COMMENTARY ON IMMIGRANTS : Latinos Play Role in Realizing Promise of Economic Success : As contributors, they deserve the benefits of labor-safety and wage laws, and health-care and education reforms.

In 1986 I was assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the Santa Ana neighborhood of Delhi. In my first few weeks I remember trying to make conversation with one of the older members of the congregation by asking how long she had been in the parish. She took her right hand and slowly waved it over her head from left to right, singing, “Owwwwww. . . .” That along with the titters from her friends made me aware that saying “a long time” would have understated her residency.

She, a Mexican woman with a long history in Southern California and still a monolingual Spanish speaker, was a symbol of the simple yet dauntless perdurance of a culture. Her quiet perseverance made it possible that at the same church a recently arrived immigrant can still cross its threshold, cast his eyes upon the loving gaze of the indigenous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and know that he has found a home.

For some of us in the Latino community, it has been since “owwwww” and for others it is a new beginning. In the ebb and flow of a Sunday service at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church we are the same people searching for redemption, hoping to find our way in the midst of the living yet confounding paradox of our traditions and history. Together we are the once and future California, at home while still finding a home.

The recent Orange County Grand Jury report on the impact of immigration curses the darkness and does little to shed any light. The Latino community has had a long history in California, longer than most people’s memories will allow. The same community will admit that we are now in a dynamic new chapter brought on by the changes in immigration law during the last 30 some years.

This chapter promises as much as it strains the possibilities of a vibrant California society. The report vents the understandable public and private frustration of many people regarding immigrants, yet its publication will only aggravate the anxieties it was meant to serve.

In these terms the report does a sadly ironic disservice to the intended purpose of the grand jury. Its manipulation of statistics is an exercise in reductionist thinking that tries to limit the truth so as to make the solutions simpler. Those of us who live the paradox of a rich Latino heritage that is simultaneously old and new, must say that there is more to us than the grand jury sees.

Any acknowledgment of the increased costs in social services relative to the Latino community must also consider at the same time the facts as presented by David Hayes-Bautista in his recently published study, “No Longer a Minority.” He mentions that the Latino community has a larger work-force participation than any other segment of the population.

In a longitudinal look at the data, Latinos are more consistent contributors to California industry than all other residents. In light of that reality, when one looks to the increased costs in social services incurred by the Latino community, there arises another seeming contradiction--an ugly paradox--one that California has lived with for a long time: low wages, no benefits, exploitative labor conditions--all of which have deprived a hard-working community of its fair compensation.

The cost of doing business in boom-town California over the last 30 years has been unduly transferred to those least able to bear it and to an institution least able to handle it in the proportions to which it has grown.

In the same study, Hayes-Bautista points out that Latino families are more likely to consist of the traditional two heads of households than any other segment of the California population. Does that fact make this population the menace that the grand jury report portrays or is it part of the promise?

Latino families are painfully aware of many of the strains that the report highlights--crime, drug abuse, overcrowding, infectious diseases. These are a burden on society, but it is the same families who shoulder the larger share of that burden.

The California economy must get going again. The state of the economy is a primary factor inciting the anti-immigrant fervor that has overtaken public offices such as the grand jury. Much of the current thinking has made the California economy look like a zero-sum game.

James Flanagan in a recent Times article said that the dire economic prognostications of the day reveal a timidity where once there was a bold, frontier spirit. He pointed to the immigrant communities of Southern California and asked his readers not to forget that for the newly arrived, California is still a new frontier. Such a “new frontier” economy as can be hoped must equitably serve those who contribute to it.

The Latino immigrant is here to contribute, to be a part of it. We are not the “underclass” the grand jury makes us out to be. Hayes-Bautista concluded that: “The youthful and optimistic nature of the Latino population represents California’s promise of future economic success. But translating this promise into actual economic returns requires creative policy.” Such social policy should include:

* Increased enforcement of labor-safety and wage laws.

* Health-care reform.

* A renewed look at the reallocation of federal revenue to which many immigrants contribute and a more equitable distribution of that money to the states impacted by these populations.

* Deportation of immigrants convicted of serious crimes, most of which are perpetrated in their own communities.

* Renewed vision and investment in our educational institutions from both public and private sectors.

We now shoulder in large measure the social price of downsizing and capital shifting that is going on as well as the immigrant scapegoating that is a perennial feature in recessionary times.

We will persevere as we have in the past. It is our California past that pushes us to its future.

To the grand jury report that would stop us in our tracks I can find no better response than that said 200 years ago by the undaunted Franciscan immigrant, Fray Junipero Serra: “Siempre adelante.” We will go forward.