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The Most Dangerous Wave
| Article
# : |
11313 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,897 Words |
| Author
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George B. High
George B. High is executive director of the Center for
Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. |
California, the Golden State, the one-time land of limitless opportunity, is overwhelmed. Overall unemployment hovers around 9.5 percent, while that for black and Hispanic young adult males approaches 50 percent in some areas; immigrant farm and unskilled workers are being heavily exploited; schools are packed beyond capacity; the quality of education is declining as multicultural requirements squeeze out art, music, and extracurricular activities; and it is charged that qualified applicants are being turned away from public universities because of overcrowding while these tax-supported institutions admit illegal immigrants.
Crime and violence are growing; social and ethnic tensions--like those that exploded in Los Angeles last year--are on the rise; pollution and waste disposal are major problems; traffic jams abound on once-touted freeway systems; and health and social service costs are growing exponentially, even as the tax base shrinks.
Gov. Pete Wilson and the state legislature, not surprisingly, again did not meet the annual deadline for a balanced budget. And still, immigrants--legal and illegal--continue to arrive in massive numbers, placing additional pressures on the economic, social, and environmental systems of the state.
California's promise as a land of plenty--for business and agriculture, for education and caring social services, for its natural beauty and its resources, for the best that our country has to offer--is in jeopardy. As much as people from the underdeveloped world are still attracted to California, people increasingly liken the state to a Third World nation.
There are a number of causes of this turn of events. Among them are the implementation of overly ambitious social programs during the past decade, inattention to the economic and social problems of the inner city, the downturn of the U.S. economy, downsizing of the state's important defense industry, and the basic restructuring of the American economy in which high-skilled labor is in ever greater demand and the need for unskilled and semiskilled labor is in steep decline, with no reprieve in sight.
Another major reason for the growing economic and fiscal crisis in California is rapid population growth, characterized to a large degree by the massive wave of mostly unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, who have settled in the state over the past two decades, and the promise of even more to come. According to the Census Bureau, California's foreign-born
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