ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CALIFORNIA

The financial unraveling of California currently on display in Sacramento has prompted a long overdue debate on what caused the seeming demise of the once most prosperous state of the union.

Arrayed on one side of the debate is a powerful coalition of special interests – and their puppets in the legislature and the toothless media – that has been the facto owner of the state for more than two decades. On the other side is the hapless and often ignorant California electorate but also objective economic reality.

To the former, there is nothing wrong with the state that higher taxes and another round of class warfare against the ‘rich’ cannot fix. The latter, though unable to pinpoint the exact causes, is increasingly aware that something has gone terribly wrong in the Golden State and is looking for answers.

The problem for the special interests coalition – a hard left group of exemplary venality and mendaciousness, made up by predatory public employees unions, environmental extremists, militant homosexuals, ambulance chasers and assorted Hollywood airheads – is that the public is increasingly aware of their decisive contributions to the economic dismantling of the state. 

More to the point, their reckless agendas of exploiting their fellow-citizens, from imposing outrageous retirement and health care demands on the taxpayer by public employees, to directly sabotaging the economy through ever more onerous regulations and pie-in-the-sky environmental fantasies like renewable energy, have run against the limits of abuse the system can take and must be sharply scaled down one way or another if California is to remain economically viable.

Unfortunately, there is yet another problem that presents an even greater systemic threat to California, even if the ones above were to be somehow fixed. A problem known to all that neither the state’s mercenary political establishment nor its politically correct media dare even mention. 

It is the irreparable damage to California’s human capital potential, at least in the medium term, that nearly 30 years of unrestrained illegal immigration has done. And human capital, most experts now agree, is the key determinant of economic development and prosperity or lack of it.

This dramatic dilution of the state’s human capital has come in the form of a massive influx of poorly educated, unskilled and often illiterate Hispanics who will soon make a majority of the labor force.  Moreover, this phenomenon is taking place as California is in the midst of a historic transition from an Anglo majority population to one dominated numerically and politically by Latinos.

It is important to understand here that this is not an immigration problem or even an illegal immigration problem per se,  but rather a question of the human capital of the populations involved.

On the basis of California’s experience with Asian immigrants, for instance, a strong case could be made that in terms of educational achievement, industriousness and entrepreneurial acumen, Asian immigrants in California have proven superior to native Anglos.

Therefore, if the state were to be demographically dominated by Asian immigrants, legal or illegal, it would be logical to expect a better economic performance in the future.  The same would likely be true if the Hispanic immigrants came form the top 10 to 20 percent of Latino society with the greatest human capital rather than from its bottom rungs.

As it is, the picture is not sanguine.  In 2005, the percentage of Latino students in the California K-12 school system of 6.2 million students had reached 48.5% compared to 30.9% white. By now it is clearly above 50%. In kindergarten, two-thirds were Hispanic with most of them unable to speak English.

Of course, the percentages of immigrant children would be of no significance by itself if they performed adequately. After all, the children of Indian immigrants have won most of the U.S. spelling bees in recent years, and those of Asian parents do better than white students both in high school and in the state’s best universities. Unfortunately, the Hispanics do not.

An example of what’s in store for California could be glimpsed from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the largest in California and second-largest in the country after New York. 

With just under 700,000 students enrolled, the district’s pupils are nearly 75%  Hispanic and only 8.9% white and 11.2% black. 300,000 of the Latino students are "English learners" and, depending on whether you believe the district or independent scholars, anywhere between a third and a half of them drop out of high school, following a significant attrition in middle school.  

A recent study by the UC Santa Barbara California Dropout Research Project  (CDRP) estimates that high school dropouts cost the state $46.4 billion in future economic losses per graduating class. [1]

Moreover, even those that manage to graduate are hardly on the road to success. According to a  Harvard University study, 69% of the Latinos that do graduate from high school "do not meet college requirements or satisfy prerequisites for most jobs that pay a living wage." 

Indeed, most of the "English learners"  that manage to get LAUSD high school diplomas, evidently have not managed to learn English properly.  In 2007, only 27% of them were able to pass the English high school exit test, down from 49% two years earlier. [2]

It is difficult to see how the majority-Hispanic labor force of the immediate future can provide the skills demanded by the sophisticated  Los Angeles economy.  In fact, they do not. 

Studies show that as many as 700,000 of the Latinos and some 65% of the illegal immigrants work in L.A.’s  huge underground economy, where they are both exploited by unscrupulous employers and, in turn, exploit the system by not contributing anything to it while using its social services.

This unhappy picture is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state’s economic competitiveness and future prospects. The state’s educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity near the bottom among the fifty states in math, science, reading and writing as tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  

For the first time in its history, California is also experiencing a dramatic increase in adult illiteracy. In 2003, it had the highest adult illiteracy in the United States at 23%, nearly 50% higher than a decade earlier. Indeed, if Mexican official literacy figures of 91.5% are to be believed, the percentage of illiterate Californians is now nearly three times higher than that of Mexico.

In some counties (Imperial County at 41%, Los Angeles at 33%) illiteracy approaches levels found in sub-Saharan Africa.[3]

Perhaps even more important than the implosion of educational standards among the lower strata is the ongoing deterioration of higher education that was the pride of California for decades and the basis of the state’s science and technology preeminence. 

California currently ranks 40^th in the U.S. in the number of those attending college and already has a significant shortage of college graduates.  Studies have shown that the economy will need 40% of its workers to be college educated by 2020 compared to today’s 32%. [4]

Given the rapidly aging Anglo population (average age 42), these new graduates could only come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age 26). In one estimate, this would require the tripling of college educated immigrants, an impossibility on current trends.

Instead, the mediocre education, unfriendly business climate and the confiscatory tax regime are driving educated, middle class Californians out of state. Between 2000 and 2005, more people with college degrees left California than came in, according to research by the Hewlett Foundation.

Since then this trend has accelerated and the state is losing its young, educated and tax-paying middle class to the tune of 2.2 million in the years 2004 to 2007.  IRS data shows that of recent migrants from the Golden State to places like Texas and Oklahoma, who average 29 years of age, 58% have some college and 53% owned their homes.[5]

In short,  what we’re witnessing is the spectacle of a highly advanced and prosperous state, long endowed with superior human capital, rapidly sinking into the exact opposite in just one generation. 

There are, of course, many other factors that account for this unprecedented transformation – first and foremost, decades of a determined assault by the politically dominant Left on free enterprise and the entrepreneurial traditions of California.

But none threaten the future of the state so directly as the ongoing dilution of its human capital through the massive population transfer that illegal immigration has accomplished in the past two and a half decades.

What then could be done to stop this suicidal race to the bottom? The answer is simple. All that needs to be done is for California and Washington DC to observe and enforce the existing laws of the land. Unfortunately, the chances of that happening are slim unless people realize that their future and that of their children is being destroyed as we speak.

Before we delve into this, it is important to dispense with some of the deeply entrenched myths about illegal immigration spread by its supporters.

Myth #1 is that America is a country of immigration that has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past  and so it will with this one. True enough for the past, but this argument neglects two key differences.

First, the numbers involved today are two times larger proportionally than those of the most massive previous immigration waves in the late 19^th century.

Secondly, and much more importantly, as scholars from the Manhattan Institute have shown, previous immigrants invariably brought with them human capital and skills that enabled them to integrate and prosper in short order.

A related myth has the Hispanic illegal immigrants quickly integrating, becoming Americanized and moving up the economic ladder. Some certainly do, but most do not. Research has shown that even after twenty years in the country, most illegal aliens and their children remain poor, unskilled and culturally isolated – a new permanent underclass.

Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they simply come to work and do not  impose any burden on society.

The reality is that even those that work (and half of them do not according to the Pew Hispanic Center) cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. 

Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar, G.J. Borjas, for instance, shows that 40.1% of the immigrant families with a non-citizen head of household are on welfare, compared to 12.7% for the native born.

This, of course, does not include the huge public expenditures on the health, education, and incarceration of illegal immigrants. In California alone the cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion today, or half the state’s huge budget deficit.

What needs to be done very simply is to stop providing welfare and other social services to illegal aliens as existing statutes demand and severely punish employers who break the law by hiring them.  This would immediately remove the huge economic incentives to illegal immigration and millions will return voluntarily to their countries.  Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that this would happen.

For even though a clear majority of the American public supports such a course, a powerful alliance of strange bed fellows will not allow it to happen. It includes the American Left and the Democrat Party who see illegal immigration and amnesties as the fastest way to guarantee their electoral dominance for  years to come;  powerful business lobbies, who see nothing wrong with transferring their cost of business to the taxpayer;  and the Catholic Church, which places a higher priority on filling its pews than on observing the law of the land.

Instead, with President Obama clearly in favor of amnesty of the 20 million illegals currently in the US, against any real enforcement of the law, and guaranteeing them taxpayer-paid medical services via ObamaCare, passing an amnesty bill may be only a matter of time.

Except that with chain-migration family reunification and "anchor babies," the 20 million will promptly become three or four times as many and dramatically accelerate the processes described above.

Milton Friedman once said that unrestrained immigration and the welfare state do not mix. Do we need to wait until California catches up with Mexico in its race to the bottom, to realize how right he was?

Legendary intelligence analyst Alex Alexiev is currently a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.  He and his wife Laurie reside in central California where they produce award-winning Allure Estates olive oil and varietal vinegars.

[1] See California High School Dropouts Cost State $46.4 Billion Annually,  UCSB Press Release, August 22, 2007 (www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1643)

[2] See Naush Boghossian, English Learners Do Worse on Test. Just 27% in LAUSD Pass First Exit Exam, DaliyNews, los angeles, Aug. 24, 2007 (www.thefreelibrary.com/English+learners+do+worse+on+test+just+27%+in+LAUSD+pass+first+exit)
  
[3] California Lowest in Adult Literacy, January 2009, The Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert (www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/018433)

[4] Hans Johnson and Ria Sengupta, Closing the Gap: Meeting California’s Need for College Graduates, Public Policy Institute of California (www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_409HJR.pdf).

[5]Philip Reese, Okies Heading Home: California Losing Folks as Old Bust-Bowl States Beckon, June 17, 2009 (www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2009/06/okies_heading_home_California.html)