News and Editorials

It's easy to take a short run view of a long term problem, but it's no surprise when this results in a harmful solution!  Yeh Ling-Ling's column (Sept. 5, 2002, San Jose Mercury News, Opinions) is a prime example of how easy observations coupled with poorly formed assumptions can lead you to all the wrong conclusions!

OK, let's admit the obvious:

1. The schools are ill equipped to handle limited English proficient students.
2. California has been an international magnet for immigrants.
3. California is cash-strapped this year with no immediate end in sight

But let's not be so quick to blame immigrants for all our present difficulties.

Our schools are struggling with limited-English students, but they have also been struggling with English proficient students for decades! That's because they have been under-funded and overburdened with regulations. School funding was not effectively distributed to meet the needs of rapidly growing populations before Prop 13; since then it's been abysmal!

Education is a long-term investment. It takes 20 years to see the real benefits of educating ALL our kids, regardless of where their parents came from. What we fail to invest in now will become obvious only over the long run.

You can get away with neglecting roads for years, but sooner or later the failure to invest in them will stop our business cold. We're still driving on bridges built as an immense investment risk in the 1930s õ now they're wearing out and inadequate. Our current economy is the result of massive investment in the 1940s through '80s.

In fact, most people running our businesses, caring for our sick, and policing our streets are a direct product of investments in education at least 2-4 decades ago. Think of where we'd be if we had neglected education then, when Yeh Ling-Ling admits the "California educational system was one of the finest in this country."

When you stop investing enough in schools, for the first decade you might not recognize the real loss, but thereafter your mistakes start to accrue. That's why our schools are struggling now.

It's not the concurrent influx of immigrants that caused the schools to falter. Rather, it's our refusal to invest in them properly since the late 1970s, just as our population growth from everywhere (US and otherwise) escalated dramatically.

So the short run, shortsighted solution to our increasingly inadequately educated local labor pool has been to import better educated people from around the world. In fact, many of our prized Silicon Valley businesses were and still are started, funded, nurtured or powered by educated and dedicated immigrants. At the same time in our booming economy the labor pool for our lowest paid jobs shrank, so we gladly imported people to fill the bottom tiers, which were just as necessary to ensure that California was able to function.

California is now in recession, yet just a year or two ago we were booming with budget surpluses and no belief that it would ever end. The shortsighted among our electorate and influential political donors pushed through tax cuts to adjust the state revenue stream. That's a major reason why the state is reeling from deficits, not just the recession. Somehow Californians ignored even the most recent history of Texas and Florida and how their hasty tax adjustments during the boom years threw them into deficits. You can't blame this on our immigrants, Yeh Ling-Ling; they often can't vote and aren't the ones who influenced this revenue reduction or who caused our recession.

Yeh Ling-Ling is right that immigration is as much a national responsibility as it is a California problem. It starts with primary immigration policy and enforcement, which is always under federal control. However, California, like most of the "sun belt" in the past 40 years, has experienced mostly massive secondary immigration õ from everywhere else in the US. We Americans take pride in our freedom to choose where we live and would not trade this for the restrictive movement policies of the old USSR.

We cannot therefore expect that we will refuse people at our state borders now, and we shouldn't. So Yeh Ling-Ling's suggestion of restrictive national immigration policy is as unlikely to be successful in the future as it has been in the past.

We are almost all indeed immigrants or their inheritors. We're the long term success story of people who typically had little money or skills to start out in America - and most of them didn't speak English either. Our families often did depend on the kindness of others to get started, and certainly have depended on tax-supported community services such as schools, roads, and hospitals.  And now we pay those taxes and we are the economy!

The real strength of the United States and the State of California, Yeh Ling-Ling, has always been our ability to grow and take advantage of our people. We got them by importing from everywhere and we should be not just thankful, but vigilant against exchanging this long range strength for a short run, shortsighted illusion of tax relief.

Bart A. Charlow, President
Silicon Valley Conference for Community and Justice
April 2003