December 4, 2005
Page E1

In the year now drawing to a close, The Bee has been looking at fundamental governance issues in California, and how they affect the state's ability to serve its residents.

As part of this project, the Commonwealth Club of California and seven of the state's newspapers, including The Bee and Vida en el Valle, have convened a series of discussions on the major issues facing Californians.

The project, "Making California Work: How State Government Can Be More Effective and Responsive," has already looked at legislative redistricting, the initiative process, legislative term limits and the troubled status of public employee pension systems.

The latest issue is California's rapidly changing demographics. How to engage unrepresented or underrepresented segments of the population in civic life has become a public policy issue.

This roundtable discussion was hosted by Vida en el Valle, a bilingual Valley newspaper.

Experts who participated on Sept. 15 were Assemblymember Juan Arambula, D-Fresno; Luis Arteaga, executive director, Latino Issues Forum; Rosalind Gold, senior director of policy, research and advocacy, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund; Kimiko Kelly, research analyst, Asian Pacific American Legal Center; Rosario Marin, chairwoman, California Integrated Waste Management Board, former mayor of Huntington Park and former U.S. treasurer; Carol Whiteside, president of the Great Valley Center, and former mayor of Modesto.

Representing editorial sections were moderator Juan Esparza Loera of Vida en el Valle, Louis Freedberg of the San Francisco Chronicle, Russ Minick of The Bee, Henrik Rehbinder of La Opinion, Phil Yost of the San Jose Mercury News.

Here is an abridged transcript of the discussion.

Esparza: As recently as 1970, California was home to only 10 million people, or about one out of every 15 U.S. residents. In three decades, the state's population has tripled to more than 36 million. The state Department of Finance projects that within two decades 50 million people will live in California.

California is now a minority majority state, meaning that no ethnic group makes up a majority of the population. The latest statistics show that 45% of the state's residents are white, 35% are Latino, 12% Asian, 6% African-American, 2% multiracial, and less than 1% American Indian.

Q: As traditional minorities emerge as a larger and larger force, how do we avoid the same nonparticipation problem that we have seen in the general population?

Arteaga: When I first started with the Latino Issues Forum in 1995, we were really seeing the emergence of the modern Latino vote in California. We all know the story of Pete Wilson and attacks on immigrants energizing this new generation of Latino voters. Subsequent issues with bilingual education, affirmative action and so on continued to snowball this vote. But subsequent to '98, when those attacks stopped, the Latino vote continued to increase, although the gains are very modest. The nonvoters are a very young population, concentrated in the 18- to 24-year-olds. So the challenges are immense to get this young vote energized and excited about voting in California.

Gold: If we look at the November 2004 election, 31% of the adults in California were Latino and 13.5% were Asian. But if you look at who actually voted, only 16% were Latino and only 8.7% were Asian. That there is a large population of Latinos who are not yet U.S. citizens is a major, major challenge for the Latino community.

Q: Isn't that an elderly demographic and one without English language skills?

Gold: No, actually, there are quite a few people who are very interested in becoming U.S. citizens, but they need assistance with filling out the application forms, assistance with negotiating the Immigration Service bureaucracy. Some just need to take some classes in English and civics to get over their fear of the exam. Some portion of Latino voters is not yet fully proficient in English.

Traditionally, political parties and political campaigns go after likely voters. They tend to be older, wealthier and white. The voters who are not yet fully engaged tend to be ignored.

Kelly: The Asian population is still majority first-generation immigrant, over 60%, and over half that population consists of individuals who are not naturalized citizens. The organization I work for, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, provides workshops where we help people with their applications. We also do a lot of voter registration and get out the vote work around elections. We also do poll monitoring (on provisions of) the Help America Vote Act.

Q: If you are a candidate for office, you're seeking to exercise political power to advance principles that you hold. You're going to go after the people most likely to vote, and to do otherwise endangers your ability to win. Isn't that the bottom line?

Whiteside: That is a decision that many of us who have been in elected office make for very pragmatic reasons. A mailer costs a lot of money. But I think there's a huge opportunity that we're seeing start to evolve with the Internet. People who may be engaged on the Internet through a variety of mechanisms can be communicated with at no cost. And so the issue there, then, is ubiquitous access to the Internet.

Arambula: Yes, we have a lot of apathetic and cynical voters, particularly younger voters, but who does participate? Older voters, better-educated voters, people who understand the issues, people who understand the importance of their vote and people who have the ability to make a difference. I think the way to increase voter participation is to help people understand what the issues are, and help them understand that they have an ability to affect the outcome.

Whiteside: We should remember that not all non-Anglo voters are immigrants. We have a considerable number of people who are Asian American, black American, Latino American, who are born here and raised here, and their participation numbers are not always what we would like to see either.

There is some hope that we are seeing greater participation and a greater diversity of representation in local government. At that level there is a direct connection. People can see and touch their local officials; they understand the local issues. And giving people experience at the local level eventually feeds the system.

Q: How do we define civic participation? Elections are periodic, a one-time thing. What about efforts to get people more engaged on an ongoing basis?

Whiteside: A number of groups are beginning to engage, especially the Latino populations, around the issue of air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley. That has a direct and relevant and measurable impact on people's children and people relate to that issue. The frustration that I think people run into, and it's one of the deterrents to participation generally, is that government is so slow. You go to a hearing today, and six months later something else happens, and 12 months later something else happens, and it takes an exceptional person to have the patience to stay engaged.

Arambula: We have a lot of poor people in the Valley, and it's hard to be a participant when you have to feed your family. Having said that, I watched the effort to gather donations for the victims of the hurricane. People who are poor as dirt were coming, offering diapers, blankets, clothing, making monetary donations. I think there is a lot of participation already, but it's not your grandfather's type of participation. They don't go to Rotary meetings. They may have a mutual-aid society. They may have their soccer league, and if you've ever been by some parks on a weekend, there's a lot of organization. We need to find a way to bridge those two types of participation so there is some continuity.

Marin: I come from a city, Huntington Park, that is about 99% Latino, and about 80% of them vote Democratic. And when we had an environmental issue, those City Council meetings were packed. Right now there are some issues about where a school should be placed. We had 2,000 people show up to a hearing. But I don't know that those same people would show up to the voting booth.

Kelly: The same is true if we're talking about new immigrant Asian communities. In the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County, there are now seven majority Asian cities, and in each of those cities you have at least one city council member who is Asian, and that kind of invigorates the population.

Gold: We're seeing two other types of efforts we think are promising. The first consists of programs to get Latino parents more involved in their kids' education and helping them to get the skills to speak with principals, teachers, administrators. Many Latino school board members started off because there was a particular issue with their kids' education they wanted to address.

Q: A recent Field poll said 49% of Californians are very concerned about immigration. But immigration, history tells us, will continue. What challenges do you see ahead?

Arambula: There have been many, many studies, including a recent one by the RAND Corp., about whether immigrants pay for themselves over the long run and the contributions of the second and third generation and so on. Yes, immigrants do require additional expenses in the form of public education and to some degree health care. But a lot of the contributions from immigrants are not seen in the coffers of local or state governments. They're either in the form of lower consumer prices that we all share in, or in the form of the tens of billions of dollars that have gone into Social Security that undocumented workers have contributed and will never see back, and that help us, you and I, pay lower rates than we otherwise would to keep the system adequately funded.

Gold: There is a mismatch now between our federal immigration policies and the economic needs of our state and nation. Our organization's perspective is that we need to create a program where law-abiding, taxpaying immigrants who have been in the United States and lived, paid taxes, obeyed the law for a certain amount of time can take the next step to become full participants in our society.

Luis [Arteaga] talked about Proposition 187 and the reason it had such a mobilizing effect on the Latino community. It was not just because Latinos objected to the particular provisions of that proposition; they were furious about the tone of the discussion, about the immigration debate that scapegoated immigrants for the economic problems of the state, that did not treat immigrants respectfully. We cannot have that discussion in that tone anymore.

Kelly: This issue has so many dimensions to it, down to the street level, where if I go out to get tamales in downtown L.A., five guys on the corner are trying to sell me a Social Security card. There is some hypocrisy going on here, when it's so easy to just go out and get a Social Security number, and yet we blame people for using those numbers to get a job and to work and make a better living. And then at the same time, they are having part of their paycheck contributed to Social Security and probably other services, and, for the most part, they are not using a lot of the health services that people are trying to blame them for.

A critical area in the Asian community is that we still are receiving refugee immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the Hmong ethnic community. We received 5,000 Hmong in the last year in the Sacramento and Fresno areas. And if we look at the census data, decade after decade these populations are still the poorest, still the least educated, still at the highest public assistance rates. Yet services are not there to help them progress in society, to gain the skills they need to get better jobs, to get off public assistance.

Q: It's not unprecedented for this country to be receiving millions of immigrants. Obviously, it happened in the 19th century, and especially early in the 20th century on the East Coast, primarily from Europe. Is what's happening today in California fundamentally different from that?

Kelly: My grandfather was an Irish immigrant. For many years he said he was Scottish because the Irish were so discriminated against. Even if we were all European, we'd have discrimination, so that hasn't really changed. But now there is much more racial diversity among immigrants who are coming. You have many more languages spoken; you have a variety of historical backgrounds, of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Whiteside: Previously, there was the Western European tradition, there were some common roots in terms of religious beliefs and so on. And now what it means to be an American and to express a variety of beliefs within the constitutional array, freedom of religion, all these kinds of things are being challenged in ways that we couldn't anticipate.

Marin: Unless we really have immigration reform, we're going to see this challenge is only exacerbated. Ask people in Mexico how many of them want to come to the United States, and the number is staggering.

Immigration reform cannot be one-sided. In order for immigration reform to work, there also has to be economic reform in Mexico. It cannot just be reform on the part of the United States. I think that would really lead to a more prosperous Mexico and a more prosperous United States.

© 2005 The Fresno Bee