Plenty of Reasons for a Crowded California

Before taking another step on this slippery slope, I want to make something clear about living in L.A.

I like the jumble and mix, the spice in the air, the world at my door.

I like driving for blocks in L.A.’s Koreatown and not seeing a single sign in English.

I like boarding a bus that originates in Sylmar and hearing nothing but Spanish from driver and riders.

So when I say we have too many people in Southern California, as I did last Sunday, please don’t ask me to speak to your chapter of the John Birch Admiration Society.

If you saw that column, UCLA professor and Sierra Club board member Ben Zuckerman said we’d better tighten the borders or we’ll wreck the environment, crush the poor and ruin the quality of life for everyone.

Like I said, I think it’s a conversation worth having. And so to keep it going, I called someone who disagreed with Zuckerman.

If you’re intent on limiting immigration, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said, there are smarter ways than to tinker with immigration policy.

For instance, we pay billions of U.S. tax dollars in subsidies each year to American farmers represented by powerful agriculture lobbies, Pope said. If that isn’t a sweet enough deal for growers, Mexico’s ban on crop imports was lifted under NAFTA, making it impossible for Mexican farmers to compete with Americans.

Subsidized corn raised in Iowa and shipped south costs less than it can be grown for in Chiapas and Oaxaca, said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

“This has had the effect,” Pope said, “of driving hundreds of thousands of families a year off subsistence farms in central and southern Mexico.”

And many of them head north, of course.

Shaiken told me about a tour he took with Border Patrol agents in San Ysidro.

“You had this triple fence, but you had a hole under one part of it where people obviously could slip underneath,” Shaiken said. “So I asked a Border Patrol agent why they don’t make the fence go down deeper. He looked at me and said, ‘There is no depth or height that’s going to keep them out.’ ”

The choice for many immigrants is to cross the border or watch their children starve, Shaiken said. That’s true of millions of Latin Americans whose failed economies drive them to the U.S.

“Immigration is not something you can control at the border,” Shaiken said. “Unless you look at the causes that are sending people here, you’re doomed.”

Many of those displaced Mexican farmers no doubt end up working for California growers whose fat subsidies helped run the Mexicans off their own farms.

The Environmental Working Group reports that in the stretch from 1995 to 2002, federal subsidies to California farmers included $1.5 billion for rice growers, $1.2 billion for cotton, $308 million for wheat, $168 million for dairy, $149 million for corn, $50 million for livestock and $39 million for barley.

As The Times reported two years ago, the vast majority of those subsidies go to the wealthiest California farmers, some of whom drive Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs, live at country clubs and have vacation homes.

Hey, labor is cheap and life is good. There’s a reason you don’t hear agribusiness tycoons, or their friends in Washington, get worked up about loose borders.

Immigration, by the way, is only one cause of overpopulation in California. The high birthrate, particularly among immigrant families, is another.

In the Central Valley, where farm wages are low and the Asian and Latino populations are high, the birthrate among teens rivals those of Third World nations.

None of this surprises Pope, who began his career handing out condoms in India for the Peace Corps and later worked for Zero Population Growth.

It isn’t easy selling the idea of birth control to high school dropouts with no decent job prospects, Pope said. He told a story about riding his bike down a rural road in India and being stopped by a peasant who asked what he was doing. The man couldn’t grasp the concept of family planning or why he should care.

There’s a parallel in California, Pope suggested, as we churn out our own generations of uneducated peasants.

The state’s public schools, once the envy of the nation, fell apart after Proposition 13 in 1978, and there is no political leadership or popular will to do what it takes to fix them.

Ben Zuckerman is right. We’ve got too many people in the schools, on the bus, on the beaches. With epic budget shortfalls and no planning for future growth, California is expanding each year by a number equivalent to the combined populations of Bakersfield and Santa Ana.

And Carl Pope is right, too, about desperation following the money trail, and about other forces driving growth.

As I wrestle with this subject of paradise in peril, I know that I’m part of the problem, and maybe you are too. We’re a little bit like the fat-cat farmers on the subsidy dole, though not quite as greedy.

When the gardener or the nanny knocks at the front door, how many of us ask for papers, or kick in something for doctor’s bills, or do anything other than pay cash for what seems like a pretty good deal?

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Steve Lopez writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.