America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
One Nation, Indivisible: Is It History?
First in a series of occasional articles
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 1998; Page A1
At the beginning of this century, as steamers poured into
American ports, their steerages filled with European
immigrants, a Jew from England named Israel Zangwill
In Los Angeles, demographers see
penned a play whose story line has long been forgotten, but
"white flight" beyond the suburbs
whose central theme has not. His production was entitled
and into rural areas.
"The Melting Pot" and its message still holds a tremendous
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post)
power on the national imagination – the promise that all
immigrants can be transformed into Americans, a new alloy forged in a crucible of
democracy, freedom and civic responsibility.
In 1908, when the play opened in Washington, the United States was in the middle of
absorbing the largest influx of immigrants in its history – Irish and Germans, followed by
Italians and East Europeans, Catholics and Jews – some 18 million new citizens between
1890 and 1920.
Today, the United States is experiencing its second great wave of immigration, a movement
of people that has profound implications for a society that by tradition pays homage to its
immigrant roots at the same time it confronts complex and deeply ingrained ethnic and racial
divisions.
The immigrants of today come not from Europe but overwhelmingly from the still developing
world of Asia and Latin America. The are driving a demographic shift so rapid that within the
lifetimes of today's teenagers, no one ethnic group – including whites of European descent –
will comprise a majority of the nation's population.
This shift, according to social historians, demographers and others
studying the trends, will severely test the premise of the fabled melting
pot, the idea, so central to national identity, that this country can
transform people of every color and background into "one America."
Just as possible, they say, is that the nation will continue to fracture
into many separate, disconnected communities with no shared sense of
commonality or purpose. Or perhaps it will evolve into something in
between, a pluralistic society that will hold on to some core ideas about
citizenship and capitalism, but with little meaningful interaction among
groups.
The demographic changes raise other questions about political and
economic power. Will that power, now held disproportionately by
whites, be shared in the new America? What will happen when
Hispanics overtake blacks as the nation's single largest minority?
"I do not think that most Americans really understand the historic
changes happening before their very eyes," said Peter Salins, an
immigration scholar who is provost of the State Universities of New
York. "What are we going to become? Who are we? How do the
newcomers fit in – and how do the natives handle it – this is the great unknown."
This is the first of a series of articles examining the effects of the new demographics on
American life. Over the next few months, other reports will focus on the impact on politics,
jobs, and social institutions.
Fear of strangers, of course, is nothing new in American history. The last great immigration
wave produced a bitter backlash, epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the
return, in the 1920s, of the Ku Klux Klan, which not only targeted blacks, but Catholics, Jews
and immigrants as well.
But despite this strife, many historians argue that there was a greater consensus in the past on
what it meant to be an American, a yearning for a common language and culture, and a desire
– encouraged, if not coerced by members of the dominant white Protestant culture – to
assimilate. Today, they say, there is more emphasis on preserving one's ethnic identity, of
finding ways to highlight and defend one's cultural roots.
Difficult to Measure
More often than not, the neighborhoods where Americans live, the politicians and
propositions they vote for, the cultures they immerse themselves in, the friends and spouses
they have, the churches and schools they attend, and the way they view themselves are
defined by ethnicity. The question is whether, in the midst of such change, there is also
enough glue to hold Americans together.
"As we become more and more diverse, there is all
this potential to make that reality work for us," said
Angela Oh, a Korean American activist who
emerged as a powerful voice for Asian immigrants
after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. "But yet, you
witness this persistance of segregation, the
fragmentation, all these fights over resources, this
finger-pointing. You would have to be blind not to
see it."
It is a phenomenon sometimes difficult to measure, Black community activist Nathaniel J. Wilcox in
but not observe. Houses of worship remain, as the Miami says, "Hispanics don't want some of the
power, they want all the power."
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described it three
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post)
decades ago, among the most segregated
institutions in America, not just by race but also ethnicity. At high school cafeterias, the
second and third generation children of immigrants clump together in cliques defined by
where their parents or grandparents were born. There are television sitcoms, talk shows and
movies that are considered black or white, Latino or Asian. At a place like the law school of
the University of California at Los Angeles, which has about 1,000 students, there are
separate student associations for blacks, Latinos and Asians with their own law review
journals.
It almost goes without saying that today's new arrivals are a source of vitality and energy,
especially in the big cities to which many are attracted. Diversity, almost everyone agrees, is
good; choice is good; exposure to different cultures and ideas is good.
But many scholars worry about the loss of community and shared sense of reality among
Americans, what Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture and communications at New York
University, calls "the twilight of common dreams." The concern is echoed by many on both
the left and right, and of all ethnicities, but no one seems to know exactly what to do about it.
Academics who examine the census data and probe for meaning in the numbers already speak
of a new "demographic balkanization," not only of residential segregation, forced or chosen
but also a powerful preference to see ourselves through a racial prism, wary of others, and, in
many instances, hostile.
At a recent school board meeting in East Palo Alto, Calif., police had to break up a fight
between Latinos and blacks, who were arguing over the merits and expense of bilingual
education in a school district that has shifted over the last few years from majority African
American to majority Hispanic. One parent told reporters that if the Hispanics wanted to learn
Spanish they should stay in Mexico.
The demographic shifts are smudging the old lines demarcating two historical, often distinct
societies, one black and one white. Reshaped by three decades of rapidly rising immigration,
the national story is now far more complicated.
Whites currently account for 74 percent of the population, blacks 12 percent, Hispanics 10
percent and Asians 3 percent. Yet according to data and predictions generated by the U.S.
Census Bureau and social scientists poring over the numbers, Hispanics will likely surpass
blacks early in the next century. And by the year 2050, demographers predict, Hispanics will
account for 25 percent of the population, blacks 14 percent, Asians 8 percent, with whites
hovering somewhere around 53 percent.
As early as next year, whites no longer will be the majority in California; in Hawaii and New
Mexico this is already the case. Soon after, Nevada, Texas, Maryland and New Jersey are also
predicted to become "majority minority" states, entities where no one ethnic group remains
the majority.
Effects of 1965 Law
The overwhelming majority of immigrants come from Asia and Latin
America – Mexico, the Central American countries, the Philippines,
Korea, and Southeast Asia.
What triggered this great transformation was a change to immigration
law in 1965, when Congress made family reunification the primary
criteria for admittance. That new policy, a response to charges that the
law favored white Europeans, allowed immigrants already in the
Korean American activist United States to bring over their relatives, who in turn could bring over
Angela Oh says, "This
more relatives. As a result, America has been absorbing as many as 1
persistence of
million newcomers a year, to the point that now almost 1 in every 10
segregation ... you would
residents is foreign born.
have to be blind not to
see it."
These numbers, relative to the overall population, were slightly higher
at the beginning of this century, but the current immigration wave is in
many ways very different, and its context inexorably altered, from the last great wave.
(By Todd Bigelow
for The Washington Post)
This time around tensions are sharpened by the changing profile of those who are entering
America's borders. Not only are their racial and ethnic backgrounds more varied than in
decades past, their place in a modern postindustrial economy has also been recast.
The newly arrived today can be roughly divided into two camps: those with college degrees
and highly specialized skills, and those with almost no education or job training. Some 12
percent of immigrants have graduate degrees, compared to 8 percent of native Americans. But
more than one-third of the immigrants have no high school diploma, double the rate for those
born in the United States.
Before 1970, immigrants were actually doing better than natives overall, as measured by
education, rate of homeownership and average incomes. But those arriving after 1970, are
younger, more likely to be underemployed and live below the poverty level. As a group, they
are doing worse than natives.
About 6 percent of new arrivals receive some form of welfare, double the rate for U.S.-born
citizens. Among some newcomers – Cambodians and Salvadorans, for example – the numbers
are even higher.
With large numbers of immigrants arriving from Latin America, and segregating in barrios,
there is also evidence of lingering language problems. Consider that in Miami, three-quarters
of residents speak a language other than English at home and 67 percent of those say they are
not fluent in English. In New York City, 4 of every 10 residents speak a language other than
English at home, and of these, half said they do not speak English well.
It is clear that not all of America is experiencing the impact of immigration equally. Although
even small midwestern cities have seen sharp changes in their racial and ethnic mix in the past
two decades, most immigrants continue to cluster into a handful of large, mostly coastal
metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, Washington,
D.C., and Houston. They are home to more than a quarter of the total U.S. population and
more than 60 percent of all foreign-born residents.
But as the immigrants arrive, many American-born citizens pour out of these cities in search
of new homes in more homogeneous locales. New York and Los Angeles each lost more than
1 million native-born residents between 1990 and 1995, even as their populations increased
by roughly the same numbers with immigrants. To oversimplify, said University of Michigan
demographer William Frey, "For every Mexican who comes to Los Angeles, a white nativeborn leaves."
Most of the people leaving the big cities are white and they tend to working class. This is an
entirely new kind of "white flight," whereby whites are not just fleeing the city centers for the
suburbs but also are leaving the region, and often the state.
"The Ozzies and Harriets of the 1990s are skipping the suburbs of the big cities and moving to
more homogeneous, mostly white smaller towns and smaller cities and rural areas," Frey said.
They're headed to Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Denver, Austin and Orlando, as
well as smaller cities in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado and Washington. Frey and other
demographers believe the domestic migrants – black and white – are being "pushed" out, at
least in part, by competition with immigrants for jobs and neighborhoods, political clout and
lifestyle.
Frey sees in this pattern "the emergence of separate Americas, one white and middle-aged,
less urban and another intensely urban, young, multicultural and multiethnic. One America
will care deeply about English as the official language and about preserving Social Security.
The other will care about things like retaining affirmative
action and bilingual education."
Ethnic Segregation
Even within gateway cities that give the outward appearance
of being multicultural, there are sharp lines of ethnic
segregation. When describing the ethnic diversity of a
bellwether megacity such as Los Angeles, many residents
speak soaringly of the great mosaic of many peoples. But the
social scientists who look at the hard census data see
something more complex.
This century's huge wave of
immigrants is attracted to large
metropolitan areas like Los Angeles,
above.
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post)
James P. Allen, a cultural geographer at California State
University-Northridge, suggests that while Los Angeles, as seen from an airplane, is a
tremendously mixed society, on the ground, racial homogeneity and segregation are common.
This is not a new phenomenon; there have always been immigrant neighborhoods. Ben
Franklin, an early proponent of making English the "official language," worried about closeknit German communities. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y) described the lingering
clannishness of Irish and other immigrant populations in New York in "Beyond the Melting
Pot," a benchmark work from the 1960s that he wrote with Nathan Glazer.
But the persistance of ethnic enclaves and identification does not appear to be going away,
and may not in a country that is now home to not a few distinct ethnic groups, but to dozens.
Hispanics in Los Angeles, to take the dominant group in the nation's second largest city, are
more segregated residentially in 1990 than they were 10 or 20 years ago, the census tracts
show. Moreover, it is possible that what mixing of groups that does occur is only a temporary
phenomenon as one ethnic group supplants another in the neighborhood.
If there is deep-seated ethnic segregation, it clearly extends to the American workplace. In
many cities, researchers find sustained "ethnic niches" in the labor market. Because jobs are
often a matter of whom one knows, the niches were enduring and remarkably resistant to
outsiders.
In California, for example, Mexican immigrants are employed overwhelmingly as gardeners
and domestics, in apparel and furniture manufacturing, and as cooks and food preparers.
Koreans open small businesses. Filipinos become nurses and medical technicians. African
Americans work in government jobs, an important niche that is increasingly being challenged
by Hispanics who want in.
UCLA's Roger Waldinger and others have pointed to the creation, in cities of high
immigration, of "dual economies."
For the affluent, which includes a disproportionate number of whites, the large labor pool
provides them with a ready supply of gardeners, maids and nannies. For businesses in need of
cheap manpower, the same is true. Yet there are fewer "transitional" jobs – the blue-collar
work that helped Italian and Irish immigrants move up the economic ladder – to help
newcomers or their children on their way to the jobs requiring advanced technical or
professional skills that now dominate the upper tier of the economy.
A Rung at a Time
Traditionally, immigration scholars have seen the phenomenon of assimilation as a relentless
economic progression. The hard-working new arrivals struggle along with a new language
and at low-paying jobs in order for their sons and daughters to climb the economic ladder,
each generation advancing a rung. There are many cases where this is true.
More recently, there is evidence to suggest that economic movement is erratic and that some
groups – particularly in high immigration cities – can get "stuck."
Among African Americans, for instance, there emerges two distinct patterns. The black
middle class is doing demonstrably better – in income, home ownership rates, education –
than it was when the demographic transformation (and the civil rights movement) began three
decades ago.
But for African Americans at the bottom, research indicates that immigration, particularly of
Latinos with limited education, has increased joblessness, and frustration.
In Miami, where Cuban immigrants dominate the political landscape, tensions are high
between Hispanics and blacks, said Nathaniel J. Wilcox, a community activist there. "The
perception in the black community, the reality, is that Hispanics don't want some of the
power, they want all the power," Wilcox said. "At least when we were going through this with
the whites during the Jim Crow era, at least they'd hire us. But Hispanics won't allow African
Americans to even compete. They have this feeling that their community is the only
community that counts."
Yet many Hispanics too find themselves in an economic "mobility trap." While the new
immigrants are willing to work in low-end jobs, their sons and daughters, growing up in the
barrios but exposed to the relentless consumerism of popular culture, have greater
expectations, but are disadvantaged because of their impoverished settings, particularly the
overwhelmed inner-city schools most immigrant children attend.
"One doubts that a truck-driving future will satisfy today's servants and assemblers. And this
scenario gets a good deal more pessimistic if the region's economy fails to deliver or simply
throws up more bad jobs," writes Waldinger, a professor of sociology and director of center
for regional policy studies at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Though there are calls to revive efforts to encourage "Americanization" of the newcomers,
many researchers now express doubt that the old assimilation model works. For one thing,
there is less of a dominant mainstream to enter. Instead, there are a dozen streams, despite the
best efforts by the dominant white society to lump groups together by ethnicity.
It is a particularly American phenomenon, many say, to label citizens by their ethnicity. When
a person lived in El Salvador, for example, he or she saw themselves as a nationality. When
they arrive in the United States, they become Hispanic or Latino. So too with Asians. Koreans
and Cambodians find little in common, but when they arrive here they become "Asian," and
are counted and courted, encouraged or discriminated against as such.
"My family has had trouble understanding that we are now Asians, and not Koreans, or
people from Korea or Korean Americans, or just plain Americans," said Arthur Lee, who
owns a dry cleaning store in Los Angeles. "Sometimes, we laugh about it. Oh, the Asian
students are so smart! The Asians have no interest in politics! Whatever. But we don't know
what people are talking about. Who are the Asians?"
Many immigrant parents say that while they want their children to advance economically in
their new country, they do not want them to become "too American." A common concern
among Haitians in South Florida is that their children will adopt the attitudes of the inner
city's underclass. Vietnamese parents in New Orleans often try to keep their children
immersed in their ethnic enclave and try not to let them assimilate too fast.
Hyphenated Americans
One study of the children of immigrants, conducted six years ago among young Haitians,
Cubans, West Indians, Mexican and Vietnamese in South Florida and Southern California,
suggests the parents are not alone in their concerns.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/meltingpot/melt0222.htm
Immigrants' Growing Role in U.S. Poverty Cited
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 1999; Page A2
Immigrants are a large and growing factor in the stubborn level of poverty seen in the United
States over the past two decades because newcomers to the country are more likely to be poor
and to remain so longer than in the past, according to a new study.
The report, to be released today by the Center for Immigration Studies, says the number of
impoverished people in the nation's immigrant-headed households nearly tripled from 2.7
million in 1979 to 7.7 million in 1997.
During that same period, the number of poor households headed by immigrants increased by
123 percent while the number of immigrant households increased by 68 percent, according to
the study. The share of immigrants living in poverty rose from 15.5 percent to 21.8 percent,
the report notes, a change that some analysts say holds troubling implications for the nation's
future. About 12 percent of the nation's native-born population lives in poverty, a figure that
has hardly changed in 20 years.
"Each successive wave of immigrants is doing worse and worse," said Steven A. Camarota,
the report's author. "Each wave of immigrants has a higher poverty rate, and a much larger
share of their children will grow up in poverty."
The report by the center, a Washington-based research group that advocates reduced
immigration, uses information compiled in the 1980 and 1990 censuses, as well as
information contained in the March 1998 Current Population Survey, to make its case that
poverty in the United States is increasingly being driven by the nation's immigration policy.
The report says immigrants are more likely to be poor because they have higher levels of
unemployment, have lower education levels and have larger families than native-born
families. And much of their economic slide has come despite the fact that the nation's
economy has been in good shape for much of the past 20 years, the report notes.
The report is rekindling the sharp-edged debate over whether high levels of immigration
benefit the nation. The number of immigrants living in the United States has almost tripled
since 1970, dramatically altering the nation's demographic and social mix because the vast
majority of current immigrants are either Hispanic or Asian. Overall, immigrants now account
for nearly 10 percent of the nation's residents, the highest level since the 1920s. About one in
four Californians and one in three residents of New York are foreign-born.
But while many advocates credit immigrants with filling jobs that few others want,
revitalizing previously neglected city neighborhoods from New York to Los Angeles and
engendering a level of ambition and enterprise often unmatched by native-born residents,
others see high levels of immigration as a burden the country can no longer bear.
If current levels of immigration remain in place, an estimated 10 million new immigrants will
settle in the United States within the next decade, the report says. Increasing the number of
poor people through immigration complicates current anti-poverty efforts, it adds. Moreover,
if immigrant children grow up in poverty, they will be more likely to turn to crime, to have
higher teenage pregnancy rates and to do poorly in school, the report says. Thus, the report
calls for restrictions on the number of "low-skill" immigrants allowed into the country.
"This report clearly illustrates the foreignization of poverty in the United States," said George
J. Borjas, a professor of public policy at Harvard University. "Nowadays, the economic
structure is very different. The economy isn't creating many new jobs for unskilled people."
Immigration advocates objected to the report's conclusions, saying they overlook the
proliferation of low-wage jobs in the U.S. economy as well as the contributions that
immigrants have historically made to the nation, frequently through sheer enterprise and hard
work. Studies have found that immigrant families have a higher propensity for home
ownership and for starting small businesses.
"What really matters here is the growth in low-wage jobs," said Sonia Perez, a deputy vice
president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group. "Many working
people are still in poverty."
The report's author, however, pointed to other research that indicates that many immigrants
and their descendants are having a difficult time making economic progress. A study released
last month by the California Senate found that Hispanic workers in that state lag far behind all
other groups in wages and educational attainment, even through the third generation.
"Even if we make the most optimistic assumptions about how the kids of [immigrants] will
do, the fact remains that we have grown our poor population and that has implications for
societal stability," said Camarota. "We are potentially creating a new underclass in America."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/immig/immig.htm
America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/meltingpot/maps.htm#popchange
SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POPULATION BY RACE: MARCH 1997
(Numbers in thousands)
Marital Status of People 18 Years Old and Older by Race: March 1997
White
Number
Percent
Marital Status
Total population 18+
Married, spouse present
Married, spouse absent
Separated
Other
Widowed
Divorced
Never Married
Black
Number
Percent
Asian and
Pacific Islander
Number
Percent
164,050
100.0
22,772
100.0
7,130
100.0
96,747
5,018
3,241
1,776
11,662
16,149
34,474
59.0
3.1
2.0
1.1
7.1
9.8
21.0
7,759
1,893
1,525
369
1,646
2,569
8,905
34.1
8.3
6.7
1.6
7.2
11.3
39.1
4,068
349
137
212
332
329
2,052
57.1
4.9
1.9
3.0
4.7
4.6
28.8
Geographical Mobility of People 1 Year Old and Older Between March 1996 and March 1997 by Race
White
Number
Percent
Black
Number
Percent
Asian and
Pacific Islander
Number
Percent
Residence in 1996
Total population 1+
217,026
100.0
33,659
100.0
9,905
100.0
Same house
Different house in the U.S.
Same county
Different county
Same state
Different state
Abroad
182,800
33,299
21,485
11,814
6,523
5,291
927
84.2
15.3
9.9
5.4
3.0
2.4
0.4
26,999
6,600
4,847
1,752
1,044
709
61
80.2
19.6
14.4
5.2
3.1
2.1
0.2
7,924
1,676
1,073
603
309
294
305
80.0
16.9
10.8
6.1
3.1
3.0
3.1
34,226
15.8
6,661
19.8
1,981
20.0
Total movers
Educational Attainment of People 25 Years Old and Older by Race: March 1997
White
Number
Percent
Educational Attainment
Total population 25+
None
Elementary: 1-4
Elementary: 5-6
Elementary: 7-8
High school: 1
High school: 2
High school: 3
High school graduate
Some college, no degree
Associate degree: occupational program
Associate degree: academic program
Bachelor's degree
Master's degree
Professional degree
Doctorate degree
Black
Number
Percent
Asian and
Pacific Islander
Number
Percent
144,058
100.0
19,072
100.0
6,107
100.0
661
1,467
2,887
5,823
3,368
4,563
5,659
48,860
24,724
5,603
5,012
23,771
7,943
2,170
1,547
0.5
1.0
2.0
4.0
2.3
3.2
3.9
33.9
17.2
3.9
3.5
16.5
5.5
1.5
1.1
110
301
429
845
500
872
1,733
6,835
3,641
653
619
1,817
567
85
65
0.6
1.6
2.2
4.4
2.6
4.6
9.1
35.8
19.1
3.4
3.2
9.5
3.0
0.4
0.3
126
125
172
176
112
109
101
1,416
780
200
214
1,665
578
190
143
2.1
2.0
2.8
2.9
1.8
1.8
1.7
23.2
12.8
3.3
3.5
27.3
9.5
3.1
2.3
Households by Type and Race of Householder: March 1997
Asian and
White
Number
Percent
Black
Number
Percent
Pacific Islander
Number
Percent
Households by type
Total households
85,059
100.0
12,109
100.0
2,998
100.0
Married couples with children
Married couples without children
Other families with children
Other families without children
People living alone
Other nonfamily households
21,914
25,736
6,322
4,962
21,513
4,612
25.8
30.3
7.4
5.8
25.3
5.4
1,974
1,877
2,913
1,692
3,126
528
16.3
15.5
24.1
14.0
25.8
4.4
1,032
731
171
312
560
191
34.4
24.4
5.7
10.4
18.7
6.4
http://www.bls.census.gov/cps/pub/1997/int_race.htm
America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
Immigrants Shunning Idea of Assimilation
Third in a series of occasional articles
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 25, 1998; Page A1
OMAHA – Night is falling on South Omaha, and Maria Jacinto is
patting tortillas for the evening meal in the kitchen of the small house
she shares with her husband and five children. Like many others in her
neighborhood, where most of the residents are Mexican immigrants,
the Jacinto household mixes the old country with the new.
As Jacinto, who speaks only Spanish, stresses a need to maintain the
family's Mexican heritage, her eldest son, a bilingual 11-year-old who
wears a San Francisco 49ers jacket and has a paper route, comes in and
joins his brothers and sisters in the living room to watch "The
Simpsons."
Jacinto became a U.S. citizen last April, but she does not feel like an
American. In fact, she seems resistant to the idea of assimilating into
U.S. society.
Maria Jacinto, with her
husband, Aristeo, and
one of their five children,
speaks only Spanish.
"When my skin turns
white and my hair turns
blonde, then I'll be an
American," she says.
(By William Branigin
– The Washington Post)
"I think I'm still a Mexican," she says. "When my skin turns white and my hair turns blonde,
then I'll be an American."
In many ways, the experiences of the Jacinto family are typical of the gradual process of
assimilation that has pulled generations of immigrants into the American mainstream. That
process is nothing new to Omaha, which drew waves of Czech, German and Irish immigrants
early this century.
But in the current immigration wave, something markedly different is happening here in the
middle of the great American "melting pot."
Not only are the demographics of the United States changing in profound and unprecedented
ways, but so too are the very notions of assimilation and the melting pot that have been
articles of faith in the American self-image for generations. E Pluribus Unum (From Many,
One) remains the national motto, but there no longer seems to be a consensus about what that
should mean.
There is a sense that, especially as immigrant populations reach a critical mass in many
communities, it is no longer the melting pot that is transforming them, but they who are
transforming American society.
American culture remains a powerful force – for better or worse – that influences people both
here and around the world in countless ways. But several factors have combined in recent
years to allow immigrants to resist, if they choose, the Americanization that had once been
considered irresistible.
In fact, the very concept of assimilation is being called into question as never before. Some
sociologists argue that the melting pot often means little more than "Anglo conformity" and
that assimilation is not always a positive experience – for either society or the immigrants
themselves. And with today's emphasis on diversity and ethnicity, it has become easier than
ever for immigrants to avoid the melting pot entirely. Even the metaphor itself is changing,
having fallen out of fashion completely with many immigration advocacy and ethnic groups.
They prefer such terms as the "salad bowl" and the "mosaic," metaphors that convey more of
a sense of separateness in describing this nation of immigrants.
"It's difficult to adapt to the culture here," said Maria Jacinto, 32, who moved to the United
States 10 years ago with her husband, Aristeo Jacinto, 36. "In the Hispanic tradition, the
family comes first, not money. It's important for our children not to be influenced too much
by the gueros," she said, using a term that means "blondies" but that she employs generally in
reference to Americans. "I don't want my children to be influenced by immoral things."
Over the blare of the television in the next room, she asked, "Not all families here are like the
Simpsons, are they?"
Among socially conservative families such as the Jacintos, who initially moved to California
from their village in Mexico's Guanajuato state, then migrated here in 1988 to find jobs in the
meatpacking industry, bad influences are a constant concern. They see their children
assimilating, but often to the worst aspects of American culture.
Her concerns reflect some of the complexities and ambivalence that mark the assimilation
process these days. Immigrants such as the Jacintos are here to stay but remain wary of their
adoptive country. According to sociologists, they are right to be concerned.
"If assimilation is a learning process, it involves learning good things and bad things," said
Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at Michigan State University. "It doesn't always
lead to something better."
At work, not only in Omaha but in immigrant communities across the country, is a process
often referred to as "segmented" assimilation, in which immigrants follow different paths to
incorporation in U.S. society. These range from the classic American ideal of blending into
the vast middle class, to a "downward assimilation" into an adversarial underclass, to a
buffered integration into "immigrant enclaves." Sometimes, members of the same family end
up taking sharply divergent paths, especially children and their parents.
The ambivalence of assimilation can cut both ways. Many native-born Americans also seem
to harbor mixed feelings about the process. As a nation, the United States increasingly
promotes diversity, but there are underlying concerns that the more emphasis there is on the
factors that set people apart, the more likely that society will end up divided.
With Hispanics, especially Mexicans, accounting for an increasing proportion of U.S.
population growth, it is this group, more than any other, that is redefining the melting pot.
Hispanics now have overtaken blacks as the largest minority group in Nebraska and will
become the biggest minority in the country within the next seven years, according to Census
Bureau projections. The nation's 29 million Hispanics, the great majority of them from
Mexico, have thus become the main focus for questions about how the United States today is
assimilating immigrants, or how it is being transformed.
In many places, new Hispanic immigrants have tended to cluster in "niche" occupations, live
in segregated neighborhoods and worship in separate churches. In this behavior they are much
like previous groups of immigrants. But their heavy concentrations in certain parts of the
country, their relatively close proximity to their native lands and their sheer numbers give this
wave of immigrants an unprecedented potential to change the way the melting pot
traditionally has worked.
Never before have so many immigrants come from a single country – Mexico – or from a
single linguistic source-Spanish-speaking Latin America. Since 1970, more than half of the
estimated 20 million foreign-born people who have settled in the United States, legally and
illegally, have been Spanish speakers.
Besides sheer numbers, several factors combine to make this influx unprecedented in the
history of American immigration. This is the first time that such large numbers of people are
immigrating from a contiguous country. And since most have flowed into relatively few
states, congregating heavily in the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have the
capacity to develop much greater cohesion than previous immigrant groups. Today Hispanics,
mostly of Mexican origin, make up 31 percent of the population of California and 28 percent
of the population of Texas.
In effect, that allows Mexican Americans to "perpetuate themselves as a separate community
and even strengthen their sense of separateness if they chose to, or felt compelled to," said
David M. Kennedy, a professor of American history at Stanford University.
To be sure, assimilation today often follows the same pattern that it has for generations. The
children of immigrants, especially those who were born in the United States or come here at a
young age, tend to learn English quickly and adopt American habits. Often they end up
serving as translators for their parents. Schools exert an important assimilating influence, as
does America's consumer society.
But there are important differences in the way immigrants adapt these days, and the
influences on them can be double-edged. Gaps in income, education and poverty levels
between new immigrants and the native-born are widening, and many of the newcomers are
becoming stuck in dead-end jobs with little upward mobility.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/meltingpot/melt0222.htm
America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
In L.A., a Sense of Future Conflicts
Second in a series of occasional articles
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 7, 1998; Page A1
LOS ANGELES – Two pictures hanging in the lobby of
Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center offer silent
testimony to a view shared by many blacks here that the
hospital was built by and for African Americans.
Hilda Bueno leaves
the Martin Luther
King Jr. Medical
Center in South
Central Los
Angeles with her
son Jose Manuel
Cuevas, 2.
(By Todd Bigelow for
The Washington Post)
King hospital rose from the ashes of the 1965 riots, a
belated answer to the long-ignored complaint that the county's white-run health system
neglected the black community. Before the facility opened in 1972, there was no public
hospital in predominantly black South Central Los Angeles.
But the regal visages of the slain civil rights leader and black county Supervisor Yvonne
Brathwaite Burke now overlook a new, often disconcerting reality: Most of the patients and
visitors in the hospital are Latino, not black. Many are holding conversations in Spanish. And
increasingly, they are pressing the hospital to hire doctors and other top staff members who
look and talk like them – a demand Latino leaders say is met largely with indifference, if not
indignation, from the hospital's black managers and its political patrons.
"At King, you now have a black island in a brown sea," said Rees Lloyd, a lawyer for an
Indian American doctor who alleges he was continuously passed over for promotions because
he is not black. "A lot of people are uncomfortable with that."
The change rumbling through King hospital is just a fraction of the fallout from a seismic
shift in the racial makeup of Los Angeles County. In 1960, four out of five people in the
county were white. But a wave of immigration has transformed the jurisdiction into one
where no ethnic or racial group holds the majority. The county's population of 9.5 million is
now 41 percent Hispanic, 37 percent white, 11 percent Asian and 10 percent black. The
Latino and Asian populations each have more than doubled in the past 20 years, dramatically
altering the dynamics of race here.
Just over a decade ago, the broad swath of the county popularly known as South Central was
synonymous with black Los Angeles. But now middle-class African Americans are leaving,
often dispersing to communities that once were all white. Asian Americans, who once
congregated in enclaves near downtown, are moving into suburban communities that ring
L.A. Meanwhile, many non-Hispanic whites are often relocating to even more distant suburbs
or leaving California altogether.
What is happening here represents the leading edge of racial and ethnic changes affecting
communities across America. Demographers predict that by the middle of the next century the
nation as a whole will look much like Los Angeles does now: a rich tapestry of people whose
sheer diversity makes once familiar notions of racial interaction obsolete.
"Politicians like to say that diversity is our greatest strength," said Ron Wakabayashi,
executive director of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. "That is b.s.
Diversity simply is. The core question is how do we extract its assets while minimizing its
liabilities?"
To be sure, the new immigrants have renewed old neighborhoods, created new businesses and
enriched the culture of Los Angeles. But the exploding diversity also has changed the nature
of racial conflict and drawn new groups into battles that once were waged almost exclusively
between blacks and whites. Here, black and Latino civil servants square off over public jobs.
Blacks activists and Asian store owners fight over control of local businesses. And Latino and
Asian gangs battle for control of their turf.
This new reality fuels the racial isolation evident in many walks of life here. Researchers have
found deep racial divisions in the Los Angeles job market – partly the result of discrimination
but reinforced because people typically find jobs through personal connections that most often
do not cross racial or ethnic lines. Many of the furniture factories in South Central have only
Latino workers. The toy factories near downtown employ mainly Chinese. Many of the small
grocery stores are owned and run by Koreans. And African Americans disproportionately
work in government jobs, where they are desperately trying to hold their place in the face of
fierce competition from Latinos who want in.
Biggest Bigots: Often, It's Minorities
As Los Angeles is learning, minorities are often quick to embrace negative racial stereotypes
of one another. A poll by the National Conference, a nonprofit organization that promotes
racial dialogue, found that minorities tend to share bitter feelings toward whites, whom they
call bigoted and bossy. But the national survey found that minorities often harbored even
harsher views of one another.
Nearly half of Latinos and 40 percent of African Americans agree that Asian Americans are
"unscrupulous, crafty and devious in business." Only one in four whites agrees with that
statement. More than two out of three Asian Americans and half of African Americans and
whites believe Latinos tend to "have bigger families than they are able to support."
Meanwhile, Latinos are almost three times as likely as whites to believe that blacks "aren't
capable of getting ahead" even if given the opportunity, the poll found.
Those attitudes contribute to the friction that often marks racial interaction in Los Angeles.
Rather than prompting people to come together, the more common reality of the new diversity
is people living separate lives in often vibrant but segregated communities. In Los Angeles,
there are suburban developments, such as Monterey Park, that are almost exclusively Chinese.
There is a Little Saigon and enclaves of Samoans and Hmong and Russians and Iranians.
And when people from diverse backgrounds find themselves thrust together in the same
neighborhoods, the same jobs or the same schools, the result can often be conflict.
Nowhere is that more vivid than in the county's South Central corridor, where the number of
Latinos is overwhelming the African American population. Much as blacks demanded a fairer
share of the power and resources from whites a generation ago, Latinos are now demanding
that blacks and others share jobs, special school programs and political control. And like
whites before them, many African Americans feel threatened by those demands.
"Latinos have their own. Blacks have their own," said Royce Esters, former president of the
NAACP branch that includes Compton, a city in the South Central corridor. "It's a power
play. Blacks feel like they have marched and marched and the Latinos have not marched. As a
result, blacks are afraid of another race coming in and taking something they have worked so
hard to get."
For much of its history, Compton was a virtually all-white suburb of Los Angeles, where
segregation was enforced with racist attacks and laws that barred African Americans from
buying homes. A 1948 Supreme Court decision lifted the legal barriers, but the acceptance of
African Americans was slow and difficult. The first blacks who dared venture to Compton
were greeted with white hostility: Paint was smeared on their homes, flower gardens were
uprooted, crosses were burned on their lawns.
But blacks persevered and by the 1960s had established a racial majority. When they finally
wrested political control of Compton from whites in the 1960s, that ascendancy became a
source of racial pride, with residents boasting that Compton was the largest black-run city
west of the Mississippi.
Blacks Face a New Challenge
Now, three decades later, an extraordinary wave of immigration has pushed Latinos into the
majority in Compton, except in the corridors of power. Blacks still control the mayor's office,
the city council, all but one school board seat and four out of five municipal jobs in Compton.
Just as a generation ago blacks questioned that kind of white domination, blacks find
themselves being challenged by Latino demands for power.
The long-simmering tension boiled over in 1994 when a black Compton police officer was
caught on videotape beating Latino teenager Felipe Soltero. The incident angered Latinos in
Compton much the same way as the bludgeoning of black motorist Rodney G. King by white
police officers incensed African Americans. The incident pushed the city toward the edge of
rioting, and resulted in a civil suit against the officer. The officer was found to have violated
Soltero's rights but the youth was awarded only $1 in damages by a federal judge after a
racially mixed jury refused to award anything.
"It was kind of like the first Rodney King trial," said Danilo Becerra, Soltero's lawyer. "I've
never seen a more blatant example of injustice."
Latino leaders in Compton call the outcome of that case one small manifestation of the
disparities that routinely go unaddressed by the city's black leadership. Nearly two-thirds of
the city's 29,000 public school students are Latino but less than 10 percent of its teaching staff
is. There are separate chamber of commerces, one for Latinos and one for blacks. But only the
group with black members receives city funds. "As far as I can tell, everything in this city is
directed to the blacks," said John Ortega, a longtime Compton resident. "Not so long ago,
[school officials] even took a load of students to Africa. ... I sure don't see them going to
Mexico."
In few places has the tension between blacks and Latinos emerged more vividly than in the
pitched racial battle occurring at King hospital, a linchpin in the nation's second largest public
health care system.
From the beginning, King was more than a medical center for many blacks in South Central,
who felt their forebears had fought – and died – to see it built.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/meltingpot/melt0407a.htm
America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
Sweat of Their Brows Reshapes Economy
Another in a series of occasional articles
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 13, 1998; Page A01
HOUSTON
The pickup trucks roll into the graveled yard, and the bosses crank down their windows to
place their orders, to tell the foreman of this dusty open-air labor market what jobs they need
to fill.
Some 200 laborers herded behind a chain-link fence, all immigrants, listen intently. This day,
the bosses driving the trucks are hiring roofing crews to spread boiling tar under a merciless
sun. They need house painters, drywall hangers, cement spreaders, bricklayers and ditch
diggers. They want men to ream clogged septic tanks, to haul away asbestos, to crawl under
houses and kill rats.
These newcomers in the day-laborer pen, from Mexico and El Salvador and Guatemala,
represent a tide of humanity that is having a profound effect on the economy of the United
States. Immigrants today do some of the dirtiest, most difficult and dangerous work in
America, the work that native-born Americans – of any ethnicity or race – often will no
longer do, or no longer do for the wages offered.
"How much?" asks the foreman, Abdonel Cespedes, who supervises the day-labor yard for an
immigrant organization.
"Five bucks," say the bosses. Cespedes will tell them $6.50 is the going rate for an hour's
honest labor. Many of the men buying workers will repeat themselves, as if Cespedes did not
understand their English. Five bucks. Then they wait to see what happens.
The immigrants understand the law of supply and demand, and they do the math. Is it better to
jump into the truck now, for less money, but a guarantee of five $10 bills at the end of the
day? Or wait, for a better offer, one that may not come?
In gateway cities such as Houston, immigrants provide a source of cheap labor that has
changed the way many Americans live – not only those who benefit from the work that
immigrants provide but also those who compete against them. Just as microwave ovens or
cellular phones have changed daily life, so now does immigrant labor provide service and
ease, maids and cooks, cleaners and care-givers, painters and babysitters – for American
businesses and often directly to the middle classes.
As the country experiences one of the most massive immigrations in modern history, much of
the public debate has focused on whether the arrival of 1 million newcomers a year, legal and
illegal, is a good or a bad thing – whether the cost of educating immigrant children or feeding
their poor is worth the benefit that comes from allowing them in. Whether, in the most
simplistic terms, immigrants are a net gain or net drain, not only to the economy but to
American culture and lifestyle.
But just looking at the bottom line is not enough. A day in the life of Houston, or New York,
or the District of Columbia would not be the same without immigrants, who toil not only on
the bottom rungs of the economy, but also on the top.
This is about the jobs they do, about four immigrants in particular, and the rippling effects of
their work – as a day laborer, a high-rise window washer, a manicurist and a physician.
The success of these and most immigrants in the United States is harnessed to many factors.
Their legal status, their education and how much money they had in their pockets when they
arrived plays an unmistakable role in the choices they make and the lives they lead.
But taken together, the stories of these four immigrants, from Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam
and India, reveal much about the role of immigrants in the modern American economy. They
show how newcomers have taken over whole sectors of the labor force; how they compete
with native-born Americans; how they have created new services and wealth; and how they
are recasting the American dream, not only for themselves, but for everyone else as well.
Day-to-Day Workhorses
The early morning sky is beginning to glow with heat when a van comes into the day-labor
yard. The boss behind the wheel is an elderly man, with deep ebony skin and a long snowy
white beard, his eyeglasses held together with tape and rubber bands. He is looking for three
movers. Cespedes asks the laborers, in Spanish, who wants to work for the man he dubs
"Santa Claus."
Manuel Barrera steps forward from behind the fence. Moving is hard, heavy lifting, but there
may be shade, even air conditioning. The man with the beard offers him too little. Barrera
holds out. He wants $7 an hour but settles for $6.50. Two other men agree to go too.
Later, Barrera confesses, "I was ashamed to fight for pennies."
Now 48, Barrera crossed the Rio Grande while in his twenties on his long journey from
Guatemala City to Houston for one single purpose: to work for U.S. dollars. He says that he
has neither been welcomed with open arms nor been turned away. He, too, is ambivalent
about Americans. His life, he believes, is better in Houston, but also very hard. He hopes his
children will do better.
Immigrants like Barrera have taken over entire sectors of the labor market, creating new
wealth and offering services that were unavailable or too costly. They have made money for
themselves and for the middlemen. But they have also competed, with a ferocity fired by a
will to survive, with the native-born Americans who lack the skills required for advancement
in the new post-industrial economy.
The job market this current wave of immigrants enter is vastly different from the one that
absorbed the last great wave of immigrants earlier this century. Today, the factories are gone,
and the economy resembles an hourglass. At the top, the elevator class works in tall buildings
shuffling papers and typing on keypads. At the bottom, immigrants paint the walls and clean
the carpets. There are fewer and fewer jobs requiring medium-level skills for average pay. It
is as if someone has cut the rungs from the middle of the ladder.
Because many immigrants have only modest educations, their ability to move from the lower
rungs of the ladder to the higher has grown more difficult. At the top of the economy, the
opportunity for advancement is great and salaries are climbing; at the bottom, wages are
stagnant or falling. For the lowest-paid workers, a recent Rand Corp. study shows, inflationadjusted wages are about one-third lower than they were in the 1970s. To be an immigrant
day laborer in Houston is to throw the dice every day. Breaking even is enough. At dozens of
street corners around the city, men jump into moving pickup trucks, heading for work. Some
are stranded at the job site at day's end, with no car to get them home. Some are cheated of
their wages.
On this day in the life of immigrants hard at work, Manuel Barrera goes with Santa Claus,
first to rent a very large moving van, and that is when Barrera begins to think this day will not
be easy. He drives the van with a bad clutch to a storage company, where the entire contents
of a now-shuttered store have been impounded as part of a repossession. The job is to unload
everything from one van parked at the storage facility, transport the contents across town and
unload at another storage site.
Barrera opens the first truck, which is filled to the ceiling with a jumble of garage-sale junk,
refrigerators and art from Africa – carved masks and ceremonial spears and huge pieces of
mahogany furniture, the heaviest furniture ever made.
Barrera sighs. There will be no air conditioning today. The metal-sided vans are ovens, and as
the day wears on, the heat becomes something a man physically recoils from and the loads to
lift so heavy that Barrera and his co-workers almost fear them, as if the weight could break a
man.
There is no lunch break. No toilets. That is assumed. After a few hours, the men grow dizzy,
weave on their feet and demand something to drink. It is so hot that not only is Barrera's shirt
soaked with sweat, but so are his bluejeans, lathered in a white froth, like a horse.
Barrera is a man with a happy face but, he says, he has a heavy heart. He believes he should
not be here, surrounded by younger men, offering his body for day labor. He has worked here
as a baker, a shoemaker. He is a married man and a father of three who owns a simple home
and a little white truck. After years of living in the shadows as an illegal alien, his papers are
now in order.
"This is work, and I will do it because it puts food on the table," Barrera says. "But I did not
foresee that it would turn out like this."
This is how it is in America. This is the kind of work that many of the record-breaking
number of new immigrants do. This is the fine print of the deal between the newcomers and
the native-born that is overlooked in the thick reports of numbers compiled by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics and in the research of think tanks examining the immigrants' impact.
After eight hours of work, Santa Claus pays the men, including the "bonus" he has been
promising all day. The two younger workers get $50. Barrera is given $60 because he knew
how to drive the van, a skill worth a bit more. "You all sure got me out of a jam," Santa Claus
says. "You all are hard workers, hard."
Moving his possessions, including the art and furniture he says is worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars, cost Santa Claus $217.88, rental van included. A professional moving
company in Houston bid the same job for $980.
After his hours in the sun, loading and unloading the vans, Manuel Barrera is about to head
home to his wife and children. His last words to a reporter who has spent the day with him: "If
you hear about a better job, will you call me?"
Latching On to a Niche
The high summer winds are whipping the American flag against its pole, hard and clanging
like a ship's mast in a gale, as Demetrio Luna swings from his wooden bench, suspended
against the mirrored windows of a 23-story building, buckled into his long ropes, with a soapy
bucket, a brush and a squeegee at hand.
For the past seven years, Luna has washed the windows of the tallest buildings in Houston,
among the highest in the world. He has cleaned the glass skins of Texas Commerce Bank and
the Transco Tower, each more than 60 stories tall. He is proud of this. "It is a good job," Luna
says in an English still thick with Spanish inflections. It is a job for men with courage.
His uncle taught him how to swing from the ropes. Luna remembers the first time he lowered
himself off the side of a building. "I was afraid," he says. Now? "It is like walking on the
ground."
From his perch high above the city, Luna can see clear across Houston. The downtown
skyline and the Astrodome rise from a rumpled carpet of steaming trees. He can see the corner
lot where Manuel Barrera waited for his day job. He can see, too, his neighborhood to the
southwest, the new barrio, where he lives with his wife and two young children. Luna, now
33, left his home in Saltillo, Mexico, when he was 16. He crossed the border with the idea that
he would stay a few years and return, like so many of the transnational "sojourners" in the
past. His father back home, a true sojourner who picked crops in Florida for 40 seasons, long
ago stopped asking his son when he was coming home. Luna is never going to return to
Saltillo.
His decision to remain in Houston, to marry and raise a family, is part of the transformation of
this broad-shouldered Texas town and is helping to make Houston one of the most diverse
cities in the United States. Its population is 41 percent Anglo, 30 percent Hispanic, 25 percent
black and 4 percent Asian. In the last two decades, the number of immigrants in Houston has
soared. By 2000, one in five Houstonians will be foreign-born.
Right now, many people in Houston are only too happy to have immigrants such as Demetrio
Luna around to clean their windows. The city is booming. Houston's economy, which endured
cycles of giddy boom and brutal bust in the 1970s and 1980s, has been transformed.
Unemployment now stands at 3.7 percent. Jobs go begging. Immigrants are welcome, at least
by those who do not have to compete with them.
Luna, like many immigrants, has burrowed into a specialized work niche. Immigrants wash
the windows of skyscrapers in Houston. Native-born Americans do not.
There are hundreds of such niches as those filled by the window washers. In Houston, whole
villages of Mayans from Guatemala have been transplanted to work cleaning and stocking the
shelves of the Randall's and Albertson's grocery store chains. Nigerians drive taxis.
Vietnamese open nail salons. Indians practice medicine. Where once the domestic servants of
the posh old-line Houston enclave of River Oaks were all black, today the maids and
caregivers are almost exclusively Latino. The precise job niches and the immigrants who fill
them change from city to city across America, but the overall pattern does not.
There was a time, a decade ago, when young workers from the Rust Belt and urban blacks
washed the windows of Houston's high-rises. No more. This transformation has had two
major effects. Those who buy or sell Luna's labor, such as his contractor and the building
owners, benefit from lower wages and lower costs. Those who compete do not. They change
jobs, acquire more skills or move to cities where immigrants are few.
Ray Cook has been a painter and a union man for 38 years, all his working life. His union
local, which represents painters, glazers, tile layers and drywallers – the bedrock trades for the
building industry – has dwindled from 2,000 members in the early 1980s to about 350 today
because the work is now being done by non-union immigrants such as Luna. The average age
of the local's members is 57. "They either retire or die," Cook says.
Cook used to despise the immigrants who stole their jobs. "I called those non-union painters a
scab or a rat or worse," he remembers. "But I did a 180-degree turnaround. These immigrants,
as you call them, they're good men. Most of them work hard, though they might not know
what they're doing. But we're all workers. I don't have a problem with them anymore. I have a
problem with the contractors."
In Houston, a union painter makes $17.94 an hour, which includes health, welfare and
pension benefits. Demetrio Luna or Manuel Barrera, or any of their friends who can pick up a
brush, will work for far less money and no benefits.
"I don't care what the economists say, our wage structure is based on how little the
immigrants are willing to work for," says Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO
in Houston. "They're bringing our wages down, and we have the pillars of the community
employing them at below minimum wage." The reason many Houstonians feel little animosity
toward immigrants, Shaw says, "is because they're going to work 'em 'til they use 'em up."
Shaw also says that while Houston wants the cheap labor, the citizens have voted, repeatedly,
against raising the minimum wage, improving the public schools or increasing funding for the
county hospitals in the areas where the immigrants live.
In his service to the elevator classes, Demetrio Luna makes between $1,700 and $2,700 a
month, depending on the work, and probably averages around $10 or $12 an hour, with no
pension, benefits or insurance. He is satisfied with the money he makes and said he has no
intention of joining a union, which he fears would make him less attractive to employers.
Luna has two young daughters – "having more in America is too expensive" – and his wife,
who is a Mexican American born here, works as an assistant manager in a pawn shop. She has
health insurance for herself and her children. Luna loves his shiny red, late-model Dodge
pickup truck and dancing to the Tejano tunes at the neon-lit clubs. "I am okay," he says. Life
is much better here than in Saltillo, even though, on average, immigrants across the nation
earn 15 percent less than the native-born, and Mexican newcomers earn less than half of what
other Americans make.
When asked how his daughters will fare in his new country, this new economy, Luna grows
uncertain. "They will need to do better," he says.
The 'Good Immigrant'
Like Demetrio Luna, Mai Tran came to this country as a teenager. She was not fleeing
poverty in Mexico, but the communists in Vietnam. Luna's father was a field hand; Tran came
from a well-to-do merchant family. She left her home aboard a smuggler's boat, paying her
way with bars of gold. She spent months at an internment camp in Malaysia, and then arrived
in Houston, legally, a refugee in 1981, following her sister but leaving her parents behind. She
was 18 years old then. Today she shops the sales at Neiman Marcus.
Tran went to community college here and studied drafting and worked as a waitress in
restaurants, including a place called the Brisket House, where she learned that Texans like
baked potatoes with chives and sour cream, and even ketchup. "It was very confusing. And if
you got it wrong – 'No chives?' – there was hell to pay." Mai Tran can laugh about this now.
She is solidly middle class, and through her clients, gets orchestra seats at the opera.
At her sister's urging, Tran attended a school of cosmetology to study for 250 hours the art
and science of the modern manicure. She discovered she was good with her hands and good
for the hands she buffed and polished. With money she had saved working in the salon of
another Vietnamese, Tran opened her own shop seven years ago on a tony shopping strip near
Rice University. Her loyal customers like the care she puts into their nails. They also like
Tran, for her smart-alecky, no-nonsense commentary and because she listens to the stories of
their lives.
"She's my psychiatrist," says one devoted client, a criminal defense investigator who has been
having her nails done every Thursday afternoon for years. "She knows everything about me."
Her salon is the calm in a storm of middle-class angst. Coffee klatch and way station. Tran
knows not only her clients' favorite shades of polish, but the names of their boyfriends,
husbands and children. She listens, all the while whittling away with her emery board, as they
tell her of their travails at work, the boyfriend who forgets to send flowers, the illnesses of
their parents.
Mai Tran, now 35, is the kind of immigrant who does not so much compete against the
native-born but creates new economic possibilities. She complements the American economy
– like maids or nannies or valet parkers or ethnic restaurants for the middle classes. The
phenomenon of the nail salon is a new one, created over the last few years, whereby a million
women who once saw the occasional manicurist for weddings or proms now visit weekly.
There is now a Nail Industry, built largely by Vietnamese immigrants, supporting three
magazines devoted to the subject (one in Vietnamese) and dozens of suppliers.
While the nail salon is fun for the clients, Tran herself does not have easy work. She spends
12 hours a day, year after year, at her little table, pushing back cuticles and buffing tips, with
surgical precision, but over and over again. It has given her a piece of the American dream,
but this is extraordinarily tedious work – and few native-born Americans with Tran's
education and intelligence would submit themselves to the task of applying polish.
But Tran is the "good immigrant," the latest incarnation of the mythical Horatio Alger success
stories. She did not take a job from anybody. She remade herself into a success story. Tran is
about to open a larger salon, with more employees and subcontractors who will offer facials
and massages.
"I have heard about the bad things that happen to immigrants," she says. "I've heard
Americans are racists and all the rest. But when you come and work hard, they love you."
A Better Life
Kalpalatha Guntupalli came to America, too, looking for a better life, and as she guides a
visitor through the pulmonary critical care unit at Harris County's Ben Taub Hospital, where
she is chief, it is clear that she has found what she was looking for. Her curriculum vitae runs
32 pages.
Trained first in India, where her parents were lower-middle-class teachers, she and all her
siblings are now doctors. When Guntupalli came to America in the 1970s, there was a great
demand for physicians, and today, so-called international medical graduates number 160,000
of the 650,000 physicians in the United States. An amazing 26,000 of them are from India,
which is one of the world's largest producers of doctors. On the walls of her office at Ben
Taub are pictures of her with President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the
emergency rooms below, however, the indigent patients are lined up, gurneys pressed
together, the dinged-out and the damaged, with no insurance, waiting their turns and soiling
their sheets. It is a good hospital, but the one that draws some of the sickest patients, the street
people, with nowhere else to go. Many of the doctors bustling about in their white jackets are
immigrants.
"I've been here for more than half my life," Guntupalli says, but because of her last name and
her lilting accent, even other physicians ask her, "When are you going back home?" She, like
Tran, Luna and Barrera, will never go back home to live. They are the new Americans.
"Initially, there is this hesitation," says Guntupalli, now 48. "The color of your skin, your
accent, your last name. But no other country will offer you what America does."
Immigrant doctors now serve many of the most needy patient populations in the United
States. They staff the clinics and hospitals such as Ben Taub, serving the inner cities and rural
areas – jobs that many native-born doctors will not do. This month, Guntupalli will become
president of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, which has been
fighting to ensure that foreign-born physicians are not discriminated against before licensing
boards or medical school selection committees.
As she makes a round of the intensive care unit, filled with the very ill patients, Guntupalli
praises the work that immigrant doctors have done in America.
But the door is closing. The medical professions, and the government commissions that
oversee immigration of the highly skilled, are forecasting a glut of physicians. As a result, the
commissions are reducing the number of foreign-trained doctors who are allowed to practice
in the United States.
But at the bottom of the ladder, where wages are cheap and the benefits of keeping it that way
are many, there appears to be no similar effort.
No stopping legal immigrants, that is, who come to take their chance alongside Manuel
Barrera.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
America's Racial and Ethnic Divides
A White Migration North From
Miami
Fifth in a series of occasional articles
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 11, 1998; Page A1
WESTON, Fla. – Everything here is nice and neat, just the
way Joanne Smith likes it. The developers call their new city Gated entrances and patrol cars
on the edge of the Everglades "Our Home Town," and Smith provide Weston, Fla., residents with
security. By Andrew Itkoff for The
agrees. "It's more like America," she says.
Washington Post)
Like thousands of others, Smith moved to this planned community 40 miles north of Miami
just a few years ago, searching for a safe and secure neighborhood like this one, where both
modest homes and rambling mansions sit against the manicured landscape of palm and
hibiscus, and gated streets called Wagon Way and Windmill Ranch gently curve around the
shallow lagoons and golf links.
Weston is a boomtown filling with refugees. But the migrants pouring into this part of
Broward County are rarely those from the Caribbean, Central and South America – the
immigrants to the south who have transformed Miami and surrounding Dade County into a
metropolis proudly called by its business and political leaders "The Gateway to Latin
America."
Instead, the refugees here are mostly native-born and white, young and old, and they have
been streaming up from Miami for years now, creating a new version of the traditional "white
flight" in reaction not to black inner cities, but to immigration.
While Miami is unique in many respects, because of both geography and politics, the outmigration of whites is occurring in other high-immigration cities. New York and Los Angeles,
for example, each lost a million U.S.-born residents in the last decade, as they gained a
million immigrants.
According to an analysis of the most recent census data, for almost every immigrant who
came to Miami-Dade County in recent years, a white non-Hispanic left.
"I loved Miami, but it's a mad scene down there now," said Smith, who is semi-retired and
asked that her occupation not be given. Before her move to Weston, Smith lived in Miami for
two decades, "in a nice neighborhood gone bad. People say things, 'Oh that's change and that's
progress,' but I like it clean and green – and everybody speaking English," Smith says.
In discussions about the historic demographic transformations occurring in the United States,
which is absorbing almost 1 million immigrants a year, most of the attention focuses quite
naturally on the newcomers: Who are they and where are they from and how do they make
their way in America?
But immigration is a two-way street – and the welcome the immigrants receive from the
native-born is crucial for the continued idea of America as a fabled "melting pot." Of course,
there are many whites – and blacks, too – who have remained in Miami-Dade County, to
either continue their lives as before or accept, even embrace the Latin tempo of Miami, who
have learned how to pronounce masas de puerco at lunchtime and to fake a respectable
merengue dance step, who enjoy the culture, the business opportunities and caffeinated hustle
of a metropolis dominated by immigrants. No one could call Miami dull.
But it is almost as if there are two kinds of native whites – those who can deal with
multiculturalism that has transformed Miami over the past several decades and those who
choose not to. Either way, if the country is to successfully transform itself into a completely
multicultural industrialized nation, what these internal migrants say – and there are millions of
them around the country – needs to be heard and understood.
Those transplants interviewed by The Washington Post, including those who asked that their
names not be used, take pains to explain that, for the most part, the people like them who are
moving out of Miami-Dade to Broward are not anti-immigrant xenophobes.
In several dozen interviews with a cross-section of these "domestic migrants," a picture
emerges of a segment of the non-Hispanic white population in Miami-Dade County that feels
marginalized, exasperated and sometimes bitter, and who move from Dade to Broward with a
mix of emotions.
Migrants to Broward give many reasons for the move north: Their money buys a bigger,
newer house in Broward; they are tired of the traffic and congestion; they worry about crime;
they complain about the overcrowded schools; those with young families often say they are
looking for a place where their children can play ball in the front yard and ride their bikes
down the block.
But all these things, the good and bad, can also be found in booming Broward County. Sooner
or later, many of the refugees moving north mention immigration and the sense that they are
no longer, as many transplants describe it, "comfortable."
Phil Phillips was born and raised near what is today downtown Miami, where his father
worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the postwar years, at a time
when the immigrants to Florida were mostly from Europe. Phillips served in the Navy, taught
vocational classes at Miami High School, and made a living running a small air conditioning
and refrigeration business.
Until the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, Phillips described the Miami of yesteryear as a more
sleepy, more southern town. It had its glitz in the fanciful playground of Jackie Gleason's city
of Miami Beach, but the county was still filled with open land and farms.
"Miami was a very happy place," Phillips remembers with nostalgia. "We had our
demarcations, don't get me wrong. But we didn't have the animosity." When pressed, Phillips
does remember that the beaches, restaurants and nightclubs were often segregated, not only
for African Americans. Jews had their own country clubs.
The Miami of black-and-white all began to change with the arrival of the Cubans in the early
1960s. "The vast majority of the Cubans came here and worked two and three jobs," said
Phillips, who is retired and living in Weston. A man who worked with his hands all his life,
Phillips respects that. "I saw them do it. And in time, they took over, and some people resent
that. But that's the way it is."
"There's this myth out there that a Cuban will screw an American in a deal," Phillips says. "I
don't think that is so, but that's the feeling the whites have, and it's because the two sides don't
communicate, sometimes they can't communicate, and so they don't understand the other
guy."
Phillips has seen decades of change, as the demographics of his home town kept skewing
toward Hispanics, in fits and starts. After the first big influx of Cubans in the 1960s, there was
Cuba's Mariel boatlift in 1980. Then all through the proxy wars and upheavals in Central
America and the Caribbean through the 1980s and 1990s, refugees from Nicaragua,
Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti kept coming to Miami.
"We're great in America at blaming somebody else for our problems," Phillips said. "But I
will tell that for a lot of the people who leave Miami, they might not tell you, but they're
leaving because of the ethnics."
Phillips offered his opinions as he sat sipping soup at the
counter of a new restaurant here in Weston opened by Tim
Robbie, whose family owned the Miami Dolphins for years,
before they sold out to Wayne Huizenga, who is "The Man"
in Broward County, as much as Jorge Mas Canosa, the
power behind the Cuban American National Foundation, was
"The Man" in Miami before his death last year.
Robbie was raised in Miami. His family, lead by his father
Joe, was a civic institution. But Robbie himself recently
moved to Weston, too.
Tim Robbie, proprietor of The
Sporting Brews restaurant in
Weston, Fla. (By Andrew Itkoff for The
Washington Post)
"I know a lot of our friends down in Miami were
disappointed with us," Robbie said. "They asked: How can you do this to us?"
Robbie agreed that something akin to "the tipping point" phenomenon might be at work,
whereby one or two families in a social or business network can leave a community and
nothing much changes. But at some point, if enough people leave, the balance suddenly tips,
and large groups start selling their homes, and over a period of several years, they create mass
demographic shifts.
Robbie himself said he was comfortable down south in Miami, but concedes that many are
not. "Anglos are accustomed to being in the majority, and down in Dade, they're not. And that
puts some people outside of their comfort zone. People tend to like to stick together."
Robbie's business partner is Bob Green, who also moved from Miami to Broward. A longtime
denizen of funky and fun Coconut Grove, Green describes himself as one of those who never
would have thought about moving north to Broward.
But then he saw the new business opportunities, and also found himself liking a place like
Weston. "It has this midwestern feeling," Green said. "More downhome and friendly."
This mass internal migration is the latest version of a classic "push-pull" model of residential
segregation, whereby many whites in Miami feel lured north by the offerings of a
development like Weston, but also feel pushed out of Miami – not only by their fatigue with
crime or congestion, but the cultural and demographic upheavals caused by three decades of
immigration.
Peter Schott is a tourism official who is changing jobs and, reluctantly, moving with his wife,
who works for a cruise ship line, to Broward. The couple, both in their thirties and expecting
their first child, are looking for a bigger home. Schott says he will miss the exotic, foreign feel
of Miami. Miami, Schott says, is a media noche, the name for a Cuban sandwich, while
Broward he fears is "white bread and baloney." While he will miss Miami, Schott knows that
many of those moving north to Broward may not.
"Some people are real frank," he said. "They say they want to be with more people more like
us. If they're white Americans, they want white Americans around them."
For non-Hispanic, non-Spanish-speaking whites to survive in Miami, there is no choice but to
move, or to adapt. "It is our city now," many Cuban Americans say, and the numbers tell part
of the story.
In the 1990s, some 95,000 white non-Hispanics left Miami-Dade County, decreasing that
group's presence by 16 percent, to around 492,000, or about one-fifth of the county
population.
They either moved away or, in the case of elderly residents, particularly in the Jewish
community, died. (The Jewish population in Miami-Dade County has decreased from about
250,000 to 100,000 in the last two decades. The new destination for Jewish retirees and
younger migrants is Broward and Palm Beach counties).
As whites left Miami, they poured into Broward. Between 1990 and 1997, the white nonHispanic population here increased by about 82,000, or 8 percent, to more than a million
residents.
These dramatic numbers follow an equally large out-migration of whites during the 1980s. So
many non-Hispanic whites left Miami-Dade in the previous decade that Marvin Dunn, a
sociologist at Florida International University, who has followed the trend, said in 1991, "You
get down to the point below which those who are going to leave have left and the others are
committed to stay. I think we're close to that with whites."
But Dunn was wrong. The whites keep leaving.
"White migration to Miami-Dade has essentially stopped," said William Frey, a demographer
at the University of Michigan, who coined the phrase "demographic balkanization" to
describe the ongoing trend of ethnic and racial groups to self-segregate – not only within a
city, but from city to city, and from state to state.
"The two appear almost like mirror images of each other," Frey said of Broward and MiamiDade counties. "There is definitely something going on here and we can only guess what it is.
But this 'One America' that Clinton talks about is clearly not in the numbers. Segregation and
non-assimilation continue."
Many times, native whites on the move explain that Miami now feels to them like "a foreign
country," that they feel "overwhelmed" by the presence not just of some Spanish-speakers,
but so many.
"You order a Coke without ice," said an executive and mother of three who moved to
Broward from Miami in 1996 and asked that her name not be used. "And you get ice. You say
no starch and you get starch. You call government offices, and they can't take a decent
message in English. You spell your name letter by letter and they get it wrong. They keep
saying 'Que? Que? Que?' (Spanish for "What?') You go to the mall, and you watch as the
clerks wait on the Spanish speakers before you. It's like reverse racism. You realize, my God,
this is what it is like to be the minority."
"The white population feels increasingly beleaguered," said George Wilson, a sociologist at
the University of Miami who is studying the phenomenon.
"Their whole domain is changing at the micro-level," Wilson continued. "At the malls, in the
schools. A lot of the whites I talk to say they feel challenged by the rapid ethnic and cultural
change. A whole population of whites has gone from a clear majority to a clear minority in a
very short time . . . and a lot of them simply say, 'To hell with this,' and move up the road."
This feeling of being the beleaguered minority is creating among some a new consciousness
of "white ethnicity," and for those who see America's future as a relatively harmonious
multicultural state based on shared ideas of capitalism and freedom, this may not bode well.
For if whites do not want to share power and place, or if they feel increasingly shoved aside
or overwhelmed in the cities and states with high immigration, they will continue to vote with
their feet, by moving away, creating not a rainbow of citizens, but a more balkanized nation,
with jobs, university enrollments, public spending, schools all seen through ethnic or racial
prisms, including among whites.
Several of those interviewed complain that the politics of Miami-Dade are dominated by the
issues of the newcomers, particularly the Cuban Americans, who wait for the fall of Fidel
Castro; they see in the city hall, where a number of officials were recently indicted and
convicted of taking kickbacks after it was discovered that the city was broke, a "banana
republic" of ethnic cronyism; they dislike being referred to in Spanish media as "the
Americans" by Miami's Hispanic residents and politicians, as if they were the foreigners.
And many balk at the dominance of Spanish – on television, in official news conferences, on
the radio, in schools and meetings and in their day-to-day lives. The movement of so many
whites from Miami-Dade to Broward is viewed by many Hispanics as understandable, even
natural, though hardly something to be encouraged.
"We had a tremendous exodus of Anglos, especially Anglos who did not feel comfortable
with the new demographics of Miami, who were intimidated by the Spanish language and the
influx of different people," said Eduardo Padron, a Cuban American and president of the
Miami Dade Community College. "It is a natural trend for them to move out. Many of them
kept working in Miami, but they found refuge in Broward."
Padron believes the rapidity of demographic changes, and the creation of a Hispanic majority,
was "intimidating" for many whites, particularly those who did not speak any Spanish.
Some whites interviewed say they know they may seem like "whiners," as one woman put it,
but they feel they are not being met halfway by the newcomers, and this is an especially acute
feeling in Miami, where Cuban Americans and other immigrants from Latin America now
dominate the political landscape, serving as city and county mayors and council members.
Both of Miami's representatives to Congress are Cuban Americans.
Recent elections reveal that voters in Miami-Dade select candidates along stark racial and
ethnic lines in classic bloc voting. The 1995 county mayor's race, pitting Cuban American
Alex Penelas against African American Arthur Teele, Jr., turned almost entirely on
demographic lines, with exit polls showing that the overwhelming majority of Cuban
Americans voted for Penelas, as most blacks voted for Teele. What did whites do? A lot of
them did not vote at all.
Over the years, there has been sporadic, organized resistance by whites in Miami to hold back
the changes. One group, calling itself Citizens of Dade United, was successful in passing a
referendum in 1980 that declared English the "official language" of county government. But it
was overturned in 1993. Enos Schera, who is a co-founder of the group and who is now 71, is
still filled with vinegar, and says he refuses to move from Miami – though he says he and his
group have received death threats.
"I'm staying to fight this crazy thing," Schera said. "I'm not a bad guy, but I don't want to be
overrun. They come here and get all the advantages of being in America and then they insult
you right on top of it." He is writing a book about the changes. "That will tell all," he
promises.
But it seems as if Schera is fighting in retreat. He, and his group, have largely been relegated
to the role of stubborn whites whose time is over.
Many of the others, like Weston resident Joanne Smith, have already left. "There's no room
for us in the discussion," said Smith. "It's like we were the oppressors."
Smith says she likes to eat at Cuban restaurants, has Hispanic neighbors in Weston and
admires the strength and striving of the newcomers. She herself is the granddaughter of
immigrants, from Europe. But Smith feels the immigrants should try harder to understand the
feelings of native Americans. "If they can survive coming here on a raft," she says. "They can
learn to speak English."
Here at Weston, almost all of the communities are closed with security gates, requiring a
visitor to punch a code or be cleared by a guard before entering the enclaves. In addition to
the gates, a private security firm patrols the neighborhoods.
One researcher on the topic, Edward Blakely of the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles, says that gated communities like Weston's are the fastest growing new developments
around the country. Blakely deplores the trend, claiming it creates "fortress neighborhoods,"
dividing citizens, creating walls between "us" and "them."
But obviously, many home buyers like the concept, and many of the residents of Weston say
one of the things they like most about the neighborhood is its sense of community, of safety
and the ability of their children to ride their bicycles on the streets.
Yet the gates cannot keep demographic change at bay. Though two of every three residents in
Weston is white, most of them in their thirties, about one in four are Hispanic. But these are
the most assimilated, often second-generation, solidly middle-class Cuban Americans who
come north for the same new schools and golf courses as the white migrants, allowing almost
everyone to continue to live within their comfort zone.
But not all. As one three-year resident, who declined to give her name, observed, "I keep
hearing more and more Spanish in the grocery store. I don't know if they live here or are just
working here. But I started to see some Spanish magazines for sale. Maybe I didn't move far
enough north."
Special correspondent Catharine Skipp contributed to this report from Miami.