Borders and quotas: immigration and the affirmative-action state

Peter Skerry

Since the elimination of national-origins quotas in 1965, the United States has been experiencing a new wave of mass immigration. The prolonged, stalemated debate that culminated in the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) reflects a national consensus to curtail but not to halt this influx, which currently amounts to about 600,000 legal, and 100,000 to 300,000 or more illegal, immigrants each year.

IRCA's controversial sanctions on hiring undocumented workers have slowed the tide, but not reversed it. During Fiscal Year (FY) 1986, which ended just before President Reagan signed the legislation, a historic high of' 1.8 million illegal entrants were apprehended along our southern border. In FY 1988 apprehensions were down to 941,000, approximately the level at the beginning of the decade. But as Professor Wayne Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego reports, documents that establish the legal status of workers (which IRCA requires employers to obtain, but not to authenticate) can be rented on the streets of Southern California for $5 an hour. Thus the flood of illegals is likely to continue, as is the controversy over immigration.

Today's immigration levels rival those of the decade 1901-1910, when a record 8.8 million newcomers entered the United States. Not surprisingly, comparisons of the two periods figure prominently in the ongoing debate. Proponents argue -- or at least assume -- that we absorbed huge numbers before and can do so again. Restrictionists counter that we now lack the consensus on basic values that once facilitated the assimilation of immigrants into the American mainstream. Others contrast the diversity of immigrant groups arriving at the turn of the century with the preponderance of Hispanics and Asians among those arriving today. Of these two groups, Hispanics have aroused more anxiety, which is undoubtedly attributable to the much greater number of Hispanics already living here and to their overwhelming presence among illegal immigrants. In any event, recently successful state referenda designating English the official language reflect concerns about our ability to assimilate large numbers of Spanish speakers.

A different set of questions has arisen with regard to the economy. Many people fear that immigrants are either taking the jobs or depressing the wages of American workers. Others argue that today's high-tech economy cannot‹or in a competitive world market, should not‹absorb as many unskilled workers as the labor-intensive U.S. economy of years past.

Preoccupied with such sociocultural and economic questions, many have ignored another important difference between today's immigration and that at the turn of the century -- the political context. Two broad developments are critical: the decline of local party organizations that once helped socialize immigrants into the political process, and the transformation of American politics wrought by post-1960s notions of individual and group rights.

Because of these developments, political authorities today have much less discretion than their predecessors in dealing with social change. This new rigidity is nowhere more evident than with regard to race and ethnicity. Political bosses used to bargain with ethnic-group leaders over balanced tickets, neighborhood services, and patronage jobs. Now politicians must defer to bureaucrats who enforce minority rights through affirmative-action quotas. Even the courts, where justice once meant the careful sorting and balancing of evidence, have come to rely on statistical formulas.

How do such developments affect our ability to respond to the inevitable tensions arising from mass immigration? Do they influence how immigrants today define themselves and their interests? Despite much controversy, we seem to have grown accustomed to "counting by race" and "governing by the numbers." But what happens when those numbers are dramatically inflated by massive immigration, much of it illegal?

Comfortable with currently high levels of immigration, both conservatives and liberals have generally been disinclined to take up such questions. Liberals, either out of guilt or obsessive tolerance, have been reluctant to strengthen our borders against immigrants, particularly from the Third World. They tend to see immigrants as victims in need of help and compassion‹sentiments that inspired the liberal reforms that have so altered our politics since the 1960s. More self-serving motives also suggest themselves, but given the time it takes immigrants to become citizens and the difficulties of organizing them for political ends, one should not exaggerate‹as restrictionists often do‹the importance liberals attach to immigrants as potential Democratic voters. On the other hand, mass immigration does benefit liberals by creating large numbers of passive clients for social-welfare programs whose legitimacy and effectiveness have been challenged. In other words, the socioeconomic problems of immigrants may be one solution to the political problems of liberals.

Conservatives, by contrast, have for the most part welcomed immigrants as reinforcements against the erosion of traditional values, and in some cases as ardent anticommunists. Above all, conservatives see immigrants as workers whose energies and ambitions will be channelled into productive economic endeavors. Here again, there is an implicit historical analogy today's im¢ grants will be like yesterday's, who (with the notable exception of the Irish) eschewed politics until they advanced economically.

Both perspectives, I believe, are too complacent. In today's post-civil rights political culture, many groups have enormous incentives to depict themselves as suffering some version of the racial oppression experienced historically by blacks. New immigrant groups are further encouraged to do so by the breadth of the civil-rights legislation that Congress passed before the great upsurge of immigration after 1965, and before its sources shifted from Europe to Latin America and Asia. It is a historical accident that the groups that received distinctive protection under civil-rights legislation and judicial rulings were shortly to expand greatly through immigration‹legal and illegal. But bestowing benefits intended for black citizens upon newly arrived immigrants has led to confusion in area after area of public policy. It distorts the common understanding of the problems immigrants face; complicates our efforts to solve them; encourages immigrants, who come with hopes of advancing themselves in a free society, to see themselves as victims of deprivation and discrimination; and results in policies that are frequently inappropriate. In this article, I consider five policy areas in which these dynamics are at work, and which should give us concern.

Hispanics in higher education

The May 11, 1988, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports‹in an article entitled "Hispanics, State's Fastest-Growing Minority, Shut Out of Top Positions at U. of California, Leaders Say‹on a two-day meeting of two hundred Hispanic faculty members, administrators, and students from the nine campuses of the University of California. The article repeats the frequent complaint that Hispanics, who make up about 24 percent of California's population, account for only 9.2 percent of the UC system's undergraduates, 6.7 percent of its graduate students, 3.2 percent of its faculty members, and 3.3 percent of its top-level administrators. Eugene Cota-Robles, the system's assistant vice-president for academic affairs, told the Chronicle: "Unless Chicanos and Latinos can increase their numbers in the system faster than in the past, the gap between their proportion of the population and their presence in the university will grow in the future."

Similar complaints have been voiced in the national media. Thus a front-page story on Hispanic college enrollments, written by Edward Fiske in the New York Times of March 20, 1988, noted that "while the absolute number of Hispanic college students is increasing, the gains are not keeping pace with population increases." The article goes on to cite census data that from 1976 to 1986 the number of Hispanics aged eighteen to twenty-four grew by 62 percent, while the numbers of that group enrolled in college increased only 43 percent. In an earlier Times article, Fiske quoted figures indicating that from 1976 to 1985 the percentage of Hispanic high school graduates going on to college actually declined from 35.8 percent to 26.9 percent. In neither article does Fiske consider the relationship between declining rates of Hispanic college enrollment and the arrival of tens of thousands of poorly educated Hispanic immigrants.

Perhaps the most prestigious effort to focus public attention on Hispanic underrepresentation in higher education has been that of the Commission on Minority Participation in Education and American Life. A joint project of the American Council on Education and the Education Commission of the States, the Commission was chaired by Dr. Frank Rhodes, President of Cornell, and had as honorary co-chairs former Presidents Ford and Carter. Its report, One-Third of a Nation, examines data on college enrollment trends among Hispanic and black youths and concludes: "In the last 10 years, not only have we lost the momentum of earlier minority progress, we have suffered actual reversals in the drive to achieve full equality for minority citizens."

From 1975 to 1985 the percentage of Hispanics aged twenty-four and younger who completed one or more years of college declined from 51 percent to 47 percent. After what Dr. Rhodes describes as "extensive examination of demographic and economic data, review of the relevant research in the field, and consultation with numerous experts," the report cites only one cause for the downward trend in minority college enrollment: reductions in federal student grants. It then calls for "additional federal investment in the nation's children and youth‹especially its disadvantaged minority youth."

The report makes no effort to estimate the effect of record levels of Hispanic immigration on rates of Hispanic college enrollment. Dr. Rhodes writes, "Our goal as a nation must be nothing less than to eliminate, as soon as possible, the gaps that mark our racial and ethnic minority population as disadvantaged." Few would challenge this sense of urgency with regard to black youth. But is it appropriate to new immigrants, many of whom arrive with low levels of education and poor command of English? President Rhodes and his Commission colleagues, in their eagerness to place blacks and Hispanics in the same "minority" category, fail to consider that Hispanic youths, a substantial number of whom are either themselves immigrants or the children of recent immigrants, do not feel the same bitterness and deprivation as blacks, whose forebears have been here for generations.

Immigration and school desegregation

The pervasive rhetoric of minority deprivation also distorts our understanding of school segregation. In Houston, the proportion of Hispanics in the public schools almost tripled between 1968 and 1986, from 13 percent of enrollments to 37 percent. In Los Angeles, the increase has been equally dramatic, from 20 percent in 1968 to 56 percent in 1986. In these and other cities, as The Urban Institute concludes in its study of the impact of immigration on Los Angeles, "the overwhelming majority of the increase is accounted for by the children of recent immigrants from Mexico."

Gary Orfield of the University of Chicago has been monitoring these trends. In his recent report to the National School Boards Association, Change in the Racial Composition and Segregation of Large School Districts, 1967-1986, Professor Orfield observes:

Overall, the data show no significant progress on the desegregation of black students in urban districts since the mid-1970s, and severe increases in racial isolation in some areas.... Hispanics, on the other hand, have been continually moving toward increasing isolation.

Elaborating on the Hispanic data, Orfield later notes: "Unless these long-established and powerfully consistent trends are reversed, Hispanics will face intense segregation, particularly the lower income Hispanics who reside in central cities.'' He concludes:

The clear trends in large district enrollments mean that the ultimate resolution of the city-suburban issue by mandatory or voluntary means, or, perhaps in the very long run, through housing integration, will decide whether there will be integration for millions of segregated minority students in a society with a constantly shrinking white majority and powerful evidence of inequality associated with segregated education.

But is "Hispanic" a category analogous to "black" or "white"? Do concentrations of l Hispanics in schools mean the same thing as concentrations of blacks? Despite a growing tendency to use the term in tandem with "black," "Hispanic" is a cultural or ethnic designation, not a racial classification. Thus the census makes separate counts of race and Hispanic origin. And in 1980 only 3percent of Hispanics identified themselves as "black," and 41 percent as "other." Fully 56 percent identified themselves as "white."

Other data similarly indicate that Hispanics, far from experiencing "segregation," are simply in the early stages of ethnic assimilation. Orfield's colleagues at the University of Chicago, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, have done extensive research on residential patterns and demonstrate that Hispanics move to the suburbs much more easily than blacks:

Not only are levels of black suburbanization quite low, but they are unrelated to any of the explanatory variables we examined. Hispanic and Asian suburbanization, in contrast, are explained largely by objective indicators of socioeconomic status and acculturation.... With rising socioeconomic status, progressive suburbanization of these two groups should occur; their levels of suburbanization are already considerably above that of blacks.

And as Massey and Denton observe elsewhere: Large Hispanic and Asian enclaves do exist in many urban areas, but they do not appear to be closed environments from which there is little social or spatial mobility. In contrast, we find a clear persistence of strong barriers to residential integration among blacks.... The term "segregation," of course, implies a prolonged period of racial oppression or exclusion. Consistent with such a perspective, Orfield refers to Hispanic residential patterns as "long-established." But are they? The trends identified by Orfield are driven, as both The Urban Institute's and Massey and Denton's research make clear, by the huge influx of Hispanic immigrants into our nation's cities. Yet the phrase "Hispanic immigrant'' never appears in Orfield's article. Nor does immigration figure at all in his analysis of school segregation.

The crucial question is whether the pattern Orfield discerns among Hispanic schoolchildren is a permanent phenomenon or a transitional phase in the assimilation process. What Orfield insists upon calling racial segregation is more accurately described as the ethnic concentration typical of new immigrants. Demographers Frank Bean and Marta Tienda argue in their exhaustive quantitative study The Hispanic Population of tile United States that Hispanics -- Mexicans and Cubans in particular -- exhibit a pattern of 'voluntary segregation." Or as Hispanic activistscholar Harry Pachon and his colleague sociologist Joan Moore put it: "[T]here are strong indications that Hispanic [residential] patterns are unlike the black-white pattern and more closely resemble those of European immigrants."

The ethnographic evidence indicates that Hispanics view their neighborhoods as the natural and more or less desirable outcome of the confluence of economic necessities and individual preferences. Although at times the objects of shame as well as pride, barrios bear less of a stigma for Hispanics than ghettos do for blacks. There is certainly no evidence that Hispanics favor busing or other such desegregation efforts. Indeed, their much praised close-knit family life means that Hispanics, like their white ethnic counterparts in the cities of the Midwest and Northeast, are reluctant to send their children off to schools far from their homes and neighborhoods. With the exception of a few activists intent on forging an unlikely coalition with blacks, Hispanics have not demanded "desegregation," but have called instead for relief of overcrowded schools and increased education funding.

Although busing is unlikely to reappear on the national agenda, Orfield's work still deserves scrutiny: it reflects a broader tendency, also evident in the Rhodes Commission, to cast the inevitable problems faced by immigrants today in terms drawn from the history of discrimination and segregation experienced by blacks. But the evidence defies the exercise. Whatever the merits of busing as a remedy for black segregation, it clearly makes no sense in the case of recently arrived Hispanic immigrants.

...

Should anything be done?

...

Affirmative-action protection for Hispanics and other immigrants -- legal or illegal -- is another matter. Whatever the merits of affirmative action for black Americans, it makes little sense to extend its benefits to those whose claims on the nation's conscience are far less cogent -- and who come here expecting no special help. Nevertheless, excluding Hispanics, or Asians, from affirmative action will not be easy. In the Voting Rights Act, and in federal legislation and regulations giving benefits to minority contractors, a form of affirmative action is already enshrined in law. Blacks, whose leaders strenuously but unsuccessfully resisted sharing the Voting Rights Act with Hispanics, will not need to be convinced of the wisdom of restricting affirmative action to themselves. And as blacks feel increasingly squeezed by the kinds of redistricting and employment controversies described here, their opposition to Hispanic participation in affirmative action can be expected to increase.

On the other hand, one suspects that blacks will not be joined by their white liberal allies, who will probably see efforts to exclude any groups from affirmative-action protection as an attack on affirmative action generally. Hispanic leaders in particular have grown dependent on such protection and will similarly reject all such proposals. And as the number of Hispanics benefiting from such programs increases, the constituency for affirmative action will of course grow.

Despite the obstacles posed by our institutions and political culture, the evidence indicates that immigrants today are managing to assimilate into the social and economic mainstream, and contributing enormously to the commonweal. But these processes are slowed‹and the tensions inevitably accompanying mass immigration exacerbated‹by the rigid, formulaic logic of affirmative action. With no end in sight to the causes of the current influx, and with the difficulty of withdrawing benefits once they have been granted, the real test of the affirmative-action state may be yet to come. At that point, we may be forced to adopt a more restrictive immigration policy.

Right now, one thing is clear. To do nothing is to ignore fundamental changes in our political system, and to persist in the wrong-headed notion that the course of today's immigration will simply parallel yesterday's. We are at present peculiarly reluctant to address such issues. But if we do not, then we acquiesce in the rewriting of the social compact this nation has had with immigrants since its founding.

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Carl Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu