Immigration: Proposition 187, Five Years Later
by Ruth S. Adams, Frank D. Bean,
Leo R. Chavez, and Min Zhou
Ruth S. Adams:
This evening we are pleased to present a creative, innovative, and important
consideration of California as it fits into the immigration picture of the
United States. But before we proceed, I want to mention that this subject is
not new to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Back in 1976, in
recognition of the bicentennial, the Midwest Center of the Academy organized a
five-day conference on migration patterns and policies; the proceedings were
published in a book in 1978. Following that came several issues of Daedalus
concerning immigration and, most recently, a five-volume series on migration
and refugees, which was cosponsored by the Academy and the German-American
Academic Council. So tonight we are exploring another aspect of what is clearly
a serious and important interest of the Academy: immigration in a very broad
sense. It's not only where the people come from, and why they come, and whether
they are forced to come; it's also how and, in the long run, whether they are
received. I can't help but remember that Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking before
the Daughters of the American Revolution, addressed them as "Fellow
Immigrants," and I think that's how I should address this audience
tonight.
Min Zhou:
Five years ago, 59 percent of the voters in California approved Proposition
187, which would have barred the state from providing public services such as
education and emergency health care to illegal immigrants. Since then, the
constitutionality of the proposition was challenged in court, and the court
ruled it unconstitutional. In July 1999 Governor Gray Davis's administration
agreed with civil rights groups that the state should stop defending the
measure. Just a few days ago I heard on the radio that a new initiative was
being prepared by the sponsor of Proposition 187 for the 2000 ballot. This
initiative would force California to conform with federal immigration law,
which forbids state and local governments to provide benefits to illegal
immigrants. The politics centering on immigration goes on as usual.
What I want to talk about is not politics but a real issue facing all
Californians and all other Americans today: the education of our children -
especially the children of the unwanted immigrants. Although the controversy
surrounding Proposition 187 shows no sign of resolution, two things are
certain. First, a large portion of today's immigrants come to the United States
with levels of education that may be good enough to get them started but make
it very difficult for them to get ahead. Second, a growing number of immigrant
children are coming of age. I want to outline for you the issues we are facing
on children's education. First, let's examine the distribution of immigrant
generations in two major immigrant receiving centers in the United States - New
York (the old immigrant center) and Los Angeles (the new). Currently, over 40
percent of New York's population and over half of Los Angeles's population
consist of either immigrants or children of immigrants, as compared with less
than 20 percent of the population elsewhere in the United States.
Comparatively, the second generation—that is, children of immigrants - is
smaller than the first generation, owing to recency of immigration, which
implies that the second generation is disproportionately young.
Indeed, almost a third of New York's second-generation population is under
fifteen years of age. In Los Angeles, close to 60 percent of the second
generation is under fifteen. So this second generation is really very young. It
is urgent that we educate these children of immigrants and make them productive
in the labor market.
Today's immigrants and their children are ethnically diverse. As expected, both
the first and second generations are less "white" and more
"colored," with Latino-origin and Asian-origin groups making up the
majority in both New York and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles particularly, over 40
percent of the immigrants are Mexican and over half of the second generation
are children of Mexican immigrants. Adding other Latinos, more than two-thirds
of the immigrants and children of immigrants in Los Angeles are of Latino
origin.
This ethnic picture is reflected in Los Angeles 's public-school enrollment. In
the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second largest in the
nation—more than 70 percent of the 700,000 students are of Latino origin,
half are from poor families, and more than a third are categorized as LEP
(limited English proficiency). In the state of California, the number of LEP
students is larger than the total number of public school students in each of
at least 38 states.
So even if Proposition 187 had been enforced five years ago and a wall had been
built along the US-Mexico border then, we would still face the challenge of
educating a very large number of immigrant children today.
The challenge confronting us today is not whether immigrants have any chance to
move ahead and assimilate. The immigrants, after all, are a transitional
generation. Their own assessment of the American condition is heavily
influenced by a dual frame of reference. Though their situation may leave much
to be desired when compared with the US average, the more critical
consideration has to do with the contrast to the circumstances they knew back
home. Were they asked to rate their progress since leaving home, the great
majority of the foreign-born generation would almost surely answer in highly
positive terms.
Their children, especially the American-born, are likely to take a rather
different view. For the immigrants ' offspring, the US standard provides the
relevant benchmark. In contrast to their parents, the second generation is
unlikely to be mollified by reminders of how much worse things were in the
"old world," wherever that might be. But the home-country legacy,
combined with difficulties engendered by the immigrant situation itself, may
put the attainment of the conventional American Dream in doubt. Getting ahead
in the next America is likely to require skills far above minimal competency in
reading, math, and writing. So some sizable portion of today 's second
generation—especially the children of the least-skilled
immigrants—may become stalled or, even worse, stumble beneath the ranks of
the lower working class in which their parents have established themselves.
The scholarly literature on the second-generation issue is not new. In a sense,
today 's researchers have rediscovered it, but they have framed it with a new
twist. Put broadly, that literature has two themes. One has to do with the
direction of progress—that is, whether or not immigrant children are doing
better than their parents. The second has to do with the rate of
progress—that is, to account for interethnic differences. Today, a look at
the children of new immigrants reveals intergenerational progress in
educational attainment, but also drastic interethnic differences.
First, consider the dropout rates. In the United States as a whole, among
students age 16 to 19, two patterns are clear:
-
Within each ethnic group, the second generation is doing better than the
immigrant generation, suggesting second-generation progress; however, a
third-generation decline is an issue of concern.
-
Despite intergenerational progress, differences between groups are marked.
Mexicans and other Latinos have significantly higher dropout rates than other
groups; Asians show the lowest dropout rates.
The four-year dropout rates for Los Angeles County high-school students mirror
the national trends. While overall dropout rates tend to decrease over time,
racial/ethnic differences are quite striking. The dropout rates for Latino and
black students are way above the state average, while those of Asian and white
students are way below. Latino and black students are more than twice as likely
as Asian or white students to drop out of high school.
College attendance shows similar patterns. Among those who make it through high
school, second-generation Mexicans, Latinos, and Asians are more likely than
their immigrant coethnics to attend college—but the high rate of college
attendance among Asians is remarkable.
I have been working on trying to account for such ethnic differences. My
current ongoing study in the inner-city neighborhoods of Los
Angeles—Chinatown, Koreatown, and Pico Union 's Central American
community—indicates that the ethnic community matters for immigrant
children, especially for those of disadvantaged socioeconomic status, in that
it can generate valuable social capital and mobilize resources unavailable in
the larger society.
The advent of the second generation is a momentous development, precisely
because the aspirations of immigrant offspring are likely to be quite different
from those of their parents. Meeting those quintessentially American
expectations, however, will depend on the resources that the second generation
can muster—most important, educational credentials and school-acquired
skills, but also the ethnic resources available in their neighborhoods.
To conclude, second-generation school success is undoubtedly crucial because
the long-term significance of the educational problems experienced by immigrant
children hinges on the consequences of those problems in terms of employment
options. It could well be, as delineated in the pessimistic scenario of
second-generation decline, that those second-generation adolescents who
performed poorly in school will find themselves excluded from the job
market—or, if not excluded, may just take themselves out of it. Yet one
can also imagine that today 's immigrant offspring will move ahead at very
different rates, with the poorest performers simply repeating the experience of
previous working-class immigrants: finding a place in the labor marked that,
however modest, represents an improvement over the conditions experienced by
their parents.
Available data suggest that the second-generation-decline scenario lacks
warrant. Whether the children of low-skilled immigrants can catch up with the
average socioeconomic levels of other Americans remains to be seen. In other
words, the central question for today 's research remains that of accounting
for ethnic differences. As I have argued in the past, groups that maintain both
a distinctive identity and a social structure that promotes continued cohesion
have a leg up in the race to succeed. I see nothing in the evidence from my
research to suggest a different point of view.
Leo R. Chavez:
I study immigration and immigrant-related issues, including availability of
medical care, use of medical care, and beliefs about cancer and other
illnesses. Because my name is Chavez, I will point out that I 'm not an
immigrant. When I give talks, people tend to think I 'm an immigrant and
therefore naturally biased toward data on immigrants. My family has been in
what is now the US Southwest for almost four hundred years. My 102-year-old
grandmother, who lives in the adobe house across the street from where she was
born, will have lived in three centuries if she can make it past January 1,
2000. We've been here a long time. I remember my great aunt once telling me
that a lot of immigrants were coming into northern New Mexico, where my family
is from, and she said they didn't understand the language or the culture and
were buying up the land. I asked her where these immigrants were coming from.
She said, "New York, Boston, and California." So, clearly, what you
think of immigration and how it affects you depend on your
perspective—your history in the place and whether you think immigrants are
coming to take things.
I want to make two points dealing with Proposition 187. First, the rhetoric
that was so prevalent among the original promoters of 187 did not suddenly
appear in 1994—and I 'll try and tie this into the 1999 version of the
proposition. In 1994, Proposition 187 was basically about two issues. One was
obvious: the use of social services by undocumented immigrants and the idea
that they should not use them. Therefore, the catchphrase "Save Our
State" (SOS) was a call to stop undocumented immigrants from using social
services. But there was also another agenda out there, another rhetoric. To
find it, you had to carefully read the newspapers and maybe go to some of the
large rallies by the promoters of 187. It was a territorial-based, particularly
anti-Mexican rhetoric. Let me quote you some examples from a couple of the
leaders of various organizations promoting 187. Betty Hammond, who you still
see in the newspapers, said this about Mexican immigrants: "They come
here, they have their babies, and after they become citizens, and all those
children use social services." The threat is that somehow Mexicans are
going to reproduce and take over the Southwest.
The word reconquest comes up continually in this rhetoric—a new conquest,
a taking back of what they already had taken from Mexicans, fair and square,
which nobody wants to give back. Glen Spencer, founder of the "Voice of
Citizens Together" in San Fernando Valley, said a number of things along
these lines that really showed Proposition 187 to be about territory, not just
social services; clearly, the two are intrinsically linked in a lot of people's
minds. Spencer once said that Proposition 187 is necessary because illegal
immigration "is part of a reconquest of the American Southwest by foreign
Hispanics. Someone is going to be leaving the state; it will either be them or
us." In his words, it boils down to this: "Do we want to retain
control of the Southwest more than the Mexicans want to take it from us?"
Later, at another rally, Spencer went on to compare what is going on in the
Southwest to the conflict in Vietnam: a struggle between two groups of people
over territory. He said, "What we have in Southern California is not
assimilation; it's annexation by Mexico." What drove a lot of the rhetoric
about 187 was this fear of reconquest, the taking over of territory. As people
told me directly, "We took it fair and square, and we're not giving it
back." And that attitude wasn't coming from a fringe element that suddenly
emerged in 1994.
I recently finished writing a book titled Covering Immigration: Popular Images
and the Politics of the Nation
. By "nation" I mean "the people." The book examines a
national discourse on immigration and its effects on the nation, the people, in
terms of changing racial composition, multiculturalism, and other such issues.
My book was based on a systematic analysis of the covers of ten national
magazines published since 1965. Beginning in April 1977, several covers
included headlines regarding the issue of Mexican immigration, which would
become prominent almost twenty years later. The headlines refer to
"illegal aliens out of control" and "border crises." When
you read the articles in these issues, they suggest that illegal aliens are out
of control because they are using social services and reproducing, which may
lead to a takeover. A few months later, in July 1977, the word invasion becomes
prominent, as in, "Time Bomb in Mexico: Will There Be No End to the
Invasion by Illegals?" Invasion is an important word. It's not a word that
connotes fun. Your friends come to visit; enemies come to invade, to take away
what you have. So the emphasis on invasion represents an escalation of the
rhetoric about the impact of the immigration of Mexicans to the United States.
The rhetoric surrounding Proposition 187 in 1994 didn't just come out of
nowhere; it had developed over a period of almost twenty years.
I also want to discuss how anti-immigrant sentiment rises and falls with the
state economy and how this might influence how the public responds today to a
new Proposition 187. During the 1974 recession, after the 1973 oil embargo, the
United States had an increase in unemployment and an increase in
anti-immigration sentiment. In the early 1980s we had a major recession in the
nation and in California, with high levels of unemployment—and major
increases in public attitudes favoring less immigration. This led, in the early
1980s, to a great deal of politics about the issue, which in turn led to the
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act—a major piece of legislation to
stop illegal immigration. We had a lessening of unemployment until the 1990s,
when there was another major recession. California, as we all know, was hit
especially hard. So the anti-immigrant attitudes that were polled in the early
1990s continued even longer in California—lending support, of course, to
the 1994 immigration reform campaign. Since then, unemployment has dropped as
California has come out of the recession - and anti-immigrant sentiments have
decreased along with the unemployment rate. But in 1994 California was still
experiencing a recession, and a lot of people responded to the anti-immigrant
rhetoric of the 1994 Proposition 187 campaign. As for the new 1999 version of
187, I really have to ask myself how much support it might get, given the fact
that California 's economy is doing so well. The Los Angeles Times recently
reported that the nation 's unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, and Southern
California 's is even lower than that. Polls show that even in Orange County,
where a large number of people supported Proposition 187, today only 35 percent
of the residents say that immigrants are a burden on our country. In 1994 that
figure was up to 60 or 70 percent.
What we have now in California—low unemployment and a demand for immigrant
labor—is the opposite of what we had in 1994. Farm growers right now are
arguing for another amnesty program. They want to legalize undocumented
immigrants, not turn them away. They want more workers. It's a tight labor
market. The demand for labor is incredible. No one is talking about immigration
in negative terms these days. I 'm not sure what kind of support the new
Proposition 187 is going to have. People don't complain as much about
immigrants when they are working. Almost everyone is working who wants to work
today, particularly in California.
The new Proposition 187 has to confront what really drives immigration: an
expanding economy, a demand for labor, and a relatively low fertility rate.
Surprisingly, these conditions are not confined to the United States. In fact,
there are places in the world with lower fertility rates, including Italy,
Germany, and some places in Eastern Europe, as well as Japan. Right now, in the
United States, the fertility level is below 2.0 percent. As you all know, it
takes 2.1 percent—two babies and an arm—to actually increase the
population. What happens when fertility is running relatively flat and you have
an increasing demand for labor because of the growing job market? Something has
to give. The new Proposition 187, even if it does pass, won't stop the demand
in our economy for immigrant labor—and I don't suspect that in the next
thirty or forty years there will be a decrease in that demand.
Frank D. Bean:
What a difference five years makes. I just moved to California from Texas two
months ago. But during the time Proposition 187 was being debated in 1994, I
watched, from Texas, what was going on in California. When I traveled around
the country, immigration colleagues and others often asked me, "Why aren't
you getting the kind of immigrant bashing in Texas that seems to be going on in
California?" Of course, Texans have a ready answer for this question: they
see themselves as simply more advanced than others on the question of
immigration. The truth of the matter, however, is that the Texas economy has
often been countercyclical to the national economy. During the mid-1980s, when
there was a large economic downturn in Texas because of declines in oil prices,
the rest of the United States was doing pretty well. During that low point for
the Texas economy, immigration was down. California went through just the
opposite experience a few years later. As immigration started to pick up again
in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the wake of the 1986 Immigration Reform
and Control Act, and as the national economy went into a recession in 1990, the
California economy went into a depression, exacerbated by the withdrawal, over
a nine-year period, of some $90 billion in anticipated defense spending. So the
early 1990s witnessed some serious economic problems in California that really
heightened the tensions surrounding immigration.
Where does the country stand with respect to those tensions today? Five years
has made a big difference. We've had a rip-roaring economy for the past four
years, and we're still trying to figure out whether this is just an unusually
positive cycle or whether it represents some sort of fundamental transformation
in economic activity that has the potential to go on for a long period of time.
There are various theories about both of these, of course. To the extent that
it should turn out that today 's good times are in substantial measure cyclical
as opposed to transformative, we have the potential to go through difficult
times again, which in turn might once more exacerbate tensions over
immigration.
To a considerable extent, we have not solved the underlying problems that have
the potential for generating immigration tensions. We still have unauthorized
immigration, despite efforts to limit it, and that itself creates a certain
difficulty—if for no other reason than because it is unauthorized, which
makes it more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of our other immigration
policies. We are a nation of laws, so that's a potential problem.
Much of the revenue that comes from immigration, much of the economic benefit,
accrues at a national level. Much of the financial cost of immigration accrues
at the state and local levels. So when financial times get tough, the bills get
paid close to home, but the taxes that immigrants pay go predominantly to the
federal government. That's a difficult problem. The state and local governments
have been lobbying on this issue for nearly thirty years, but the problem is
still there. And there are other distributional problems. For example, many of
the economic benefits of immigration accrue in the short run, whereas many of
the costs accrue over a somewhat longer time frame.
On the more positive side of the ledger, I think there is a greater
appreciation now for what immigrants mean to American society. One important
question has to do with how rapidly immigrant groups are moving into the
mainstream. The answer now, I think, particularly in this strong economy, is
very rapidly. The most recent report from the US Bureau of the Census about
income growth shows that immigrants have the strongest rate of income growth of
any group in the country. For example, a recent study shows that there is a
rapidly developing and prosperous Latino middle class, something that is often
overlooked because when you look at aggregate income statistics for all
Latinos, they look bleak - because there are so many new immigrants whose low
earnings pull the statistics down, thus obscuring the fact that there is a
large group of native-born Latinos that's doing really well.
Despite the generally positive popular awareness of what immigrants mean for
our economy and for our society, there are still some underlying disjunctures
that we've yet to come to grips with fully, and they do have a potential to
raise tensions if economic slowdowns should occur. Let's hope that we won't
again see the negative side of such tensions, which is to say the
anti-immigrant sort of rhetoric that accompanied endeavors like Proposition
187. Let's hope that we will instead see greater and more constructive efforts
to deal with the kinds of problems that cause economic downturns and raise
tensions.
Questions and Answers
Ruth S. Adams:
I have two questions I would like to put to the panel. One is, "What's in
it for the immigrant?" There has been a lot of talk about California. It's
one thing to talk about a few successes; it's another thing to talk about the
people who may still live in profound poverty in rural areas of
California—and I 'd like to know whether there's been any change for the
immigrant farm laborers in California. Second, statistics are hard to come by.
Now that we have a well-known social scientist designing our next census, do
you think that's going to bring us some valuable information and insight?
Frank D. Bean: As to the 2000 census, it will generate mostly the same
kinds of information that we've had before. But what is so interesting and
intriguing about the census is that it keeps coming out at times when we really
need the new information, and this census will be particularly valuable in that
regard. It has been afflicted with a lot of controversy pertaining to the issue of whether the results
and the numbers should be adjusted. Happily, both the Republicans and
the Democrats have now called a truce and agreed to provide the Census
Bureau with the funding it needs to get the job done. Some adjustments
will be done on a trial basis and the results compared, but officially,
the results will not be adjusted. The census will provide a wealth of
information about immigration, as it always has. It's the only really
good source of data on immigrants that's big enough and provides enough
detail to let us break down the numbers for specific immigrant groups.
Leo R. Chavez: I 'll address the question about
immigrant farm laborers. Farm work is a profession. A report on the actual
wages of farm workers over the past ten or fifteen years has shown that
when you adjust for inflation, they are down by about 50 percent. So in
terms of real earnings, it's a pretty hard life. What amazes me is that
immigrants want to come here and do that work. There's a lot of loss and
a lot of gain, and it's really hard to generalize, I think, for any particular
immigrant. But what seems clear, when I interview people, is that they
see themselves as taking advantage of an opportunity. For some, it's only
a temporary opportunity—to get some money and perhaps go home and
build a house, invest in land, or invest in some business. For others,
it turns out to be a longer-term investment in the United States, where
they wind up raising families, and at some point they think life here
might be better than the life they had back home. Obviously, the immigrant
story is an old one in the United States. For natives, it can be hard
to imagine that people would give up so much to come and work here for
so little, at such great cost; in fact, most natives seem to think immigrants
are here to take rather than to give. Yet despite the hardships, immigrants
manage to maintain a great deal of dignity and self-respect, and they
manage to carve out a life that, for them, has a great deal of pleasure
and value. I'm always amazed by what people can create, in a positive
sense, under what may appear to be poverty to us but is seen by them as
an improvement over conditions back home.
Min Zhou: Both middle-class immigrants and working-class
immigrants see the American educational system as a very important mobility
path for their children. Among immigrant parents, there is tremendous
optimism. However, among the immigrant second generation, it depends on
class. Those living in suburban communities tend to have access to ample
resources, including good public and private schools, so they are able
to maintain a sense of optimism. However, those living in the inner city
have a tremendous degree of cynicism. On one hand, they believe that they
need education to get ahead; on the other hand, they don't believe that
they can actually attain their goals through the education they get. Of
course, there are tremendous interethnic differences too.
Question: I think it was John L. Lewis who once
said, "There are lies and bare lies and statistical lies," but
I don't think statistics lie in the way he thought. On the other hand,
in looking at the comforting statistics, we may look away from other aspects
of immigration-related issues that deserve some attention. For example,
I'm thinking of the Los Angeles riots, in which members of the black community
were obviously taking out anger toward the Korean community, on the grounds
that they were being exploited by Korean merchants. A lot of issues arise
out of intercommunity tensions that really aren't addressed by whether
or not educational levels are improving or whether or not farmers want
more workers in the fields. Somehow, those issues have to be addressed,
and I know they are not easy to address.
Frank D. Bean: I think the real questions concern
the level at which those kinds of things should be addressed. We've just
finished a large research project in which we assessed the implications
of immigration for racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans,
in the United States—not only in terms of perceptions but also in
terms of tangible impacts. The project involved about twenty-five commissioned
pieces of research, and what these studies revealed, on balance, is that
immigration seems to have small, negative economic implications for the
African American population. That is, African Americans have not benefited
from immigration to the same degree as the rest of the population - which,
as a whole, does benefit economically from immigration. A National Academy
of Sciences study has documented that the country as a whole does benefit
economically from immigration but that the benefits are not evenly distributed
throughout the population. Persons with higher education and owners of
capital have gained substantially more than others, but workers with lower
levels of education have not gained. So the finding that African Americans
have not gained is not surprising, given that African Americans are generally
a population with less education.
What should be done? Does it follow from this finding that
we should limit immigration? Or does it follow, given the overall positive
economic impact of immigration and the other reasons to have immigration,
that some set of policies ought to be considered that would try to compensate
(if that's the right term) those persons who don't gain, and who perhaps
lose a bit, from immigration? There are many reasons the United States
has the kinds and amount of immigration that it does: humanitarian reasons,
foreign policy reasons, family reunification reasons, economic reasons.
These have been around for a long time; many of them are firmly rooted
in our society and probably couldn't be changed very easily, even if we
wanted to change them. But we could do more to help those people in our
society who are not winners as a result of immigration.
Leo R. Chavez: I think perceptions are definitely
important—and, mainly because of the lack of information, people
often lack a clear understanding of the actual impact of immigrants. When
human beings look at immigration and its impact at their own local level,
they rarely take a long-term view of things. Humans react to the immediate:
here are these new people who speak a different language; all of a sudden,
signs are using foreign languages. We see this across different nations
and across different cultures worldwide, when immigrants come in and manage
to fill niches in an economy that were neglected because of the internal
stratification and inequality that already existed in that system.
For example, there were no supermarkets or businesses in
certain parts of Los Angeles. Then immigrant groups came in and set up
entrepreneurial ventures like small stores and dry cleaners in those communities,
which had been neglected by the larger society for very clear reasons.
In each case, the insertion of a new group of people between those who
really have power in that society and those without power became a source
of friction. We saw this in Uganda, when the Indians were kicked out;
in Malaysia, when the Chinese were almost killed out of Kuala Lumpur in
race riots; and in Los Angeles, where we had the same sort of thing. Basically,
a group of people, who tend to be immigrants, insert themselves between
those who have no power and have a legitimate history of oppression, and
those who have power and have neglected the powerless—and the immigrants
end up being targeted as the problem.
A larger sociological analysis would clearly indicate that
this phenomenon is merely a symptom of the real problem. There's a real
lack of understanding about why immigrants come to this country, so it's
easy to blame them for a lot of problems. And when you have a class-based
society like ours, in which immigrants are so prevalent, it's easy for
those without something to say that immigrants are the problem. It's easy
to blame a guy with a third-grade education for why an American who is
poor and a minority, who grew up in our system and probably went to high
school, still can't compete with this guy who doesn't even understand
the language, hasn't even been here for more than two weeks, yet manages
to find a job. Instead of targeting the school system, or the lack of
capital and employment in their communities, or the lack of transportation
out of their communities to get to the jobs, or the employers who have
a clear agenda and hierarchy of ranking of who they want to hire, or the
politicians who made all these decisions, they're going to target this
guy who speaks no English, who has only a third-grade education, yet manages
to find a job. That's the problem. It's a misperception of all those larger
issues that's creating the set of relationships that people see in their
immediate surroundings. They don't take the long-term view about what's
going to happen over the next thirty or forty years as their kids and
the immigrants ' kids learn to interact. They see what's happening right
now and respond quickly: either they don't like it or they do. It's very
hard to get people to really examine why immigrants are here and what
is the real impact of their presence.
Ruth S. Adams: I would just like to add that racism
is clearly still a very important issue in American society, despite the
ideal of equal opportunity for all citizens—and that has to complicate
the whole issue of immigration.
Leo R. Chavez: Yes, that's part of the tension as well.
What's interesting is the changing political power of various ethnic groups.
There's a lot of tension in Watts, in Southeast Los Angeles—which
is now basically 50 percent Latino because of immigration—between
those who were established (African Americans) and those who are relatively
new to the community. Most of the people in county jobs and state government
jobs there are African Americans. Now that the demographics have shifted,
Latinos want to have more of those civic jobs.
Americans not only have a very narrow historical perspective;
they have a short memory as well. Not that long ago, African Americans
were the newcomers in places like Watts and South Central Los Angeles—primarily
after World War II, when many African Americans came to the area as a
result of joining the US Army. The people who had helped found Watts earlier
were Mexican immigrants who worked on the local railway system and wound
up settling in the area.
So now, all of a sudden, there is another transition from
a previous transition. But we don't have a memory of transitions. Once
you 've lived in a place for fifteen years, you consider yourself a native.
It becomes very difficult for people to remember that they themselves
were once newcomers. What is being played out in many places, even among
minorities and immigrants, is the classic American story of one group
coming in and trying to gain some political power, a transition occurring,
and a certain amount of conflict arising over who will get the good jobs,
who will be elected to local city councils. It's such a classic story,
yet it's one that few people ever remember when they write about immigration
and ethnic tensions —at least in the Los Angeles Times and the Orange
County Register.
Question: The North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) was supposed to be a big boon to the economy of Mexico. Is there
any observable impact of NAFTA on Mexican emigration to the United States?
Leo R. Chavez: Obviously, a big issue in Mexico
is whether or not people can make a living and whether or not they see
greater opportunities somewhere else. When you have a major set of devaluations
to the economy, as Mexico did in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s,
you have people whose life savings are basically cut in half and who see
an opportunity to go to the United States as a way to make some money.
But those of us who study immigration—immigration from Mexico, in
particular—don't really look at the immediate economy to explain
most of it. We try to go back at least a century to look at what we call
the social construction of migration to the United States. Throughout
this century, the demand for labor in the United States has really constructed
the migration of Mexicans to the United States as a plausible thing in
their lives, as a cultural thing. They have fathers and grandfathers who
went to work in the United States as braceros or contract workers. They
have songs about it; in my book I quote Mexican songs from the early 1900s
and 1920s about coming to the United States to work. It has become, in
a sense, part of the culture—almost a rite of passage—for many
young rural men to come to work in the United States to get a stake, and
that just didn't occur naturally. It occurred through a whole historical
process of recruitment of Mexican laborers. But most Americans tend to
think Mexicans come to the United States because they like hamburgers
and want to get a job and that's it.
What if suddenly, tomorrow, Mexico had a job for every
Mexican who wanted one, at a rate they considered adequate to support
a decent lifestyle? What if, as a result, no one wanted to come to the
United States from Mexico tomorrow? Would we no longer have an immigration
problem? No; we would still have an immigration problem. Our demand for
the same type of labor would continue to exist. We've never been shy about
turning to another country. Maybe we'd turn to India. After the 1986 Immigration
Law was passed, an entrepreneur in China said he'd have 500,000 farm laborers
here as guest workers in six months. The demand in the United States for
cheap labor is so great that if no Mexican wanted to come over tomorrow,
we'd turn somewhere else—Poland, perhaps. Eastern Europe has a lot
of people who'd love to come to work in the United States.
Those of us who study immigration see that Mexico is just
convenient. We have a history of hiring Mexicans. It's easy for them to
get here with little cost to us. But that doesn't mean that if none of
them wanted to come, we wouldn't have a demand for people to work in our
yards and work in our kitchens and work in all kinds of jobs and services;
we'd just turn somewhere else. What's important to Mexico is that its
economy is tied to the United States very closely. At any particular historical
moment, shifts in Mexico's fortunes may push more Mexicans to come to
the United States. If they didn't have a job here, what would be the point
of coming?
Frank D. Bean: In addition to the kinds of things
Leo mentioned, there has been some research on your question, and it shows
that there are fluctuations in Mexican emigration that depend on the strength
of the economy of Mexico. Of course, NAFTA was sold politically in part
on the false promise—and many politicians knew it was a false promise,
but it was one they could explain to their constituents—that it would
reduce unauthorized migration. What NAFTA actually appears to have done,
which is no surprise, is to have hastened the pace at which the export
sector in Mexico has grown. That sector of the Mexican economy is doing
very well. The problem Mexico has been confronting is that the rest of
its economy has done less well, because much of it involves leftover activities
from the old days of import substitution. Under globalization, such inefficient,
old-fashioned industries (like the Mexican steel industry) have had to
undergo the same kinds of restructuring that have been going on elsewhere
in the world. In Mexico more jobs have been lost as a result of this,
and as a result of the economic crisis of a few years ago, than have been
created by the growth in the export sector. These trends may cross at
some point, but they haven't yet. Pressures remain severe for Mexicans
to emigrate because of lack of jobs and because population increases continue
to outstrip job growth.
Min Zhou: Let me just throw in one example from the Asian patterns. In a
way, economic development actually does not reduce emigration; it perpetuates
it. As in China and India, for example, those who are likely to emigrate are
from the economically most developed regions, and they are also likely to be
high-skilled. One explanation is that the economic development raises the
aspirations of the high-skilled, yet their opportunity structure at home does
not allow them to realize those aspirations, so they go to countries that they
perceive as offering more opportunities. The emigration of the low-skilled is
largely driven by networks independent of economic factors. The low-skilled are
tied to a certain type of network that perpetuates migration, as Leo says, to
fill the demand for labor. So I don't think economic development reduces
emigration or reduces the pressure to leave.
This presentation was given at the 1827th Stated Meeting,
held in La Jolla, California, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
on November 6, 1999.
The meeting featured a panel discussion on immigration, moderated by Ruth S.
Adams (visiting scholar, Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation,
University of California, San Diego). Ms. Adams is coeditor of the book Human
Migration Patterns and Politics and former editor of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, as well
as program director for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Frank D. Bean (professor of sociology, University of California, Irvine)
is coauthor of The Hispanic Population of the United States and coeditor
of Immigration and Opportunities: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United
States. He has served as the
director of the Population Research Center and chair of the Sociology
Department at the University of Texas, Austin, and director of the Program
for Research on Immigration Policy at the Urban Institute.
Leo R. Chavez (professor of anthropology, UC Irvine), author of Shadowed
Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society,
has served as chair of the Anthropology Department at Irvine.
Min Zhou (professor of sociology and Asian American studies, University
of California, Los Angeles) is the author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic
Potential of an Urban Enclave. Her main areas of
research are immigration and immigration adaptation, race, ethnic economics,
and community and urban sociology.
The speakers' introductory statements were followed by
a brief panel discussion and a question-and-answer session with the audience.
© 1999 by Ruth S. Adams, Min Zhou, Leo R. Chavez, and
Frank D. Bean, respectively.
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