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.