California's lessons on immigration
AS THE IMMIGRATION controversy reaches white heat, California, with more than 9 million immigrants in a population of 36 million, 2.4 million of them undocumented -- both far and away the highest proportions in the nation -- represents America's most important test of how well that new population is assimilating and how native, white Americans are assimilating to it. The results so far are a cautionary tale for both the right and the left.
For the right there's the harsh lesson of the long-term effects of the Latino backlash against Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that sought to deny schooling and most other services to illegal immigrants, and against former Republican Governor Pete Wilson's broad-brush attacks on illegal immigration in his reelection campaign that same year. Nearly a million California aliens became citizens and registered to vote shortly after that campaign, most of them as Democrats. The 500,000 people who marched in Los Angeles last weekend in protest of the punitive House immigration bill were a reminder of that power. In California, Hispanics represent 19 percent of registered voters, more than double their percentage in 1990, and their numbers continue to increase rapidly. Within the next generation, as the nation's Hispanic population grows, countless other states will show similar numbers.
But California is also a cautionary tale for the left, and not just because of the depressing effects of illegal immigrant workers on low-end wages. A model of high-quality public services in the three decades after World War II -- roads, water systems, a world-class higher education system, well-funded schools -- California did an abrupt about-face in the 1970s, symbolized by the overwhelming passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which sharply reduced property taxes, and continuing with the string of tax limitations and other restrictive measures that followed. Ever since, and largely as a result, California's public services -- schools in particular -- have been seriously underfunded, its once-famous highway system in wretched condition.
Proposition 13 was widely (and for the most part correctly) attributed to the spike in property taxes that accompanied the run-up in real estate values of the mid- and late-'70s. But it also happened to coincide with the sharp increase in immigration, particularly from Latin America, that began with the repeal in 1965 of the nation's national-origins immigration quotas. In the ensuing decades, those immigrants and their children have become a majority in California's public schools and, because of their lack of insurance, a significant proportion of the clients of emergency rooms and public clinics. At the same time non-Hispanic whites, who are older, more affluent, and have fewer children, still represent about two-thirds of the voting population. When the beneficiaries of services are largely other people and their children, it shouldn't be surprising that voters are less passionate about supporting them.
California's experience offers reassurance as well. Some 600,000 California businesses are now Latino owned; third generation homeownership among Latinos is almost equal to the state average. Immigrants' children learn English almost as fast as prior generations; by the third generation, few speak anything but English. As those immigrants and their children become an essential part of California's economic and social fabric, the political climate is changing as well. In 1982, according to the Field Poll, 75 percent of Californians believed immigrants had a negative effect on the state. In a survey taken just a month ago, only 45 percent said immigrants were having an unfavorable impact, 47 percent said the opposite. (Among registered voters, 57 percent said immigrants had a negative impact. But that was still a significant change from 1982).
All Californians, regardless of background, are now immigrants to the new multi-ethnic society growing up around them. That society demands something that's never been done anywhere: Take that great diversity of people from a hundred different cultures and bring them all up to the demands of a global high-tech economy. In that respect, too, California is not different from the rest of the nation, just a generation or two ahead.
Peter Schrag is author of ''Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future." 
