Candidates Skirt Immigration Issue
Growth in the numbers and voting clout of the foreign-born, especially Latinos and Asians, has altered the tone of political debate.
By Teresa Watanabe
Times Staff Writer
September 8, 2003
Nine years ago, California politics featured a raging debate over excluding illegal immigrants from public schools and hospitals. Today, the divisive question is whether to give them driver's licenses.
The gap between the two issues underlines a central fact of the state's politics: Immigration and its consequences remain topics of intense debate, but the ground has moved.
The shift illustrates how sweeping demographic changes have altered the state and its politics: immigrants, mostly Latino and Asian, now comprise more than a quarter of California's population, the highest proportion in the nation and up substantially from a decade earlier.
Latinos and Asians differ about the proper mix of policies toward immigration ? both legal and illegal. But the increased number of immigrants in the population, and even more so the increased number who have registered to vote, has had a strong impact on the state's political figures.
"Politicians of both parties are terrified of this issue for fear of alienating the Latino community," said Kevin Spillane, a Republican political consultant in Sacramento. "It's not politically correct to talk about illegal immigration."
Those who advocate more restrictive policies say the majority continues to support their side of the debate ? a contention backed by at least some polling data ? but they concede that politicians of both parties now consider the issue a loser.
"What has changed is that both political parties have decided that they simply will not discuss the issue and will go along with extending all kinds of benefits to illegal aliens, despite the fact that the state has no money," said Ira Mehlman, Los Angeles spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Indeed, while Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he opposes the bill to give driver's licenses to some 2 million illegal immigrants, which Gov. Gray Davis signed into law Friday, the Republican candidate has not emphasized the issue. Instead, he plays up his immigrant background.
His reticence stands in sharp contrast to the actions of former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who in 1994 made support for Proposition 187 ? the measure to cut off most public services to illegal immigrants ? a major focus of his campaign for reelection.
Demographic trends of the last decade help explain the political queasiness. In the last decade, more than a million non-Latino whites moved out of California, according to a study of Census data by Hans Johnson, a demographer with the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California.
At the same time, the population of Latino and Asian immigrants and their children grew rapidly. California's Latino numbers, which doubled between 1980 and 2000, now stand at 11 million people, or 32.4% of the population. The number of Asians also doubled, to 3.6 million people, or 10.8% of the total.
Those trends are expected to intensify in the future: More than two-thirds of Californians older than 65 are non-Latino whites, while more than half of those younger than 18 are Latino and Asian, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
"The message going out is, if you want to be left out of the future, attack immigrants," said Gabriel Buelna, an immigrant-rights advocate in East Los Angeles.
Public concern about illegal immigration has not disappeared. Nationwide, the proportion of people who said controlling illegal immigration was a "very important" foreign policy goal has remained high: 72% in 1994 and 70% in 2002, according to data gathered by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.
Moreover, the Sept. 11terrorist attacks helped reawaken efforts to control illegal immigration and, for a time, sidetracked proposals like the driver's license measure. Last year, Davis vetoed a similar bill, citing the post-Sept. 11 fears of terrorism. At the time, a Times poll showed voters supporting the veto by a 2-1 margin.
But at least in California, the debate over illegal immigration appears to have lost some of its intensity. In 1994, a Times poll showed Californians ranking illegal immigration as the third most important issue facing the state after crime and unemployment; a Times poll this year showed illegal immigration ranking ninth.
On the streets, people like Buelna say they feel a discernible difference in the public mood.
While he was a graduate student in social work at San Diego State in 1994, Buelna said, sentiments against illegal immigrants were so intense that even fellow graduate students would tell him to "go back to Mexico" for defending illegal residents.
When he led campaigns against Proposition 187, Buelna said, he was accosted by people who yelled: "You losers! Why do you protect illegal aliens, the enemies of America?"
Such overt hostility seems to have largely subsided, he said.
"People really got out of that feverish pitch," said Buelna, executive director of Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission, a nonprofit organization that provides social services to residents of East Los Angeles.
"Now, they may think it, but there's no vehicle for them to act on it."
The issue still stirs passions, however.
In Monrovia's Old Town over the weekend, retired engineer Joel Zneimer, 76, declared himself "totally against" the new driver's license law. He also backed restrictions on public services for illegal immigrants.
"Why should you give benefits to people who have broken the law?" Zneimer asked as he ate ice cream with a friend. "I pay enough taxes without having to support half of Mexico."
Down the Pasadena Freeway at Alhambra Park, where Latino families picnicked with carne asada and mariachi music, Xavier Flores, a loan executive in Los Angeles, said he supported the driver's license law and resented those who blamed Latinos for the state's problems with illegal immigration.
"Anytime a knucklehead says, 'Send 'em back to Mexico,' I say: 'This is Mexico!' " said Flores, a sixth-generation American of Mexican descent. His ancestors arrived in the Southwest before the United States conquered what was then Mexican territory, he said, asking, "Why doesn't anyone ever say, 'Send 'em back to Canada?' It's racist."
But both Flores and his neighbor, Gabriel Gomez, said they also supported curbs on illegal immigration. Gomez, a Los Angeles plumber and third-generation Mexican American, said his business has suffered from the cut-rate competition of illegal immigrants.
"When you get illegals doing the job at half the price, you can't compete," Gomez said, adding that if their numbers were reduced, "it would give opportunities for those of us who really deserve them."
In addition to the state's demographic shifts, several other differences help account for the changed political mood, analysts say.
A decade ago, Californians faced their worst recession since the Great Depression, fanning resentment toward illegal immigrants who were perceived as low-cost labor competition. Today's economic downturn is less severe and centered more on parts of the economy not regarded as havens for illegal immigrants, such as high-tech, according to Johnson.
Georges Vernez of the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica speculated that immigration reform had lost some steam because of the court decisions that invalidated most of Proposition 187.
The 1996 federal welfare reform law also "quieted the resentment of taking away services from the native-born," Vernez said.
So did successful California initiatives to eliminate bilingual education and affirmation action, other analysts said.
But the biggest factor, many say, is a new political reluctance to take on the issue of illegal immigration.
When Proposition 187 came to the fore, some Republican strategists opposed it, arguing that it would spark a backlash from the state's growing numbers of Latino and immigrant voters.
In the years since, the proposition, along with moves by Congress to restrict the welfare benefits that legal immigrants could obtain, became rallying points that helped increase the political participation of both Latinos and Asians.
From 1994 to 2000, nearly half a million Mexican immigrants became U.S. citizens, and about that many during the same rough period registered to vote, according to Rosalind Gold of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
"These were voters with a mission: They wanted to send a message that they would fight discrimination against immigrants, and that they would hold Republicans responsible for the tone and tenor of the discussions in California about immigration," Gold said.
Increased numbers of immigrant voters were not the only factor that helped turn California into a state politically dominated by Democrats.
Republicans repeatedly have nominated candidates who are more conservative than the majority of state voters.
Most analysts agree, however, that the perception of Republicans being anti-immigrant ? a charge that Wilson and his supporters have steadily denied ? took a toll.
Democrats, who lost control of the Assembly in 1994, regained it in 1996 and recaptured the governor's office in 1998.
From 1996 to 2000, Republican Assembly seats dropped from 41 to 30 as candidates lost in virtually every district with more than 15% Latino voter registration, said Allan Hoffenblum, a GOP political consultant who opposed Proposition 187. The key exceptions were Latino Republican candidates, he said.
"You had a major political party in power 10 years ago that has been marginalized in part because of losing the vote of Latinos and what is the largest group of new [voter] registrants: immigrants of all backgrounds," Hoffenblum said.
"Now people are so shellshocked that it's difficult to even discuss this issue."
[latimes.com]
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