Immigration Shapes a New Cultural Mosaic

To some, it is a juggernaut posing a threat to the nation’s integrity. To others, it is a culturally enriching current, coursing through America’s great melting pot.

“It” is the country’s latest immigration wave, and nowhere is the impact felt more keenly than in Southern California.

Here, 3,000 miles from the eastern shores on which the steerage-class passengers of an earlier era landed, a new Ellis Island has emerged and turned the region into a bewildering kaleidoscope of cultures.

In 1846, the last Mexican governor of California, Jose Sepulveda, complained: “We find ourselves suddenly threatened by hordes of Yankee emigrants . . . whose progress we cannot arrest.” The Yankees came and conquered, but are now looking over their own shoulders.

Today, according to the 1980 U.S. Census, Los Angeles has more Mexicans than any city except Mexico City, and nearly half as many Salvadorans (350,000) as San Salvador.

They are not the only people for whom America’s still-potent promise of opportunity--in this case, drenched in Southern California sunshine--has proven irresistible.

More Koreans live in Los Angeles and Orange counties than anywhere in the world outside of the Korean capital of Seoul, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.

This year, one of every three freshman students entering the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County were Asian, mostly Vietnamese and Laotian, according to university officials.

Between 1975 and 1980, 500,000 of the nearly 900,000 newcomers to Southern California were foreign-born, 80% of them Asians and Hispanics. Census figures also show that more than a third of America’s 3.4 million Asians reside in California.

Between 1970 and 1980, the Latino population in Southern California doubled to 2.8 million. Latinos now make up nearly 25% of the total population of nearly 12.3 million people, according to a 1984 report by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

During the same period, the Asian population more than tripled while the number of whites--excluding Latinos--declined by 500,000.

By the year 2000, the report predicted, 42% of Southern California’s residents will be Anglo, 41% Latino, 9% Asian and 8% black.

In Los Angeles city schools, where 85 different languages are used, Anglos accounted for 56.1% of all children enrolled 20 years ago. Today, Latinos dominate with 53.7%, Anglos make up 18.7% and black schoolchildren held steady at 19.2%.

The immigration influx has changed the face of the region, creating an exotic patchwork of barrios, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, Little Taipeis, Little Saigons--all taking root in neighborhoods once predominantly white or black.

Who makes up this wave?

Mexicans dashing furtively across the porous border, hoping to escape a life of grinding poverty. Salvadorans fleeing a reign of terror. Chinese, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Filipinos--some documented, some illegal.

All are beckoned by the chance for a better life built on their own efforts, just as the Irish, Germans, Poles, Russians and Italians were at the turn of the century.

Their presence has redefined the Los Angeles megalopolis, altering its architecture, its music, its food, its politics, even its religious life.

“I just wish we could move Miss Liberty to the Los Angeles Harbor, because we really are the Ellis Island of the 1980s,” said Harold Ezell, Western regional commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Vacillating between hospitality and paranoia, Southern California has reacted with ambivalence.

A poll commissioned by Time magazine last year showed that nearly 60% of those surveyed believe that immigrants end up on welfare (about 20% do), while 58% said they add to the crime problem. But 67% of respondents said immigrants are productive citizens, once established.

Although many residents relish the diversity, many others resent the intrusion and wonder how long it will be before the Third World engulfs the New World.

While predictable from right-wing extremists, resentment over immigration is by no means confined to those who make xenophobia a part of their creed.

“We can’t take care of all the world’s needy. We can’t absorb them,” said Ezell, the outspoken immigration official.

“If America doesn’t want to do something to protect her borders, we will become a Third World country, with unemployment and uneducated people.”

Some politicians, such as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, believe that immigrants make a positive economic contribution. But critics blame the newcomers for crowded classrooms, rising gang violence, strain on government agencies and a general decline in the quality of life.

“The situation has reached crisis proportions,” complains Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, saying illegal immigrants are costing local government a whopping $370 million a year.

After years of begging for congressional bail-outs to offset the cost of providing social services to the burgeoning numbers of immigrants, Los Angeles County officials are running short on patience.

Few Tax Dollars to County

Studies show that illegal aliens, an estimated 1.1 million in the county, paid an estimated $2.8 billion in taxes last year, but that the federal government received 60% of those revenues, the state 32% and Los Angeles County only 8%.

Last fiscal year, immigrants too poor for private hospital care ran up a bill of nearly $115 million in county-run clinics. Nearly 84% of pregnant mothers who used the county hospital were foreign-born.

Nonetheless, some studies challenge the notion that immigrants are an economic drain.

A recent study by the Rand Corp. found that Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal, pay more in taxes than they cost in government services, with the exception of education.

Based on the 1980 Census, the study said less than 5% of all Mexican immigrants received any cash public assistance, and it added that a vast majority of them paid payroll and social security taxes.

‘An Economic Asset’

“Overall, Mexican immigration has probably been an economic asset to the state, in that it has stimulated employment growth and kept wages competitive,” the Rand study said.

Bradley agrees, saying, “There are industries that would collapse tomorrow if all the immigrants left--the garment industry, agriculture, restaurants, hotels, the service industries.”

In a largely symbolic but highly controversial resolution, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution last November making Los Angeles a “sanctuary city,” which provided moral support to those fleeing their homelands for political reason.

The council reversed itself in February in the face of heavy criticism from politicians and other community leaders who contended that the measure, symbolic or not, would only prompt a greater flow of illegal aliens into Los Angeles.

The man who steered the resolution through the council was Michael Woo, who last year became Los Angeles’ first Asian councilman.

‘Undercurrent’ of Tension

To Woo, whose grandfather was a Chinese laundryman, there is nothing new about the fear of new immigrants.

“I think there is an undercurrent of racial tension between a lot of the groups in my district . . . and in other parts of the city, because there seems to be a natural tendency to blame the most recent arrivals for problems in the community--like crime, unemployment, graffiti, and other kinds of problems,” Woo said.

Street interviews bear out Woo’s contention that the Los Angeles area is witnessing “an undercurrent of racial tension.”

“There comes a time when you just have to say, ‘No more,’ ” said John Wrightson, a North Hollywood mechanic upset that his neighborhood is now almost exclusively Latino. “They’ve practically taken over. If you don’t speak Spanish, you’re out of luck.”

In Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, a potentially volatile rift has developed between longtime white and Latino residents and waves of Chinese newcomers, many of them affluent and well-educated immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

‘Bought Up Everything’

“They’ve bought up everything,” said Ernestine Giacoletto, a Latino woman who has lived in Monterey Park since 1930.

“See over there,” she said, pointing to a condominium complex under construction. “The lady who used to live in that house lost her husband three months ago. Then she had to move because the Chinese bought the property.”

Fifteen years ago, the Chinese represented 10% of Monterey Park’s population. Today, with the population swelled to 60,000, Chinese compose more than 40% of the population and are a largely affluent community.

The 1980 Census showed that the mean family income for Asians in Monterey Park was about $30,000, contrasted with $24,000 for Anglo residents.

The wealth and education of many Asian immigrants account for some of the resentment often directed against them. A more fundamental reason is the fear of submersion--a fear exacerbated in Monterey Park by the proliferation of Chinese-language signs.

“If we wanted to live in China, we’d live in China,” said Frank Arcuri, who several months ago launched a ballot petition drive to make English the official language of Monterey Park.

Recently, a gas station operator in Monterey Park whose lot was sold to a Chinese businessman put a sign on his station that read: “Will the Last American to Leave Monterey Park Please Bring the Flag.”

The sign was quickly removed, but the sentiment persists amid an ever-present backlash atmosphere.

In a wry twist on the complaints, an Asian woman fastened to her new Cadillac a license plate frame saying, “My Other Car Is a Rickshaw.”

Like the Chinese in Monterey Park, Vietnamese immigrants have made remarkable economic strides in Orange County, adjoining Los Angeles County.

There are now as many as 800 Vietnamese-owned businesses in Orange County--a 100% increase since 1984, said Loc Nguyen, a spokesman for the Orange County chapter of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce in America.

A dramatic illustration of the trend Loc Nguyen describes is found in the city of Santa Ana along Bolsa Avenue, where there was nothing but strawberry fields and a few warehouses a decade ago. Now, nearly every supermarket, bookstore, pharmacy and gas station is Vietnamese-owned.

What accounts for such success by a community whose members came as refugees from a nation where they were on the losing side of a bitter civil war?

‘Not Lazy People’

“They are not lazy people,” Vy Trac Do, a counselor at California State University, Fullerton, said of his fellow Vietnamese. “Many work two or three jobs, and many work 14 hours a day.”

Such determination is reflected in scholastic achievements.

In Orange County’s sprawling Garden Grove Unified School District, where Vietnamese account for only 10% of the public schools’ 36,492 students, 12 of the last 14 high school valedictorians were Asian, three of them Vietnamese, said district spokesman Alan Trudell.

Another area where Asian immigrants have made their presence felt is Watts, a predominantly black community where a 1965 outbreak of rioting marked some of the worst violence seen in the United States.

The Rev. H. P. Rachel, pastor of the Greater Unity Baptist Church in Watts, complained that Koreans have been buying up small businesses while contributing little.

“I don’t feel they are putting as much back into the community as they should,” Rachel said. “But then, none of the outsiders really have.

“It’s things like that (that) make it a powder keg,” Rachel said. “I keep trying to keep the lid on, but you don’t know when something like that is going to explode.”

In the heart of Watts, Jin Lee, 20, operates a small dairy stand at 98th Street and Avalon Boulevard. He took it over when his father bought a larger market several years ago.

The stand is no more than a dilapidated shack, but the young man is doing well enough to own a new red Toyota, and his earnings allow him to invest in real estate.

“That’s the way we do it,” Lee said. “Probably 90% of Koreans here borrow from relatives, friends, and not so much from the bank.”

No matter how acquired, the wealth of Koreans has not won them friends.

“There’s a resentment, particularly among blacks, directed at the success of the Koreans,” said UCLA sociology professor Ivan Light. “They think they accumulate money in devious ways. There’s also a resentment by working-class Caucasians of Japanese success that carries over to other Asian groups.”

Impatience and Frustration

Light said it is the Latinos who now weigh in at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, as the Irish, and later the Italians, did in the past.

“And there’s a great deal of impatience and frustration” with the Latinos, he said.

But amid the obvious resentment, there are also countless efforts to help absorb new immigrants.

There are now regular Catholic services in seven different languages in many Los Angeles-area churches, said Elizabeth Kirnis, director of the immigration and citizenship division of Catholic Social Services. At one downtown Catholic school, Kirnis said, 59 languages are represented in the student body.

The Los Angeles County court system provides interpreters for 80 languages, from Armenian to Tongan.

Bonus for Speaking Spanish

In Westminster, the Police Department offers special driver-training classes for motorists from Indochina.

Santa Ana police, who receive a cash bonus if they speak Spanish, have a Latino affairs officer who writes a Spanish-language column for area Latino newspapers explaining laws and police procedures.

California’s top telephone companies recently announced that they would hold public hearings to determine whether they should offer services in foreign languages--specifically to Asians and Spanish-speakers.

And in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a bank keeps abacuses on tables for the benefit of new Americans who prefer to count their money the old-fashioned way.

The process of assimilation is a painful, messy affair that probably always will arouse sympathy but also suspicion.

A massive immigration wave means a massive absorption headache. How long, and ultimately how successful, this new Americanization ordeal will be is unclear.

But if the experience of the millions who passed through the other Ellis Island holds true for today’s immigrants, they may one day join their voices to the 20th-Century folk song:

“We may have come in on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”Copyright Betsy Rose, “Same Boat Now,” used by permission of Redwood Records, San Francisco

United Press International reporters John Bilotta, Niki Cervantes, Michael Collins, Catherine Gewertz, Linda Rapattoni, Aurelio Rojas, Susan Seager, Russell Snyder and Bob Webster also contributed to this report.