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.
