State needs a 'time-out' from mass immigration
By Yeh Ling-Ling
Published in the The Mercury News, September 5, 2002
Translate
Californians feel pessimistic about the direction of the state. That's according to a new poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California. Education, jobs and the economy, electricity and the state budget rank as the top four concerns for California voters.
But can any state leader effectively address those concerns without simultaneously advocating a "time-out" from mass immigration?
In the 1950s, California's educational system was one of the finest in this country. Sadly, California's 2000 education achievement ranked near the bottom in the nation in math, although the state's overall budget for education, $49 billion in 2000-2001, far exceeds that of the other states.
Many of our schools are struggling to cope with exploding immigration-related enrollment. Many teachers without proper credentials have been hired to deal with English-deficient kids. According to a 2000 news report, a California Department of Education study found that 25 percent of California's 5.6 million schoolchildren could not speak English well enough to understand what goes on in the classroom.
Immigration advocates argue that California's Proposition 13 has curbed property revenues to fund education. But has high immigrant enrollment in our schools improved or exacerbated the problem of overcrowding?
Not surprisingly, according to a Zogby poll released last year, 62 percent of voters in California, including 66 percent of Hispanics, believed that continued immigration made state education reform more difficult. Presently, more than half of Californians surveyed in the new poll are convinced that the area where they live is in a recession.
Many Californians indeed cannot make ends meet. Is raising property tax or passing additional billion-dollar bonds the real solution to our problems?
Due to current economic woes, hundreds of thousands of workers in California, professional and low-skilled, are unemployed or underemployed. In addition, according to a study released in 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences, each native household paid an additional $1,200 a year due to services provided to immigrant families.
The state Legislature struggled to close a budget deficit of $24 billion. Painful spending cuts will have to be implemented. Why continue an immigration policy that adds large numbers of workers, students, drivers, and electricity and service users to the state and exacerbates the budgetary problems?
Immigration advocates argue that immigrant workers pay taxes and therefore contribute to the economy. However, a third of immigrants have no high school diplomas. Most low-skilled workers do not pay enough taxes to offset even the costs of educating their children, around $7,000 per child per year, let alone other infrastructure.
In fact, low-income people, especially those with many children, qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit and actually receive as much as $3,500 per family when they file their federal income tax return.
California cannot expect long-term prosperity if we continue to import poverty. The 2000 Census showed a statewide 30 percent increase in people living in poverty in California in the 1990s. A recent news article reported that "legions of working-poor immigrants contribute mightily to inflated poverty levels and declining per capita incomes." Ruth Milkman, director of the UCLA Institute for Labor and Employment, was quoted earlier this year as saying: "We're beginning to resemble much more a Third World society where a class of people are stuck at the bottom."
We all are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and many foreign-born are good workers and have contributed to California in many ways. However, recent yearly increases of nearly 600,000 people, mostly immigrants, have added a tremendous burden to our infrastructure and government budgets.
Deteriorating quality of life affects natives as well as immigrants. Therefore, if Gov. Gray Davis is serious about addressing Californians' concerns, he should urge President Bush and Congress to adopt a moratorium on most categories of legal immigration and fund measures to curb illegal immigration. He should also veto any legislation granting benefits to illegal immigrants.
California needs this time-out to solve many problems that are heightened by exploding population.
Yeh Ling-Ling is executive director of the Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America in Oakland.
|