In 1882, pressure from California was instrumental in the passage of federal legislation barring foreign-born Chinese from acquiring citizenship and banning the entry of Chinese workers for decades.

Once the nation excluded Chinese immigrants, California agricultural interests began recruiting the Japanese to replace them around the turn of the century. Like the Chinese, Japanese immigrants were at first welcomed. But success brought retribution.

In 1906, the San Francisco school board set off an international incident by segregating Japanese schoolchildren. "The Japanese government was so ticked off that they inquired whether Japan could declare war just on California," historian Kevin Starr said. It took the federal government to persuade the San Francisco board to rescind its order.

With other groups, the pattern persisted: a welcome that curdled into resentment. By 1929, race riots flared against Filipino laborers. When the Depression hit, Mexican workers--who had been recruited earlier as a source of cheap agricultural labor--were deported by the hundreds of thousands. This exclusionary impulse has been constantly counterbalanced by an insatiable desire for cheap labor to fuel the state's growth. Not long after the mass deportation of Mexicans during the Depression, California agriculture--then the state's largest and most powerful industry--persuaded Congress during World War II to establish the bracero guest worker program that brought in hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants.

Even after the bracero program was repealed in 1964, much of the state winked as illegal immigrants flowed back into California in ever-larger numbers, finding work not only in farms and factories, but in upper- and even middle-class homes. Shortly after the 1978 passage of the tax-slashing Proposition 13, the cost of providing health care to illegal immigrants emerged as a hot topic of debate at meetings of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In 1986, in a surge of national concern over illegal immigrants, Congress passed the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act. But until recently, few state leaders appeared even mildly annoyed about the law's palpable failure to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

To this historic hunger for inexpensive labor, state leaders in the last two decades have articulated a second rationale for welcoming immigration--a vision of California as the multicultural capital of a new Pacific Basin world axis, culturally and economically enriched by its diversity.