Like tectonic plates, two relentless forces are colliding to produce the political earthquake over immigration that is shaking California.
On one side is a demographic remaking of the state: a dramatic rise in immigration--legal and illegal--that has swelled the foreign-born share of the state population to the highest level since 1920.
On the other is the economic unmaking of the state: a sustained economic slump that has swelled unemployment, strained finances and eroded the optimism about the future that Californians for generations have assumed as a birthright.
Throughout the state's history, the combination of rising immigration, economic contraction and anxiety about the future has been explosive. From its founding, California has followed a schizophrenic pattern of welcoming immigrants at times of economic need, then turning against them, either when the economy soured or the ranks of newcomers reached critical mass.
"California has a long and unfortunate history of treading on immigrants after they have been welcomed," said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.
Now, in the crucible of the state's worst economic downturn since the Depression, the historic pattern is reasserting itself.
In the last three decades, with only intermittent murmurs of concern, California has integrated into its economy millions of legal and illegal immigrants as workers in factories, restaurant kitchens, farm fields and construction sites, as nannies in middle-class homes and gardeners of lavish estates.
"When things are going well and there's a shortage of labor, people either look the other way or are actively supportive of bringing cheaper labor into the United States," said Bruce Cain, associate director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. "There probably are a very high fraction of middle-class homeowners in this state that have used immigrant labor in one form or another to do something and have reaped the economic benefits of having a cheaper labor supply."
But that equilibrium has been torn apart by the force of economic trends and the flow of immigration. Among the key factors:
* The explosive rise in the level of immigration in which more arrivals entered California in the 1980s than in the previous three decades combined.
* A slowdown in the state economy that has cost California more than 830,000 jobs in the last three years and raised anxieties about competition for work posed by the arrivals, both legal and illegal.
* The recession-induced strains on state and local budgets that have made the public more receptive to California Gov. Pete Wilson's arguments that the state can no longer afford to provide as many public services to illegal immigrants.
* The preponderance of newcomers from a single source--Mexico--that appears to be sharpening fears among many U.S.-born residents about the Balkanization of American culture.
Together, these powerful forces are sharpening the lines for a debate over immigration that is likely to divide the state more than any other issue through the 1990s. Wilson, facing a battle for reelection next November, galvanized the issue earlier this year with his polarizing proposals to deny benefits to illegal immigrants--including the automatic right of citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal migrants.
Now virtually every officeholder in the state is rushing forward with proposals to combat the flow of illegal immigrants--from deploying the National Guard along the border to deporting illegal immigrants held in California jails.
"There's suddenly a sense that we can't afford this," Cain said. "We tolerate it only insofar as the net benefit is good. But when jobs are tight, and the cost of supporting people goes up, then we suddenly redo the calculus."
Advocates for immigrants are firing back with charges of nativism, racism and scapegoating. But they are bracing for difficult months and years ahead. "Part of the dilemma for those of us in immigrant rights is who (among public officials) are our friends anymore?" said Angelo Ancheta, head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and the son of Filipino immigrants. "Are there any friends left?"
In no other state have concerns about immigration reached the intensity they have here. But in less concentrated form, the key factors driving the debate over immigration in California are present at the national level too.
"There is a notion that we are 'full'--that there are not enough opportunities to go around," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said. "Today the notion is (that) the pie is shrinking and that each new person who arrives not only takes a piece of the pie, but takes it from me."
