Looking for Source of a City’s Troubles

As Los Angeles careens toward its first post-riot mayoral election, there are two political possibilities:

One is that the city will begin to confront the questions of economic justice and political disintegration which, left unanswered for too many years, have brought us to this point. The other is that voters, a majority of whom still are white, English-speaking and relatively affluent, will continue to ignore those issues and simply find somebody to blame.

Unfortunately, the early evidence suggests that the campaign is shaping up as search not for solutions but for scapegoats. And the designated scapegoats are, unsurprisingly, immigrants.

Last week, at a forum for mayoral candidates, former deputy mayor Tom Houston suggested that failure to control illegal immigration was like overloading the lifeboats on a sinking ship. Julian Nava, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, was booed when he suggested that legal immigrants be allowed to vote in local elections.

An aide to Assembly member Richard Katz, another mayoral candidate, told Times staff writer Frank Clifford that the subject of illegal immigration “comes up everywhere we go.”

In an unusually contentious City Council debate on immigration Tuesday, Mike Hernandez and Richard Alatorre--the body’s two Latino members--were booed and applauded by the audience when they rose to deliver impassioned defenses of the role immigrants play in the city’s life and commerce.

When Latino elected officials speak on these issues, what they say often is dismissed as pandering to an ethnic constituency with a vested interest in continued high levels of immigration. In fact, the opposite is true. These days, it takes considerable political courage to speak as Hernandez and Alatorre did Tuesday, even when you represent an overwhelmingly Latino district. Today, a deep current of anti-immigrant feeling has begun to course through all of our ethnic communities.

In Washington this week, for example, the Latino National Political Survey, directed by Rodolfo O. de la Garza, a distinguished professor of government at the University of Texas, released the findings of the most extensive study of Latino opinion ever undertaken in America.

What those findings reveal confounds conventional opinion. According to the survey, Latino opinions on questions of immigration, bilingualism and ethnicity are indistinguishable from those of Anglos. More than nine of every 10 Latinos surveyed said the level of immigration is too high. Substantial majorities opposed immigration preferences for Latin Americans. Mexican-Americans, who make up the majority of Hernandez’s and Alatorre’s voting constituents, were particularly skeptical of government spending on programs for refugees and immigrants.

To anyone who recently has spent time in one of Los Angeles’ Latino communities, such findings have the ring of truth.

I recall a conversation I had not long ago with a young woman involved in organizing the other tenants in her public housing project in East Los Angeles. She is a Mexican-American, a single mother of a 4-year-old daughter and a welfare recipient. She never has lived outside the projects. I was there to discuss the job training program in which she is enrolled. Joblessness, she agreed, was her neighborhood’s “No. 1 problem.” But, in her view, the other major difficulty wasn’t gang violence, drug dealing or cutbacks in public services, all of which have hit the surrounding community hard in recent years.

“The other big problem,” she said, “is all these immigrants. They make me so mad. They come here from Mexico all the time. They get on welfare. They get apartments here. They use the schools and the clinics, and us who were born here get pushed out. It’s not right. This is our country, and we deserve help first. Let them get their help in Mexico.”

There is, in fact, no credible evidence that immigrants use public services at a level disproportionate to their contributions to the economy and tax base. Undocumented immigrants may well under-use the services to which their taxes normally would entitle them.

The notion that immigrants are displacing Americans from jobs and services is, however, as much the common currency of conversation in East L.A. as it is in the West San Fernando Valley.

It even prevails widely among many recent Latino immigrants. A few days ago, for example, I heard precisely those sentiments from a Salvadoran acquaintance. She and her husband came here illegally more than a decade ago. They have since legalized their status. She is a housekeeper; he is a painting contractor. They’ve purchased their own home, and she now worries about the changes in the Pico Union neighborhood.

“The Salvadoran people who come to Los Angeles now are different than we were,” she says. “We came to work and we worked hard. We do what the law says. The ones now are different. Their families borrow money from the bank to send them here, and when they get here, they think they have to make money right away. So they steal or they sell the drugs. I don’t like it. It embarrasses me to see my people do this. I think the difference is we were raised before the fighting started, and we ran away from it. They were raised during the fighting, and it made them a little loco. They are a problem, and I think maybe something should be done.”

There is, in fact, no evidence that immigration from El Salvador has contributed in any distinctive way to the crime rate in the desperately poor Pico Union area. For Rodolfo de la Garza, the Latino Survey’s principal researcher, the explanation for such sentiments “is simply that Latinos are the people who feel the greatest economic competition from immigrants.”

Clearly, there is a deep current of anxiety over immigration running throughout Los Angeles these days. Tapping it may get somebody elected. But it won’t help that person govern, and it won’t bring any of us even a step closer to the real sources of our anger and mutual discontent.