If You Can’t Stand the Heat . . .

Here are some interesting numbers about Los Angeles County:

* Two-thirds of all births here are to foreign-born mothers.

* Educating undocumented immigrant children costs about $1 billion a year.

* A Latino immigrant is paid, on average, 72% less than his native-born counterparts.

Feel the heat that comes from these numbers? It is the heat, I think, of racism. In our hearts, few of us can escape thinking in racial terms. And few cultures have been asked to absorb so many different races, in such a short time, as has ours.

So when we confront numbers like these we sense a small wave of fear or triumph, depending on our situation. We feel control slipping away from us, or coming into our grasp. In the end, racism is all about control.

But these numbers, which come from a new book on California immigration, just may help us rise above racism. Because the numbers suggest, along with much additional evidence, that we face a common problem and have a common interest in solving it. In fact, the future of all Southern California may depend on finding that solution.

The book is titled “The California Cauldron” and was written by UCLA geography professor William A.V. Clark. In one disturbing section after another, Clark describes how California’s cities and towns have been inundated by one of the greatest waves of immigration in human history and how no one--particularly the immigrants themselves--has been spared by the result.

Some of Clark’s statistics will seem familiar, but they bear repeating. Since 1980, 5 million foreign newcomers have arrived in California, joining the 25 million already here. The mix of newcomers is astounding, from Vietnamese to Ukrainians, and entire cities have switched their racial compositions in less than a generation.

Within California, startling differences emerge. Currently, for example, 41% of all California immigrants wind up in Los Angeles County. One ZIP Code in Glendale, 91205, has absorbed 16,000 immigrants since 1980, and another ZIP Code in San Francisco has absorbed 25,000. Meanwhile, the state’s best-known ZIP Code in Beverly Hills, 90210, has absorbed very few.

All of this makes California the great exception when it comes to the costs and benefits of immigration, Clark writes. At the national level, he contends, new immigrants have probably produced a plus for the economy. But in Los Angeles County and other heavy-influx areas, they have produced a large deficit. The federal government, after all, receives the lion’s share of revenue from immigrants through income taxes but pays only a small portion of their education and medical care costs.

“It is quite possible that the very large numbers of immigrants who are arriving in Southern California will overwhelm the state’s metropolitan areas by the sheer size of their flows,” he writes. “It is clear from a California perspective that there is a critical need for greater federal recognition of the special role of California as the immigrant entry point.”

Clark is contending, in effect, that no culture can continue to absorb the huge numbers of poor, uneducated immigrants flocking to California without a breakdown in its social institutions. At places like the Los Angeles Unified School District, where achievement test scores have plunged since the great immigrant influx began, he suggests we may be experiencing this breakdown already.

“Los Angeles is a microcosm, in which we are witnessing a serious problem in the ability of inner-city school systems to receive and educate the flows of new immigrants. . . . Los Angeles County is home to almost one-third of a million children in poverty and with foreign-born parents. More than a quarter-million children in poverty are Mexican and Central American in origin. Most of these parents and their children are in the Los Angeles Unified School District,” he writes.

We have heard some of these arguments before, of course, most notably from our dear departed Gov. Pete Wilson. And usually they are made to feed the racial fires of old-guard whites who see themselves as paying the bill for the onrush of the heathen hordes.

But Clark is reaching for another goal. Should this immigration wave continue in its present proportion, he argues that the greatest victims will be the immigrants here now. Indeed, he contends that present immigrants already have suffered grievously from the collapse in the schools, the dearth of medical care and the downward pressure on wages produced by each week’s new arrivals.

In support of this theory, he offers a disturbing profile of a recent arrival from, say, Mexico. In constant dollars, his wages have fallen from an average $17,727 in 1980 to $11,644 in 1995. The chance of his children graduating from high school remains frighteningly low. And the possibility of him owning his own home is declining every year.

Ironically, Clark notes, most new immigrants do find work in the United States whether they have arrived legally or illegally. “But they are finding work at the very bottom of an economic ladder that no longer has the same rungs to success as earlier waves of immigrants used,” he writes.

We are all familiar with the jobs offered to new, no-English immigrants, right? They rake leaves, clean house, sweep up, flip burgers. Jobs that offer no route upward, no way out. And that, Clark says, is exactly what happens to many. They get stuck, forever, at jobs paying less than a living wage.

This profile contrasts sharply with the experience of previous immigrants in California, who often found well-paying jobs in manufacturing and experienced less competition from other new arrivals. Clark, in fact, describes the immigrant population of California as a “bifurcated society,” divided between the relatively affluent older generation and the desperately poor present generation.

“The jobs that immigrant groups filled in the first decades of this century have vanished or are vanishing,” he writes. “Immigrants used these jobs as a way up and out; they offered both security and the chance of occupational advancement. As manufacturing jobs have declined, they have been replaced by less stable, and often low-paying, service jobs.”

So here’s the point: If Clark is to be believed, both the old-guard whites and the new immigrants have a powerful motive for changing the current immigrant flow into the state. Both groups will avoid the further crumbling of social institutions and will be relieved of the enormous financial burden of assimilation, and the already-arrived will find themselves with a much better chance at grabbing the brass ring.

In the 1920s, as Clark notes, the United States once before felt the need for a pause in immigration. Over the previous 20 years, some 18 million Europeans had entered the country, straining the social fabric in the same way it is strained today in California.

So, in 1924, the country simply turned down the screws on its immigration quotas and spent the next several decades absorbing the immigrants into its political and business institutions.

These days, the 1924 solution probably will never fly. So Clark suggests another approach. Switch immigration policy to one that emphasizes education and technical skills on the part of applicants. End the current policy of “family reunification” that favors admission of those with family members living in the United States.

And for those already here, he says we must find a way to educate immigrant children successfully. A continuation of the present failure of our school system will eventually put us in jeopardy of social upheaval, he predicts.

“Even the most ardent proponents of immigration are beginning to recognize that the country cannot take in all of the world’s displaced people,” he concludes.

In the past, those have amounted to fighting words in the war over immigration. We’ll see if Clark’s book similarly gets demonized. Or whether, for once, we can approach this issue as a common problem that just might have a common solution.

That is to say, without the heat.