Flood of Immigrants Mark Citizenship With Celebratory Traffic Nightmare

Hearty Defamer congratulations go out to the estimated 40,000 immigrants acquiring their American citizenship today in Los Angeles. And even bigger kudos for making it the kind of party those Liberty Island underachievers in New York only dream of:

Traffic downtown was at a crawl this morning as immigrants flooded the Los Angeles Convention Centre to become citizens. …

KFWB 980 radio reported this morning that some people had gotten out of vehicles near the Convention Centre and were walking on freeway shoulders, apparently in an effort to get to their events on time.

If your regular route home follows the I-10/110 elbow around the Convention Centre, be warned that freedom will ring (and honk and swear in no fewer than 50 languages) until around 4 p.m. today. Complicating matters further, nearly 2,000 more visitors were expected for a Herbalife conference in an adjoining LACC facility, unwittingly inspiring the company’s single-biggest one-day recruitment and sales spike in its 28-year-history. What a country!

• Huge citizenship ceremony jams morning traffic in downtown L.A. [LAT]