It's My Party (24 page)

For decades a smaller proportion of the population of California was made up of minorities than was the case in almost any other large state.
Few African-Americans lived in California until after the Second World War. Even then the proportion of African-Americans
in the state never exceeded 7 percent, about half the national average of 13 percent. As late as 1970 nine out of ten Californians
were white.

Then the inundation began.

Between 1970 and 1995, two million legal immigrants entered California, a quarter of the total that entered the entire nation.
At least half the legal immigrants to California were Hispanic. During the same period hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants
entered the state. The number of illegal immigrants can only be estimated, but even the lowest estimates place it at one million.
At least 80 percent were Hispanic. Not only were Hispanics arriving in large numbers, once they settled in California they
gave birth in large numbers. The Hispanic birth rate proved so high that by 1991 the number of babies born to Hispanics exceeded
the number born to whites, even though whites still outnumbered Hispanics by two to one.

The millions of Hispanic immigrants to California were joined by at least a million Asian immigrants and by hundreds of thousands
of immigrants from the Near East. Together, they represented an influx so great that Ron Unz, who has made a close study of
immigrants in California, believes they turned the white population of the state into a minority sometime during the 1980s.
The peculiarities of federal racial classifications make it impossible to say this for certain. The government used to force
everyone into one of four categories: white, Asian, black, and Hispanic. Hence in government statistics the hundreds of thousands
of Iranian and Egyptian immigrants to California actually served to make the state “whiter,” offsetting the rising numbers
of Asians and Hispanics. After attempting to correct for this anomaly, Ron has concluded that white people of the kind that
the term “white” ordinarily implies—that is, European whites—found themselves outnumbered in California fifteen or more years
ago.

For a time the most noteworthy aspect of relations between white Californians and the new, mostly Hispanic immigrants was
how well they got along. Even in areas where the concentration of immigrants was heaviest, relations proved peaceful. For
example, between 1976 and 1996 the five counties that make up the Los Angeles basin—Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino,
and Ventura—saw immigrants inflate their population by 40 percent. About a million new immigrants arrived from Asia while
more than two million arrived from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. In the Balkans, a population shift of half that
magnitude would have prompted open warfare. In the Los Angeles basin, the economy and political system absorbed the new immigrants
without fuss.

Then in the early 1990s the white attitude toward the new immigrants shifted.

Ron Unz notes several causes. A recession struck. Although it proved mild in most of the nation, the recession was severe
in California, largely because the end of the Cold War led to heavy cutbacks in Southern California’s aerospace industry.
As tens of thousands of Californians were losing their jobs, the California real estate bubble burst, causing housing values
to plummet. Then, after the verdict in the Rodney King trial, rioting erupted. “It’s impossible to overstate the effect of
the Rodney King rioting on white Californians,” Ron says. Much of the violence pitted African-Americans against immigrants,
especially Hispanics and Koreans, who had begun to displace African-Americans from their neighborhoods. When white Californians
turned on their televisions, they saw smoke spreading across the sky.

For decades white Americans had moved to the Golden State because it seemed just that, golden—a land of sunshine, good jobs,
affordable housing, and excellent schools. Now California was golden no longer. When its white inhabitants looked around,
wondering who might be to blame, they saw a lot of faces, especially brown faces, that they weren’t even sure belonged there.

As I’ve said, Republicans in California tried dealing with Hispanics in two different ways. The first was to ostracize them.

Written by a group of anti-immigrant activists in Orange County, Proposition 187 appeared on the California ballot in November
1994. As mentioned earlier, the initiative would have denied illegal immigrants an array of government services. Proposition
187 would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving care at public hospitals and—the initiative’s most inflammatory
measure—it would have excluded their children from California’s public schools. “Prop. 187 would have forced hundreds of thousands
of children out of school,” Ron Unz, who fought the measure, told me. Governor Pete Wilson, running in 1994, endorsed the
initiative, swinging the full weight of the California Republican Party behind it.

“What do Hispanics value most?” Ron Unz said. “Their families. So what did Republicans do? They went after Hispanic children.
It was just insane.” In his late thirties, Ron grew up in Southern California. While studying at Stanford for a doctorate
in engineering, he realized that he could write a software program that would prove useful to traders on Wall Street. In his
spare time, he wrote the software, then founded a company called Wall Street Analytics. The company made him rich. Instead
of retiring to play golf, Ron has devoted himself to politics. He is skinny, cerebral, and friendly. He speaks in measured
tones, often pausing, even in midsentence, to think. A native of California, Ron is determined to reconcile the Republican
Party with immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants. Over lunch one afternoon, he argued that although Proposition 187 was
intended to cut off services only to illegal immigrants, nobody should have been surprised when the measure offended legal
immigrants. In many cases, legal and illegal immigrants belonged to the same families. For that matter, in many cases legal
immigrants came here illegally themselves, acquiring legal status only in 1986, when President Reagan signed legislation granting
amnesty to three million illegal immigrants. “Maybe Anglos think you can draw a line between legal and illegal immigrants,
but try telling that to the Hispanics in this state,” Ron said.

Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly, receiving 59 percent of the vote. When it was blocked by the federal courts—the 1982
Supreme Court decision,
Plyler v. Doe
, requires states to provide public education for all children—Governor Wilson, who had been reelected, launched a legal fight
on behalf of the measure that he pursued throughout his second term, associating the Republican Party with Proposition 187
for another four years. (In 1999, as we have seen, the measure was set aside as the result of arbitration.)

Proposition 187 may never have taken force, but its effects were felt all the same. Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s,
Hispanics in California cast between 30 and 40 percent of their votes for Republicans. In 1994, the year Proposition 187 was
on the ballot, that figure fell to less than 20 percent. It has yet to recover. “Prop. 187 was a
catastrophe
for Republicans,” Ron said. “It will take at least a couple of generations for Hispanics to forgive us.”

Now, it is worth pausing to note that you didn’t have to be rabidly anti-immigrant to support Proposition 187. After having
lunch with Ron Unz, I had breakfast with former Governor Pete Wilson.

A former marine, Pete is still lean at 67. For a man who spent so much of his life in high office, he is utterly unassuming—when
we walked into Il Fornaio, a high-tech gathering place in Palo Alto, the maître d’ failed to recognize Pete, giving us a table
against the back wall, perhaps the worst table in the dining room. Pete never complained. (As one diner after another approached
the former governor to pay his respects, the maître d’ looked perplexed, as if he was trying to figure out just how much of
a mistake he had made.)

“Prop. 187 wasn’t an anti-immigrant measure,” Pete said. “It was the biggest taxpayer revolt since the Boston Tea Party.”
For years the federal government had failed to police the border with Mexico, permitting immigrants to stream into California
illegally. Then the federal government had forced California to provide the illegal immigrants with billions of dollars’ worth
of services a year. “Those bastards in Washington were falling down on the job,” Pete said, “and they were sticking our taxpayers
with the bill.” Pete spoke earnestly. His sincerity was transparent. He never had any intention of seeing children thrown
out of school. He knew the initiative would get tied up in the courts instead. “That was part of the beauty of it,” he said.
Pete, who was convinced that
Plyler v. Doe
had been incorrectly decided, intended to take Proposition 187 all the way to the Supreme Court, forcing the Court to rule
that the federal government, not the states, must bear the costs of caring for illegal immigrants.

A taxpayer revolt. Pete Wilson’s stand sounds so reasonable, so Republican. Indeed, we have heard from one young man, Justin
Adams, who joined the GOP largely because he admired the courage Wilson displayed in supporting Proposition 187. Justin on
the one hand, several million Hispanics on the other. The problem is that this is not a winning calculation.

In 1996, two years after the passage of Proposition 187, Proposition 227 appeared on the California ballot. Written by Ron
Unz himself, Proposition 227 was intended to ban bilingual education in the state’s public schools. Ron’s own mother had been
born into a Yiddish-speaking household in Los Angeles, yet when she attended school she had learned English quickly. Bearing
in mind his mother’s experience, Ron based his initiative—the Unz Initiative, as it became known—on the proposition that Hispanics
and other recent immigrants were no different from the generations of immigrants who had come to this country before them.
Their children should not be taught in the native language of their parents. They should be taught in English.

The Unz Initiative represented the second approach to Hispanics that Republicans in California have attempted: treating Hispanics
like everybody else.

In lining up support for the initiative, Ron recruited Alice Callaghan, a prominent left-wing activist, and several prominent
Hispanics, including Jaime Escalante, the public school teacher portrayed in the movie
Stand and Deliver
. Ron made no effort to gather endorsements from prominent Republicans. “I was trying to win the support of Hispanics, not
drive them away,” Ron explained. “The last thing I wanted was an endorsement from Pete Wilson.” Although many Republicans,
including Pete Wilson, supported the measure—“Unz and I have our differences,” Pete told me, “but he did a great thing with
Prop. 227”—they did so quietly.

Ron’s strategy almost worked.

Up until the week of the election, polls showed that more than 60 percent of Hispanics supported the Unz Initiative. Then
opponents of the initiative began blanketing the state with television ads, outspending Ron and the other backers of the initiative
by about twenty-five to one. (It later emerged that money for the advertising campaign came largely from the owner of Univision,
the Spanish-language television network. He seems to have opposed the Unz Initiative not because he thought it would fail
but because he thought it would work, reasoning that if Hispanic children learned English, he would lose his captive audience.)
Although on election day itself the Unz Initiative passed with 61 percent of the vote, just 40 percent of Hispanics voted
for it. Ron was downhearted—for a couple of weeks. Then polls began to indicate that Hispanic support for the measure was
rebounding. Soon Hispanics once again backed the Unz Initiative just as strongly as they had before the ad campaign against
it. “Political ads can only rent support,” Ron says, “not buy it.

“Hispanics didn’t come here to go on welfare or rip off California’s taxpayers,” Ron told me, “and their support for Prop.
227 proves it. They came here to become Americans. They have a strong work ethic. They believe in family values. As Catholics,
they’re pro-life. They’re
natural
Republicans. But the Republican Party just can’t seem to stop insulting them.”

* * *

As I was leaving Hope Lutheran Church, I noticed a Hispanic man in the reception area. Pastor Bentz told me he was the janitor.
I asked him to join me in the church hall for a cup of coffee.

His name was Gregorio Leal, but he asked me to call him Greg. In his mid-fifties, his hair still jet black, Greg explained
that he had been born into an extended migrant family. “My great-grandfather was the man of the family. He was the one who
heard where there was work and decided where we would go next.” The family followed farmwork from Texas, where Greg was born,
throughout the Southwest and California. They moved constantly. The work—picking and packing crops—was hard. Greg decided
early that he wanted a different life. “I just didn’t want to run around,” he said. “I didn’t want to follow the crops.”

In 1965 Greg joined the army. He performed three tours of duty in Vietnam.

“Three?” I asked. “I thought nobody had to do more than one.”

“The second and third times, I volunteered,” Greg replied. “I can’t say I liked it. But compared to picking crops, it was
easy money.”

When Greg returned from Vietnam, he attended Fresno City College, earning a two-year associate’s degree. Then he went to work
as a custodian with the Fresno Unified School district. He married, bought a house, and raised three children, sending all
three to college. When he retired he discovered that sitting at home all day bored him, so he went to work as the janitor
at Hope Lutheran Church.

Greg had made something of himself. He had lived the American dream. The son of migrant workers, he had served in the military,
gone to college, and become a husband, a father, and a hardworking, home-owning member of the middle class. He is a person
any member of the GOP would be proud to call a fellow Republican. How does he vote? “I go both ways, but mostly Democratic,”
Greg said. What did he think of Proposition 187? “Deep inside myself, I thought Governor Wilson was wrong. I thought it came
from prejudice. It’s hard to forget.”