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Immigration and California Communities
By William A.V. Clark
February 1999
A recent media headline during the governor's race
in California in 1998 — "What a Difference Four Years Makes"
— drew attention to the lack of any debate on the immigration issue.
In 1994, in contrast, immigration was at the heart of gubernatorial debates
in California. But has anything changed, especially at the local level?
Are immigration's impacts different in 1998? A detailed analysis of communities
where there has been large-scale immigration suggests that, while voter
attention may not be directed to immigrant issues, immigration outcomes
at the local level require even more political attention.
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Forty-one percent of all immigrants to California settle in Los Angeles,
another 9 percent in Orange County. More than 16,000 immigrants settled
in one zip code in Burbank, a suburban city in the San Fernando Valley
of Los Angeles, and more than 25,000 new immigrants settled in two zip
codes in San Francisco.
These examples highlight three important findings about
immigration which are often glossed over in national studies and in media
discussions:
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Immigrants are highly concentrated, even within
the states with high levels of foreign-born populations.
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The foreign born who are already settled in
the cities and towns of the United States are having dramatic impacts
on the population growth of these localities because they have very high
fertility.
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New immigrants are often disadvantaged and
require special and additional resources now, and will require even more
in the future as their children enter the schools and colleges of California
and the nation.
The Impact of Immigrant Concentration
Immigrants have always tended to cluster together. This
tendency partly is a response to the protection provided by an enclave
of immigrants and partly created by the outside world, by the lack of
acceptance from the native born. Whatever the relative strengths of the
varying explanations, the concentration of immigrants in 1998 is much
like the concentration of immigrants 90 years ago. So what is different?
It seems that the concentration may be increasing. Statistics show that
the flow of immigrants is increasingly centered on a few states and a
few localities within those states. Thus, Los Angeles and Fresno, to cite
two different contexts, have become home to local concentrations of large
numbers of Mexican and Hmong immigrants respectively. Overall, California
is divided into north and south. More immigrants flow to the south, hardly
surprising given its geographic proximity to Mexico, and fewer to the
northern Bay Area. But at the same time, the immigrants are selected by
ethnic origin — many more Mexican-origin immigrants locate in Southern
California than in Northern California, and the opposite is true for Asian
immigrants (Figure 1). While this information is hardly new, it reiterates
the age-old factor of chain migration, and of the importance of networks
and connections. The outcome of this chain migration may be greater and
greater concentrations of groups of immigrants.
In the most extreme cases, whole villages from Mexico
have slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, transported themselves from
Mexico to Southern California, where they have recreated familiar cultural
patterns from their homeland. Cities and communities have changed in response
to these immigrant flows. Some cities and communities are now more complex
mixtures of people than is the state as a whole.
Applicants for residency during the IRCA amnesty program
demonstrated the level of concentration of new immigrants. In Los Angeles
alone, several hundred thousand applicants came from a dozen zip codes
concentrated in a five mile radius of city hall in Los Angeles (Figure
2).
The New Resident and Citizen Population
Discussions of immigration tend to focus on the flows
across the border, when in fact much of the change that will occur in
California and the United States in general is already in place. High
fertility among the new immigrants will create a new citizen immigrant
population, one in need of substantial educational resources. The immigrants
already here are going to change the California social structure fundamentally,
so how we accommodate the new immigrants, educate them, and so on, is
critical for the future of California. Even if immigration were to stop
immediately, the processes now occurring would ensure continued population
expansion and ethnic change. That change is embedded in the youthful immigrant
population that has entered California in the past decade. Moreover, that
young population is also showing signs of moving to other locations in
the Midwest, the South, and the East — communities in those areas
will also change.
Moreover, the localized concentration of recent waves
of immigrants in crowded inner-city housing, sometimes in high-crime neighborhoods,
makes it even harder for these new arrivals to make progress in U.S. society.
Just as immigrants are divided, so is immigrant geography. Immigrants
in the Bay Area by and large are doing much better than immigrants in
Southern California. To be sure, some of this is the nature of the immigrant
composition, but not all of it can be explained simply by ethnic origin.
Education, Skills, and the Future
In general, the new Latino population has the lowest
levels of human capital, is the most disadvantaged, and is suffering greater
levels of poverty and more limited access to educational resources. The
immigrant Latino population, although perhaps better off in California
than in rural villages in Mexico, is trapped in a cycle of inadequate
education and low-paying jobs. The data from California test scores present
a troubling but inescapable problem. In the Los Angeles Unified School
District (LAUSD) reading and math scores for 11th graders (those who are
about to join the labor force) are well below the national norms. In fact,
for a selected set of high schools in LAUSD scores are at about the 10th
percentile level for reading for both inner city and San Fernando Valley
high schools. The Los Angeles high schools (and probably most large inner
city school districts) are simply not providing an adequate education
for new immigrants and their children. The high school completion rates
and the college entry rates are abysmally low for these LEP students.
Of course, one can take the position that everything will work out, that
immigrants will get jobs and move up the income and occupational ladder.
That was the process in the past and it may continue to be so. If not,
however, California's work force will no longer be on the cutting edge.
Although money alone cannot be a solution, California's
current position in educational spending — which is in the bottom
fifth of the country — will not ensure that the new immigrants receive
the education they need to participate in the 21st century economy. In
addition, if the flow of legal and illegal immigrants without adequate
human capital continues, the needs will be many times greater.
Test scores are declining and by extension the average
level of education is declining, at least in California. In 1970 Californians
had 12.4 mean years of education compared to 12.1 years for the United
States as a whole. In fact, California outperformed the United States
in 1970 in every age cohort for both high school education and for college
education. The vaunted California educational system played some role
in this, but a net inflow of bright students from the rest of the United
States was a big part of this "California advantage."
At some point in the late 1980s, however, California's
education advantage disappeared. Around 1987 the enrollment rate for California
high school seniors dropped below the rate for the United States as a
whole. The college enrollment rate in the United States as a whole is
now higher than it was in California in 1977. All of this has implications
for California's continuing competitive advantage. Clearly, the state
continues to attract a highly skilled population, but at the same time
the continuing influx of low-skilled immigrants who are having difficulty
achieving at national standards has dramatic implications for the future
competitiveness of the California economy. While California may not lose
its competitive strength at the cutting edge of research and development
in the information technology industries, these industries seem to be
increasingly dependent on a small number of highly educated foreign professionals
just at a time when most of the new immigrants are unable to perform at
this level. The concentration of low-skilled immigrants in one locale
and high-skilled immigrants in another only exacerbates the local outcomes
of differential immigration flows.
Much of the current discussion in California, and indeed
in the United States, is about education in general and about education
for new immigrants in particular. How are we delivering education to these
new immigrants and their children? Research to date suggests that the
process of educating new immigrants will be slow and that the education
of parents is an important factor in children's school achievement. Moreover,
the results show real variations across the geography of the state. In
Los Angeles, nearly two-fifths of school-age children live in households
headed by an adult without a high school education. In the Bay Area, 11
percent of children are in households headed by an adult without a high
school education. Again, the outcomes are extremely variable and impact
the local delivery of services. Schools that are faced with large numbers
of low-wage, low-education families have a major task in front of them,
especially in the inner cities of Southern California (and by extension
other inner-city areas that will soon have large numbers of new immigrants).
To reiterate, California is spending significantly less per pupil than
the national average on education and California's children are falling
behind. A mild judgment is that this is a recipe for disaster.
In a nation where education and many other services are
funded locally, it does not particularly matter that immigrants may be
a net benefit to the country as a whole, as has been so frequently cited.
It is already apparent that significant monetary costs arise in particular
communities and neighborhoods, though these costs may not be the most
critical in the long run. The costs of social tensions may be much more
important as new groups struggle for a share of scarce resources for schools,
medical care, and other services. Already, there are reports of tensions
between older established African American communities and new immigrants
in cities like Compton and Downey in Southern California.
There is a lot of talk about Balkanization, but it is
too soon to tell how the assimilation process of our newest immigrants
is going to work out. We know, however, that the assimilation process
will be different. The new immigrants are arriving in a different social
context, one where there is more emphasis on individual rights, on protected
minorities, and on special programs. It is a different and more socially
accepting climate. Another big difference, that others also have emphasized,
is that the immigrants who came in the early 1900s were severing all ties
with their home locations, whereas most immigrants to California, especially
those from Mexico, still have very close ties to their homelands and are,
in some senses, a nation within a nation. This is not to say that assimilation
will not occur, but it will be a different process than that of 90 years
ago.
While there is evidence of poverty and deprivation among
some immigrant groups, others are "making it." There is evidence
of increasing home-ownership for some Asian and Eastern European immigrant
groups — some of which have ownership rates similar to those of the
white native-born population and much higher than the native-born African-American
and native-born Hispanic populations. For example, more than 60 percent
of Chinese, Filipino, and Indian immigrants are home owners compared to
only about 20 percent of Central American immigrants. This emphasizes
yet another important finding which is often glossed over in the national
studies: The outcomes both for immigrants and communities are very different
for immigrants from different origins.
My recent book, The California Cauldron, explores
whether the "California Cauldron" will come to a boil or continue
to simmer: Will the social fabric stretch or tear? My tentative assessment
is that the fabric of California society can stretch, but only with quite
a bit of help from the local and state governments. Much of the problem
is that the immigrant population, like the population as a whole, is bifurcating
into relatively rich and relatively poor groups. Some new arrivals are
making real progress, especially those who arrive with skills and generally
high levels of human capital. Others, who arrive without even a high school
education, with little chance or time for gaining more training, are becoming
financially isolated. It is impossible to ignore the clear division between
the foreign born (and their children) from some Asian and Middle Eastern
and European countries and their counterparts from Central America and
Mexico.
Immigration already has changed the old biracial view
of the United States to a multiracial mix in California and the rest of
the United States will follow fairly quickly. Today's responses to this
change at the local, state, and even federal level will determine local
outcomes well into the next century.
Immigration and California Communities
While there has been little debate in California on immigration
lately, has anything changed, especially at the local level? A detailed
analysis suggests that, while voter attention may not be directed to immigration
issues, immigration outcomes at the local level require even more political
attention than four years ago. Some facts:
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About four million new immigrants
were counted in California in the last decade or so.
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Forty-one percent
of immigrants to California settle in Los Angeles, another 9 percent in
Orange County.
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In 1995, Los Angeles County had more than half a million
Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students.
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In Los Angeles, more than
a quarter of all the foreign born live in poverty.
William Clark is the author of The California Cauldron:
Immigration and the Fortunes of Local Communities (Guilford Press, 1998,
ISBN 1-57230-403-0) from which this Backgrounder is derived. He was born
in New Zealand and completed bachelor's and master's degrees in geography
at the University of New Zealand. His Ph.D. is from the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is currently Professor of Geography at
the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on
migration and metropolitan change. In addition to the recently published
California Cauldron, he wrote Human Migration (Sage Publications), coauthored
Households and Housing: Choice and Outcomes in the Housing Market (Rutgers
University Press), and coedited Residential Mobility and Public Policy
(Sage).
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