces, housing, and transit access to replace industrial development in lower-income neighborhoods; the Southern San Joaquin Valley, where residents have formed their own multilingual advocacy organizations in Tulare and Kern Counties; and Los Angeles, where three neighborhoods with significant immigrant populations have been prioritized for improved environmental health standards by city officials because of local advocacy efforts.
To learn more about the TCC program, visit their website here. To learn more about CEJA’s Green Zones initiative, visit their website here. To read the report from The Greenlining Institute and the USC Equity Research Institute, click here.
