The logistics of Christmas morning are immensely complex and immensely important to California, which for decades has been the primary portal for the goods that Asia exports in huge quantities to America.
That’s especially true in Southern California, whose twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have become vital economic powerhouses since the virtual collapse of the region’s aerospace industry in the 1990s.
They handle over 40 percent of the waterborne freight entering the nation and unloading container ships and transshipping their contents employ as many as 1.6 million Southern Californians. Some work in the ports themselves but many more in the immense logistical warehouse, trucking and railroad complexes 50 miles to the east in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. . . Southern California needs its ports, and their attendant logical networks, to prosper because its very large immigrant and first-generation populations need their blue-collar jobs.
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