Immigrants and the California Economy - The Orange Country Register

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FOUNDED IN 1 905

REMEMBERING SEPT. 1 1, 200 1

Covering the scars of 9/11 won’t erase the loss NEW YORK ● It’s Christmas Eve

D AV I D WHITING REGISTER COLUMNIST

2006, and I step into freezing darkness on a balcony high above Ground Zero and wonder what 2,977 people would be doing if they were still alive.

Traffic lights wink 32 stories below my sister’s apartment. They match the tiny red and green lights strung across the iron guardrail on the narrow ledge. But, on this night, there is no joy.

There is a gaping black hole

in the ground, blackness where the twin towers once sparkled like crystals reaching toward the heavens.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the souls floating in front of me, and I realize had they lived, most would be celebrating right now – singing carols or cleaning up after Hanukkah or getting ready for Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holy day. Others S E E W H I T I N G ● PA G E 1 8

● Solemn ceremonies at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., paid tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks.

News 22-23

Orange County marked the ninth anniversary of the attacks with a remembrance service and a ride featuring more than a thousand motorcycles.

Local 1 ●

JASON DECROW, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A firefighter salutes as taps is played for victims of the Sept. 1 1 terrorist attacks during a commemoration ceremony Saturday at Zuccotti Park, adjacent to Ground Zero, in New York.

A N I N V E S T I G AT I O N B Y R O N A L D C A M P B E L L PA R T O N E O F F O U R

CALIFORNIA IS HOME TO 9.8 MILLION IMMIGRANTS. TOGETHER THEY MAKE UP ONE-THIRD OF THE STATE’S WORKERS – MORE THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER DEVELOPED ECONOMY ON THE PLANET. IMMIGRANT WORKERS EARNED $260 BILLION IN 2008.

IN SHORT, THIS IS …

A STATE POWERED

BY IMMIGRANTS T

oday, half of California’s software developers, one-third of its nurses and a quarter of its CEOs are immigrants. So are most of its housekeepers, cooks and gardeners. Most of them are here legally, the

product of the largest wave of legal immigration in a century. Long after residents of other states gave up on California, immigrants are still coming, bringing muscle and ideas to the state’s economy. NEWS 3-7 S E R I E S AT A G L A N C E

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California relies more on immigrant labor than any other state and almost any developed country. That’s the result of decades-long economic and demographic shifts as well as political choices.

More than 1 0 million undocumented immigrants have moved to the United States since Congress vowed a crackdown in 1 986. A key reason: the government’s failure to lock them out of jobs.

Immigrants have driven down wages in low-skilled trades. But they’ve made life easier for middle- and upper-income Californians.

Changing U.S. immigration policy means grappling with polarizing choices – such as amnesty and a national ID card.

Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010 | NEWS 3

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRANTS AND THE CALIFORNIA ECONOMY Birthplace of California workers, 1900-2008 California Rest of U.S. Mexico Europe Asia Other countries

1900

1910

1920

1930 CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Alma Nieto, holding a photo of herself at age 1 6, fled Nicaragua with her husband, Francisco, after years of harassment and feeling unsafe. The couple were granted asylum and eventually became U.S. citizens in 1 999.

1940

DEPENDENT ON A WORKFORCE OF IMMIGRANTS

1950

1960

Economic and demographic factors, as well as government policies, have fostered the state’s reliance on a foreign-born labor pool.

C

alifornia is addicted to immigrant labor.

Over the past four decades, the state has come to depend on immigrant brains and brawn to an extent unmatched by any other state and almost any developed country.

That puts the state at the center of a politically charged debate over immigration for at least the third time in its history. Nowhere else are the numbers greater or the stakes higher.

As Congress prepares to act on immigration – to restrict or expand it, to offer illegal immigrants “a path to citizenship” or to harass them until they leave – success or failure will depend in large part on how that policy works in California.

The Orange County Register analyzed four decades of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, reviewed more than 100 reports and interviewed dozens of experts and immigrants to weigh the enormous and often misunderstood impact of immigrants on the California econoRONALD my.

CAMPBELL REGISTER Among the conclusions: WRITER ● California is home to more immigrants, 9.8 million, than any foreign country save Russia and Germany. Most are here legally, the product of the largest wave of legal immigration in a century.1 ● A third of California workers are immigrants, a far higher proportion than any other state and any advanced economy except for tiny Luxembourg.

Together they earned $260 billion in 2008 – more than the state spent on imports of oil, cars and electronics combined.2 ● Nearly a tenth of the state’s workers, 1.75 million people, are illegal immigrants. They’re here because of a tacit consensus in Washington to spend billions fortifying the border while doing almost nothing to prevent illegal immigrants from finding work once they cross or to catch those who overstay their visas.3 ● Immigrants have filled most of the new jobs created in California since 1970. Without them, the state’s workforce would have shrunk in the 1990s.4 ● Immigration has helped middle- and upper-inS E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 4

A note from Register Editor Ken Brusic Immigration is a political, legal and economic story – one that we have covered extensively. It is also a highly charged emotional issue, as any frequent reader of the comments section of ocregister.com can attest.

I remember sitting in the Register building with a group of readers who were assessing our immigration coverage.

“What part of illegal don’t you understand?” one reader asked. The majority of the other dozen or so in the group nodded their heads. In their eyes, we had failed to address the central issue of the immigration debate.

I challenged some of our best reporters to develop a way to assess the true economic effect of illegal immigration: its costs as well as its benefits. They tried but could not come up with reliable numbers on either side.

So we decided to tell the broad economic story of immigration: the incentives that drew millions of foreign-born legal and illegal workers and their families to California, the jobs they filled and the impact they have had on our community.

In general, most people in our community do not like the idea of people entering the country unlawfully. But we also have a tremendous appetite for inexpensive labor – in our gardens, in our restaurants, building our homes. The task of keeping illegal immigrants out belongs to the federal government. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have failed to resolve the issue.

To tell our story, we have talked with dozens of immigrants, analyzed four decades of census records and reviewed more than 1 00 reports.

We have also taken the unusual step of footnoting our stories so you can follow the chain of documents and numbers that led to our conclusions. Online you can view, download and analyze for yourself three dozen spreadsheets that help tell the economic story of immigration in California.

We know you will want to discuss and perhaps challenge the findings. We welcome the conversation. I have assigned an editor to moderate the online discussion. We will answer questions as well as ask some. We will tolerate divergent viewpoints. And we will keep the conversation civil.

This is an important story that requires some length to tell. Please take the time over the four Sundays it will run to read, reflect and discuss it with your family, friends, neighbors and online with us.

We hope all of us will come to a better understanding of the issues involved and use that knowledge to require meaningful reform.

1970

1980

1990

2000

2008

Source: IPUMS SDA database

The Register

FOR MORE COVERAGE, GO TO OCREGISTER.COM/INVESTIGATIONS

NEWS 4 | Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRANTS AND THE CALIFORNIA ECONOMY

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Daniel Lee, who served on the St. Thomas Korean Catholic Center construction committee, was born in South Korea and lives in Fullerton.

California’s workforce

'70

'80

'90

'00

'05

'06

Source: IPUMS; U.S. Census Bureau

much of Silicon Valley, including the hometowns of Apple and Google.7 And no matter what Congress does, the role of immigrant families in the California economy is certain to grow: Nearly half of the state’s children have an immigrant parent.8 California’s dependence on immigrant labor is no accident.

It is the product of economic and demographic shifts that have been decades in the making. It is also the result of policy choices.

And it has echoes in our past.

A third of the forty-niners came from foreign lands, leaving their mark on gold camps such as Dutch Flat, English Mountain, Irish Hill, Chinese Camp, Canada Hill, French Corral and Spanish Flat.9

‘NO PLACE BUT CALIFORNIA’ Today, most of the state’s housekeepers, painters and cooks are immigrants. So are half of its software developers, a third of its registered nurses and a quarter of its business executives. A generation ago, natives of the United States dominated all of these jobs, indeed almost every occupation.6 Most of the workers in Santa Ana and central Los Angeles, places filled with tiny businesses and garment factories, are immigrants. But immigrants make up nearly half the workers in

In millions 15 12

12,172,594 6,243,670

11,807,719

11,791,325 6,173,389

11,345,562 5,929,853

4,826,121

11,127,561 3,836,722

9,449,240 1,888,700

7,092,700

come Californians economically while driving down wages for those with the fewest job skills.5 The immigrant workforce includes people such as Daniel Lee, who left postwar Korea to study in America and stayed to become an architect. And Alma Nieto, who fled the Sandinista regime in her native Nicaragua, slipped into California through a sewer pipe and became a church secretary. And Maria Rosa, a cosmetologist, one of millions of Mexicans who walked away from poverty at home for an illegal but more prosperous life in the United States.

932,200

F R O M PA G E 3

11,012,905

Native and foreign-born workers in California: Foreign-born Native

9 6,348,879

IMMIGRANT

tually outlawed Asian immigration and severely restricted immigration from southern and Eastern Europe. One of the leaders of the anti-immigration campaign in Congress was California Sen. Hiram Johnson.13 The opponents of immigration got what they wanted. In 1860, nearly 40 percent of Californians were immigrants. By 1960, less than 9 percent were foreign-born.14

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0 '07 '08 The Register

OPENING THE DOORS

In 1861, New York native William Brewer marveled at the crowd attending Mass at Mission Santa Barbara: Americans, Irish, French, Italians, Spanish, even two Chinese.

“No place but California can produce such groups,” Brewer wrote.10 But during the sharp depression of the 1870s, white Californians saw the Chinese as a threat to their livelihoods. Their shout – “The Chinese must go!”

– led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first restrictive immigration law in the nation’s history.11 Twenty-five years later, Californians demanded similar restrictions on Japanese immigrants, and again Washington agreed.12 Finally, in 1924, Congress vir-

California’s immigrant present has its roots in 1965.

That year, Congress scrapped nationality-based quotas in favor of a family-friendly system.

The architects of the 1965 law saw it as a way to redress the discriminatory aspects of the 1924 law. Instead it became the legal foundation for a new era of mass migration.15 The United States has admitted nearly as many legal permanent residents in the past 10 years, 10.3 million, as it did in the entire 50-year span following passage of the 1924 law. Some 3 million to 4 million illegal immigrants also entered the country during the last decade.16 California attracted far more immigrants than any other state. Today, it is home to 26 percent of the nation’s immigrants, S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 5

U.S.- and foreign-born Californians, 1849-2008

Native 30 million population: 26,897,639

The foreign-born population grew or stalled depending on changes to immigration laws.

1849-1869 The Gold Rush and construction of the Transcontinental Railroad draw a flood of immigrants to California, including tens of thousands of Chinese.

Immigrants from Asia arrive at Angel Island in San Francisco.

1890-1910 Peak period for immigration to the United States.

1942-1964: Congress authorizes the bracero program to import agricultural workers from Mexico. It remains on the books until 1964.

25

1965: Congress passes a new Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the nationality quotas created in 1924. The new law makes family unification and job skills the primary criteria for admitting immigrants.

Workers from Mexico pick chili peppers in California in 1964 as part of the bracero program.

Native population (blue): 70,795 Foreign-born population (red): 21,802

Applicants wait for amnesty application papers to be typed in 1988 in Los Angeles.

2001: The 9/1 1 attacks prompt sweeping changes in immigration law.

20

15

10

Foreign-born population: 9,859,027

5

0 1850

1860

1850: Census begins separate count of foreign-born residents.

In California, newly admitted to the Union, 23.5% of residents are foreign-born.

1870

1880

1890

1900

1882: In response to pressure from California, Congress enacts the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese immigration and forbids Chinese who have already arrived from becoming citizens. The act is not repealed until 1943, as a gesture to wartime ally China.

1910

1920

1930

1940

1924: Ending decades of essentially unlimited immigration from Europe, the Immigration Act sets tight racial and nationality quotas. It slashes Italian immigration from 200,000 annually to 4,000.

1950

1960

1970

1980

1952: The Immigration and Nationality Act modifies the nationality quotas in the 1924 act and adds preferences for immigrants with special work skills or family ties to the U.S. Although it was illegal for undocumented immigrants to work, a clause in the law known as the “Texas Proviso” made it legal for employers to hire them.

1990

2000

2008

1986: Congress passes the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law scraps the “Texas Proviso,” imposes sanctions on employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and grants amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau; The Associated Press photos

The Register

FOOTNOTES 1 9.8 million immigrants: See “Native and foreign-born, all states, 18502008.xls,” Register analysis of census data. “More than any foreign country save Russia and Germany”: See “World Bank estimate of migrants by country, 2005.xls,” based on United Nations population division estimates; the 12 million immigrants in Russia include several million people born in other nations of the former Soviet Union. “Most are here legally”: Widely accepted estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Department of Homeland Security put the illegal immigrant population at 11 million nationwide and about 2.55 million in California, or less than a third of the total foreign-born population as counted by the Census Bureau. “Largest wave of legal immigration in a century”: See “Legal Immigration Summary, 1907-2009.xls,” Register analysis of Department of Homeland Security data.

2 “A third of California workers”: 34.3% in 2008; see “Native and foreign-born workers, CA, 1950-2008.xls,” Register analysis of Census PUMS data. “Any other state”: The states with the next highest rates are New York (27.0 percent), New Jersey (25.6 percent), Nevada (25.2 percent) and Florida (23.8 percent), according to “Foreign labor force by state, 1980-2005.xls,” Migration Policy Institute, 2008. “And any advanced economy”: See “Immigrant workers by nation, 2000.xls,” based on a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 28 developed nations; only one of the 28, Luxembourg, had a higher percentage of immigrant workers – 42.9 percent. Luxembourg is a banking center with a workforce of 191,000, roughly twice the size of Irvine’s. “Together they earned $250 billion in 2008”; see “Income of native and foreign-born workers, CA, 2008.xls,” Register analysis of census PUMS data. “More than the state spent on imports”; see “California

trade statistics, detailed, 1998-2008.xls,” from California Department of Finance; these are totals for all goods imported through California ports and include products shipped to other states after passing through customs here.

3 “Nearly a tenth of the state’s workers, 1.75 million”; see “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade” by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Hispanic Center, Sept. 1, 2010.

“A tacit consensus”; see part 2 of this series.

4 “Filled most of the new jobs”; see “Native and foreign-born workers, CA, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data; immigrants filled 52 percent of all jobs created from 1970 through 2008 and 70.6 percent from 1990 through 2008; during the 1990s, the native workforce declined by 115,000.

5 See part 3 of this series.

6 “Most of the state’s housekeepers”: “Native and foreign-born workers by occupation, 2006-2008.xls, Register analysis of IPUMS data. “A generation ago”: “Occupations and wages, 1970-2008.xls”, “1970” sheet, Register analysis of IPUMS data.

7 “Most of the workers in Santa Ana”: “Foreign workforce by PUMA, 2006-2008.pdf” (map) and “Foreign-born workforce by PUMA, 20062008.xls” (spreadsheet), Register analysis of Census PUMS data. A PUMA is a Public Use Microdata Area, an area with about 100,000 residents, the smallest area for which the Census reports microdata.

8 “Nearly half of the state’s children”: See “Nativity of parents, 2008.xls,” Register analysis of census PUMS data.

9 “A third of the forty-niners”: See “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008.xls,” a Register analysis based on Census Bureau Tech Pa-

per 29, Table 13. The 1850 census, conducted amidst the chaos of the Gold Rush, reported that 23.5 percent of California residents were foreign-born; that did not include San Francisco – then the largest city west of St. Louis – because returns from the city were destroyed by fire. The 1850 census is online at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850a-01.pdf. The 1860 census, conducted under calmer conditions, found that 38.6 percent of California residents were foreign-born.

“Gold camps”: These place names all appear on the “Gold Rush Mining Districts” map, Atlas of California, by Michael W. Donley, Stuart Allan, Patricia Caro and Clyde P. Patton, Pacific Book Center, 1979, page 14.

10 Up and Down California in 1860:1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer, edited by Francis P. Farquhar, University of California Press, 1930 (reprinted 1966), pages 69-70. This is a classic of early California history, written by a Yale-educated scientist who was second-in-command of the Whitney Survey. He was the first to climb 13,570-foot Mount Brewer in the central Sierra Nevada; from the top, he spotted a much higher group of peaks to the southeast, including the peak later named for his boss, Josiah Whitney.

11 “Their shout”: See California: The Great Exception, by Carey McWilliams, University of California Press, 1948, for an account of the rise of the Workingmen’s Party and its leader, Denis Kearney. In 1880, 71.2 percent of the nation’s 105,000 Chinese residents lived in California; for details, see http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1880.html; click on the Zip file to download Volume 1, then open “1880a_v1-03.pdf” and go to page 7. “Chinese Exclusion Act”: California had unusual political clout in the early 1880s because it was a swing state; it voted Republican in the 1876 presidential race, turned Democratic (by a statewide

margin of 144 votes) in 1880 and reverted to the Republican side in 1884.

“The first restrictive immigration law”: A 1798 law, the Alien Friends Act, part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, gave the president the power to deport aliens suspected of radical opinions. But the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law to bar immigrants from entering; it remained on the books until 1943 when it was repealed as a gesture to World War II ally China.

12 California agitation led to the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” curbing Japanese immigration in 1907. See McWilliams, California: The Great Exception.

13 For an account of the 1924 law, see “Three Decades of Mass Migration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” by Center for Immigration Studies, September 1995. Hiram Johnson: As governor, Johnson signed the 1913 Alien Land Act, which tried to prevent Japanese immigrants from buying farm land; in the Senate, he allied with Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in sponsoring restrictive legislation in 1920 and chaired the Senate Immigration Committee from 1923 to 1930.

14 “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008.xls,” Register compilation of U.S. Census data.

15 “Three Decades of Mass Migration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 1995.

16 “The United States has admitted”: “Legal immigration summary, 19072009.xls,” Register compilation of data from Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2009, Table 1; see “LPR Only” sheet, Line 66, for summary comparing number of legal permanent residents admitted for the 2000-2009 period with other periods. “Some 2 million to 3 million illegal”: See “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls,” Register compilation of data from Pew Hispanic Center, Congressional Research Service, Department of Homeland Security and others.

EARTHWATCH MOVES THIS WEEK TO MONDAY NEWS 2

The Orange County Register

Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010 | NEWS 5

IMMIGRANTS AND THE CALIFORNIA ECONOMY

Immigrants in the workforce 1980

1970

1990

2000

2008

O.C.

Source: IPUMS

O.C.

Percentage of foreign workers

5-10%

10-15%

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 4

twice its share of the overall population.17 At least two-thirds of those immigrants are here legally.18 The 1965 law applied everywhere. But California absorbed far more immigrants than any other state – far more immigrants than almost any large nation – because of unique economic and social factors.

Together those factors allowed California to take enough immigrants to people a medium-size state.19 One of those factors was cultural.

When the immigration wave began rising in the 1980s and 1990s, California already had small immigrant communities ready to welcome newcomers. So the engineer from India, the refugee from Somalia and the illegal immigrant from Guatemala all knew that in California they could eat familiar foods, hear familiar tongues and perhaps meet familiar people.

Esmael Adibi, a Chapman University economics professor who came to Southern California as a student in 1974 and is now a U.S. citizen, later helped most of his family move here from Iran.20 Community organizer Hilda Cruz’s grandparents had become citizens and settled in Southern California years before she crossed the border illegally in 1978 at age 9. An uncle met the Cruz family in Tijuana, providing the children with their American-born cousins’ birth certificates to fool the guards. Years later, she became a citizen.21 Maria Rosa, the cosmetologist, left her native Morelia,

15-20%

20-25%

Mexico, in 1990 at age 27 in search of “a better life, a better job, better opportunity.” She slipped across the border and made her way to Orange County, where her older sister and brother-in-law already lived. She remains undocumented.22 When Alex Ortega imigrated illegally from Mexico in 1991 at age 16, he immediately went to work painting houses for his uncle in Santa Ana. He now owns a small carpet business, has a work visa and is applying

Immigrants are “going to work 1 0 times faster than any American citizen would work.”

D AV E N O R R E D OWNER OF BUSINESS IN LAGUNA NIGUEL

for a green card.23 “That’s just the basic way that social networks work,” said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors restrictions on immigration.24 “Once that concentration (of social connections) is established, then it grows really fast,” Adibi said. “Once a state gets established in that path, there’s no stopping it – unless the economy falls apart.”25

RUN FOR THE EXITS The California economy did fall apart in the early 1990s.

The post-Cold War recession sent more than 1 million U.S.born workers running to other states. And it set the stage for our dependence on immigrant labor.

For most of its frenetic his-

25-30%

25-30%

tory, California has produced far more jobs than its natives could fill. The California job magnet lured people from the East, South and, above all, the Midwest. In 1960, two of every three California workers hailed from another U.S. state.26 California continued to attract workers from other states for three more decades.

Then, in the 1990s, the flow of workers from other states abruptly reversed. During the ’90s, the number of workers born in other states fell by 1 million.27 One big factor: the postCold War cutbacks in aerospace, which wiped out hundreds of thousands of high-paying blue-collar jobs. For example, the number of machine operators has fallen by 125,000 – more than half – since 1970.28 Another factor: the increase in home prices, which even after the market’s decline remain far higher in California than in most other states.29 Although the state has picked up lots of high-skilled workers and low-skilled immigrants during the past two decades, said UC San Diego economist Gordon H. Hanson, it also has lost mid-skilled workers, the people who used to fill bluecollar manufacturing jobs.

“They’re priced out of California,” Hanson said. “California is an expensive place.”30 While workers from Iowa, Michigan and Texas were moving out, workers from Mexico, the Philippines and a hundred other countries were moving in. By 2008, immigrants outnumbered workers from other U.S. states in every age bracket save one: 60 and older.31 Without immigrants, the state’s labor force would have shrunk by 100,000 in the 1990s.

S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 6

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Alma Nieto, left, and her mother, Miriam Mayorga, receive Communion from the Rev. Avenlino Orozco of La Purisima Catholic Church at Nieto’s home in Orange.

30-35%

35% or more

The Register

Q&A Q. How many immigrants work in California?

A. About 6.3 million immigrants are in the civilian labor force.

That’s roughly one of every three workers. The Pew Hispanic Center, which provides the most widely accepted estimates of illegal immigrants, says there are 1.75 million undocumented workers in California.

Q. How many are citizens?

A. About 2.86 million immigrant workers are citizens. The remainder are split roughly in half between illegal immigrants and legal residents, who have green cards or are here on temporary visas.

Q. Where do they come from?

A. They come from more than 100 countries. But two-thirds hail from just six nations. Some 43 percent (2.85 million) come from Mexico, followed by the Philippines (8.7 percent), Vietnam (4.6 percent), El Salvador (4.6 percent), China (3.4 percent) and India (3.1 percent).

Q. What do they do?

A. Immigrants dominate lowskilled jobs, those requiring less than a high school diploma. Examples include housekeepers (81 percent of whom are immigrants), electrical equipment assemblers (68 percent), gardeners (68 percent), cooks (61 percent), painters (61 percent) and construction laborers (57 percent).

But they also comprise large shares of scientific and technical occupations – half of software developers, 48 percent of electrical engineers, 36 percent of registered nurses and 34 percent of physicians.

Q. How well-educated are they?

A. As a group, immigrants are not as well-educated as natives.

One of every three immigrant workers lacks a high school diploma. Fewer than half have attended college. By comparison, just 8 percent of native workers are high school dropouts, and 71 percent have attended college. However, at the educational pinnacle, immigrants are slightly more likely than natives to hold a doctoral degree (1.6 percent of immigrant workers vs. 1.3 percent of natives).

Q. How much do they earn?

A. Immigrants as a group earn about 70 percent of what natives do. In 2008, the mean income was $41,566 for immigrants and $53,902 for natives. The median income was $26,478 for immigrants and $37,069 for natives.

(The mean is the arithmetic average; the median is the midpoint or “typical” income.) Education explains most of the difference.

College graduates on average earn twice as much as high school graduates and nearly three times more than high school dropouts. Because a disproportionate share of immigrants are dropouts, that holds down their average income.

Sources: Register analysis of census data, Pew Hispanic Center

FOOTNOTES 17 “Native and foreign-born, CA, 1850-2008.xls” and “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008.xls,” Register analysis of census data.

18 The Department of Homeland Security estimated there were 2.8 million undocumented immigrants in California in 2007; see “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls”. The census counted about 9.8 million immigrants in the state that year.

19 “Enough immigrants to people a medium-size state”: California’s foreign-born population, 9.86 million in 2008, exceeds the total populations of Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey, the ninth-, 10th- and

11th-largest states. See “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008.xls,” Register compilation of census data.

20 Esmael Adibi interview, Nov. 25, 2009.

21 Hilda Cruz interview, Jan. 20, 2010.

22 Maria Rosa interview, Dec. 15, 2009.

23 Alex Ortega interview, Jan. 21, 2010.

24 Steven Camarota interview, Nov. 18, 2009.

25 Adibi interview.

26 “For most of its frenetic history”: See “Birthplace of CA workforce, 1900-2008.xls” and especially the “Summary” worksheet, Register compilation of

IPUMS data.

27 “Fell by 1 million”: See “1990” and “2000” worksheets in “Birthplace of CA workforce, 19002008.xls”; the number of workers born in other states shrank from 5.38 million in 1990 to 4.35 million in 2000.

28 “The number of machine operators”: See “Occupations and wages, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data; go to “Summary” worksheet, line 297, “Machine operators, n.e.c.” (not elsewhere classified), showing 250,000 holding this job in 1970 and 122,000 in 2008.

29 Four California metro areas – Santa Clara County, San Francisco-Oakland, Orange County and San Diego County – ranked among the 10 most expensive areas nationwide on the National Association of Realtors’ list of median home prices for existing single-family homes in 2009. See http://www.realtor.org/wps/wcm/ connect/d83da280415d4daca9dfb908069f8e0c/ rel09q4t.xls?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=d83da280415d4daca9dfb908069f8e0c 30 Gordon H. Hanson interview, Oct. 26, 2009.

31 “A hundred other countries”: See “Birthplace of CA workforce, 1900-2008.xls,” “2008” worksheet; list of

foreign countries sending workers and residents to California extends from line 64 through line 209. Note: This spreadsheet counts people by place of birth, regardless of citizenship; thus people born to U.S. citizens in, say, Germany, appear in the German total; for all other purposes, we consider workers to be foreign-born only if they are born in a foreign country to parents who are not U.S. citizens. “Outnumbered workers from other U.S. states in every age bracket”: See “Birthplace and age of CA workforce, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data.

FOR MORE COVERAGE, GO TO OCREGISTER.COM/INVESTIGATIONS

The Orange County Register

NEWS 6 | Sunday, Sept. 1 2, 20 1 0

IMMIGRATION AND THE CALIFORNIA ECONOMY

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Esmael Adibi, an economics professor at Chapman University, holds the attention of economic students during a lecture. Adibi came to Southern California as a student in 1 974 and is now a U.S. citizen. He eventually helped most of his family move here from Iran.

IMMIGRANT

THE CALIFORNIA PROMISE

If California has lost its allure for residents of other states, it remains golden to immiF R O M PA G E 5 grants. Especially for those at the bottom of the economic heap, California promises a Instead it grew by 875,000. Immigrants better life. helped revive the California economy Hanson, the UC San Diego economist, and kept it growing until the Great Refound that young Mexican men earn huge pay 32 cession. raises by crossing the border – anywhere from two to six times their wages at home – HIGHER EDUCATION after adjusting for the higher cost of living While millions of blue-collar jobs were here.40 disappearing from California, a subtler, For men ages 23 to 27 with less than four longer-term change created an opening years of schooling, that translates to a $7.01for millions of poorly educated immiper-hour wage increase. grants.

Luciano, 42, welds iron gates and window That change happened in the classframes in Orange County. He earns $11.50 an room. hour when there is work. An illegal immiIn 1970, the typical U.S.-born Califorgrant, he planned to return to Mexico as soon nia worker had a high school diploma. By as he earned enough money to buy a home 1990, the typical native worker had a year there. Instead, he stayed. of college.33 “You come here thinking, just for one year,” The changes were more extreme Luciano said. “But once you’re here, things among the best- and worst-educated nachange. … Once you see life here, you don’t tive workers. In 1970, the top 10 percent want to leave.”41 of native workers had a bachelor’s deHe shares an apartment in a crowded Anagree or better. By 2008, that threshold heim complex with his wife, Martha, a househad jumped to a master’s degree or betcleaner who is also undocumented. She ter.34 makes more money The change was cleaning houses, $415 even starker at the a week, than she did as bottom. In 1970, the a social worker in worst-educated 10 Mexico. percent of native “Once you’re here, The California workers had gotten promise is greatest for things change. … Once no further than ninth those who immigrated you see life here, you grade. By 2008, the as children. A quarter don’t want to leave.” bottom 10 percent inof California’s immicluded people with LUCIANO grant workers arrived high school diplomas.

WELDER FROM MEXICO in the U.S. at age 15 or Economics helped younger.43 drive that change.

Jose Moreno grew Since 1970, Califorup the youngest child nia employers have in a family of illegal imcreated 1.1 million migrants in Oxnard. Living in constant fear of new jobs for high school dropouts – and la migra, he absorbed an unspoken message four times more new jobs for people with from his parents: “Get A’s or get deported.”44 college and postgraduate degrees.35 He got A’s. In time, he became a U.S. citiNative-born workers have used educazen and earned a doctorate in education. Two tion to move up the job chain. Many imolder siblings became medical doctors. migrants have done the same thing, takHe describes himself this way: “Made in ing high-skilled jobs in fields such as Mexico, assembled in the U.S.” health and technology. Nearly half of imThe economic influence of immigrants migrant workers have at least some colseems likely to continue long after the curlege.36 rent generation retires. Nearly half the chilBut today, immigrants hold two-thirds dren in California have an immigrant parent. of the state’s low-skilled jobs – jobs such Most of those 4.4 million children of immias janitor, gardener and construction lagrants were themselves born in the United borer that can be filled by high school States.45 dropouts.37 The presence of those children, and the Barbara Davies Alvarez operates a hopes their parents place in them, help excommercial landscaping business in San plain why most immigrants are choosing to Dimas. Almost all of her employees are stay rather than earn some money and return immigrants. home. In 1980, the typical immigrant to Cali“I do hard, physical work,” Alvarez fornia had been in the U.S. for less than a decsaid. “It’s the American mentality that ade. By 2008, the median stay had nearly doing physical labor is not considered doubled, to 18.3 years.46 sexy.”38 Hilda Cruz, who came to the U.S. as a child, Even in the midst of the recession, she never got past high school; she was too busy got no applications from U.S.-born workworking and raising her family. But one of her ers. Her own 22-year-old grandson would children earned a degree from UC Riverside, not work for her. and three others are college students.47 Immigrants are “a pretty consistent Had she never left Mexico, “we would workforce,” said Dave Norred, owner of a probably have only had an elementary educalandscape installation business in Lagution and then moved on. … We would continue na Niguel. “They come to your door. to live in poverty.

They’re a cousin of somebody, and they “I came here so young, this has always stay. … They’re going to work 10 times been my home,” Cruz added. “Mexico is a forfaster than any American citizen would eign country.” work.”39

The numbers behind the story The Orange County Register’s coverage of the immigrant workforce is based primarily on U.S. Census Bureau data from 1 970 through 2008.

In every once-a-decade census and in the American Community Survey conducted annually since 2005, the bureau has gathered mountains of data about the American people and economy. Much of that data goes unpublished.

It is simply too detailed for the policymakers and marketers who are the census’ primary customers.

But after each major survey, the census releases raw data for those who want to dig deeper into the numbers.

Known as the Public Use Microdata Sample, it consists of nearly complete survey results from 1 percent of a state’s households. Names and addresses are excluded from the PUMS file to protect individuals’ privacy. The only geographic information given is the respondent’s “Public Use Microdata Area,” a region with about 1 00,000 inhabitants.

In this way, a researcher can get detailed information about a group of people without learning about specific individuals.

An explanation of the PUMS file is at http://www .census.gov/acs/www/Products/PUMS/index.html.

Using PUMS data from 2005 through 2008, the Register focused on the civilian workforce in California and compared natives – those born in the United States or born abroad to U.S. citizens – with immigrants.

For historical comparisons, we turned to IPUMS-USA – the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, a service of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota (usa.ipums.org/usa). The authors are Stephen Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder and Matthew Sobek.

IPUMS has gathered census microdata from 1 850 to 2008 and harmonized ever-changing census variables so users can accurately compare pre-Civil War America with the present.

MARGIN OF ERROR Although they seem precise, PUMS and IPUMS numbers are in fact estimates, drawn from samples of the population. The PUMS samples are enormous by conventional surveying standards – 346,000 California respondents in 2008 alone and 5.9 million respondents over the 38-year span that the Register analyzed – but they still are just samples. Like all samples, they are subject to statistical error.

We’ve calculated margins of error for most of the PUMS data from 2006 forward and selected data from 1 990 and 2000. We have reported estimates in our stories only where the margin of error is 5 percentage points or less with a 95 percent confidence interval. In other words, if we could somehow count everybody in a group, the chances are 95 percent, or 1 9 in 20, that the true number would be within 5 percentage points above or below the reported estimate.

Here’s an example. In 2008, the census estimated that among California workers ages 30 to 34, 42.8 percent were immigrants. Based on census formulas, the probability is 95 percent that the true proportion is between 4 1.3 percent and 44.3 percent, 1.5 percentage points above or below the estimate.

We’re publishing our spreadsheets online. These spreadsheets include many estimates that weren’t reliable enough to make the story. Where a margin of error exceeds 5 percentage points, we’ve highlighted it in bold, red type.

In general, the smaller the estimate, the bigger the margin of error. This has forced us in some cases to combine surveys and categories to get publishable data. That’s especially true for the number of natives and immigrants in particular occupations. When we looked at 2008 alone, we were able to get reliable estimates of the foreign-born percentage for just 44 of 335 occupations representing less than 20 percent of the state workforce. By combining survey results from 2006 through 2008, we got reliable data for 1 08 occupations representing more than 80 percent of the state’s workforce.

FOOTNOTES 32 “Native and foreign-born workers, CA, 1950-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data.

33 “Education by nativity for workers, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data.

34 “Educational attainment of CA workforce, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data. See “Natives” and “Immigrants” sheets.

35 “Education by nativity for workers, 1970-2008.xls”: See “Change: 1970 vs. 2008” beginning at line 68; this analyzes the change in the

number of native and foreign-born workers at each educational level.

36 “Nearly half have some college”: “Education by nativity for workers, 1970-2008.xls” 37 91 percent of workers with no high school are immigrants; 69 percent of dropouts (workers who either never attended high school or never graduated) are immigrants. See “Education by nativity for workers, 1970-2008.xls” 38 Barbara Davies Alvarez interview, Dec. 14, 2009.

39 David Norred interview, Dec. 15, 2009.

40 “Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States,” by Gordon H. Hanson. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12141, March 2006.

41 Luciano and Martha interview, Jan. 22, 2010.

42 Aleem Bilwani interview, Dec. 16, 2009.

43 “Age at entry of foreign-born workforce, 2006-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data.

44 Jose Moreno interview, Dec. 16, 2009.

45 “Nearly half the children”: “Nativity of parents, 2008.xls,” Register analysis of census PUMS data; of the nearly 4.4 million children with immigrant parents, almost 3.9 million, or 88 percent, were born in the U.S. 46 “Immigrant years in U.S., 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data. The median stay was 13.8 years in 1970 but dropped to 9.8 years by 1980; the state’s foreign-born population almost doubled during the 1970s.

47 Hilda Cruz interview, Jan. 20, 2010.

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The Orange County Register

Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010 News 7 1

AT THE HEAD OF THE CLASS ing by peeling onions and ending as a manager. After three years in the kitchen, he swore off hamburgers.

While he was writing his doctoral disserEsmael Adibi Job: Professor of economics, Chapman tation, a friend at Chapman, a young economics professor named Jim Doti, now University Chapman’s president, got him a temporary, Home: Lake Forest Birthplace: Babol, Iran (near southern one-year teaching assignment.

Adibi had come to California with a plan: shore of Caspian Sea) He was going to get a doctorate, then reAge: 58 turn to Iran and become a Status: Naturalized citiresearcher in the central zen bank, one of a handful of Family: Married, two Ph.D.s helping set ecochildren nomic policy.

For an economist devotThen came the Iranian ed to the rationality of revolution, the fall of the markets, there is someshah, the rise of theocracy thing almost whimsical in and the hostage crisis.

Essie Adibi’s story.

“The revolution In April 1974, freshly changed everything for graduated from Tehran CINDY YAMANAKA, THE REGISTER University, Adibi flew Professor Esmael Adibi has an very many people,” Adibi 7,600 miles at a friend’s easy rapport with his students. said. “Educated people felt they were not welcome to urging to attend a tiny colgo back.” lege he knew next to nothing about.

He got his green card in 1981 and became He arrived at Los Angeles International Airport with a single suitcase, barely man- a citizen five years later.

Adibi married an Iranian woman, the sisaged to avoid boarding the Disneyland bus and took a taxi to Chapman University in ter of a friend, in 1978.

He and his wife were careful to speak onOrange.

“And then,” Adibi recalled, “I realized ly English around their young children. The they didn’t have a graduate degree in eco- children learned Farsi as a second language. nomics.”

“We did not want them to have an acNo matter. He earned an MBA from Chapman while studying for his master’s in cent,” Adibi said. “We did not want them to economics at Cal State Fullerton and later slow down. Because we knew they were goa Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate Univer- ing to end up here.”

Adibi misses the neighborhood where he sity.

He worked his way through school at the grew up, but little else about Iran. The Knowlwood restaurant in Fullerton, start- United States, he said, is his home.

Profiles by RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

CHASING HIS OPPORTUNITIES per person.

Daniel (Changmin) Lee So Lee built his architectural career in Job: Retired architect the U.S., first in Ohio and then in California.

Home: Fullerton In the mid-1960s, he returned home lookBirthplace: Seoul, South Korea ing for work. He met his wife, Helen, but in Age: 75 six months of searching could not find a job.

Status: Naturalized citizen Family: Married, three children and two He returned with Helen to California, where they started their family. grandchildren By the mid-1970s, South Korean conWar and its aftermath set the course of struction companies were booming. They Changmin Lee’s life.

He was a teenager when North Korea at- wanted people familiar with the American and European standards tacked Seoul, forcing his that prevailed on big jobs family to flee. After the – people like Daniel Lee. war, he joined a generaHe went to Korea intion of South Korea’s tending to stay one year. brightest students, goHe stayed 12, spending ing to college in the Unitsix months of every year ed States. in the Middle East helpBy the time South Koing design city-size prorea had recovered jects. He returned to Calenough to offer suitable ifornia in the mid-1980s work, 20 years had CINDY YAMANAKA, THE REGISTER “for the sake of my chilpassed, and Changmin dren.”

Lee had become Daniel Daniel Lee holds a photo of himLee retired a decade Lee, an American citizen self with his mother in 1 955. ago but did not give up architecture entirewith American-born children.

Lee came to the United States in 1955, ly. He served 4 1⁄2 years on the construction hoping to become a doctor. But the pre- committee for St. Thomas Korean Catholic med program at Ohio State University, Center in Anaheim, advising the architect where he enrolled, was filled. So he joined a on ways to harmonize traditional Korean Korean friend in the architecture program. style with Catholic architectural motifs.

Five years later, degree in hand, he realFive decades after leaving South Korea ized he had no future at home. for the United States, Lee recognizes that if “Korea at the time wasn’t ready to pro- he had only stayed long enough, until the vide reasonable employment,” Lee said. boom of the 1980s, he might have made This was decades before the South Ko- more money there. But he has no regrets. rean economic boom. The nation’s gross “What can you do?” he asked. “You candomestic product was about $50 to $100 not have everything in your lifetime.”

LEAVING THEIR PAST BEHIND flashlight.

Alma Nieto She found a job at a McDonald’s. The Job: Church office manager manager “hired me on the spot as the cashHome: Orange ier. And I said to him, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Birthplace: Matagalpa, Nicaragua She had wanted a job in the kitchen Age: 48 where no customers would hear her broken Status: Naturalized citizen English. She returned home that first day Family: Married, three children Late one night in September 1984, Alma crying. Customers had made fun of her Nieto emerged from a manhole in San Die- thick accent.

Francisco refused to sympathize. go to begin her new life.

“No more Spanish radio, no more SpanShe and her husband, Francisco, had clung to their native Nicaragua despite ish TV, no more Spanish conversation,” he told her. “Spanish stays years of harassment. in Nicaragua. Here we They stayed after the speak English.”

Sandinista government deThe threat of deportanied them flour and eggs tion haunted her. On a for their small bakery. bus ride, Alma thought They stayed after the army the uniformed bus driver briefly drafted Francisco, a might be la migra. breadwinner who was supCaught in a traffic jam, posed to be exempt. They she was sure there was stayed even after a boyan immigration checkhood friend, a lieutenant in point ahead. the army, pulled a gun on CINDY YAMANAKA, THE REGISTER A parish priest sent Francisco and said he had Alma Nieto holds a photo of her- Alma and Francisco to permission to kill him.

Catholic Charities.

They finally knew it was self in first grade.

Workers there asked time to flee when his mother, visiting from Southern California, told Francisco to describe in writing why they him, “Next time I come over here, I’m going had fled Nicaragua. He wrote three or four pages. Within months, they were granted to have to put flowers on your grave.” asylum. They became citizens in 1999.

That was in August 1984.

Four years later, Alma and Francisco visDays later, Francisco waded across a river to Honduras, his birth certificate wrap- ited Nicaragua with their children.

“The kids just loved the country,” Alma ped in a $10 bill in his boot. Months later, he rode a motorcycle across the U.S. border, recalled, “and they were very surprised. telling a guard in accent-free English that They said, ‘How can you leave such a beauhe was returning from a day trip to Tijuana. tiful country?’ … And we had to say, ‘We had Alma, meanwhile, sold their property no choice.’ ” and flew to Mexico City. She crossed the C O N TA C T T H E W R I T E R : border walking barefoot, hunched over 7 1 4-796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com through a sewer, her way lit by a coyote’s

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A N I N V E S T I G AT I O N B Y R O N A L D C A M P B E L L PA R T T W O O F F O U R

RACE FOR THE

CURE W

THE REFORM THAT FAILED

hen Geraldine Watts was diagnosed with breast cancer, she feared that no one would want to help her because she was homeless. To her amazement, she experienced generosity at every turn – from the hospital employee who arranged for her to get a much-needed shower before surgery to the nonprofit that paid for three months’ rent. She’s one of the many local women helped by the annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. NEWS 1 6

Special section Look inside today’s Register for the 20 1 0 Race for the Cure section. Women diagnosed with breast cancer, survivors and the people who love them describe the battles and the hope.

More essays are at ocregister.com /sections/life/health-and-fitness/.

LA X ENFORCEMENT OF 1 986 LAW ENTICED MILLIONS TO IMMIGRATE ILLEGALLY.

DAVID WHITING

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

REGISTER COLUMNIST

T

he federal government has spent billions of dollars fortifying the border. But a wayward policy embraced by multiple presidents and Congresses has done little to stop employers from hiring those who immigrated. Few illegal workers are caught, and those who hire them are rarely fined. The result:

1.75 million California workers – one in every 11 – are here illegally. NEWS 3-7 S E R I E S AT A G L A N C E

SEPT. 1 2

TODAY

SEPT. 26

OCT. 3

California relies more on immigrant labor than any other state and almost any developed country. That’s the result of decades-long economic and demographic shifts as well as political choices.

More than 1 0 million undocumented immigrants have moved to the United States since Congress vowed a crackdown in 1 986.

A key reason: the government’s failure to lock them out of jobs.

Immigrants have driven down wages in lowskilled trades. But they’ve made life easier for middleand upper-income Californians.

Overhauling U.S. immigration policy means grappling with polarizing choices – such as amnesty and a national ID card.

Finding laughter in grief When you have 744 friends on Facebook, it might mean you’re the kind of guy who can help people expand their goofy zone by cracking eggs on their heads.

Sure, there was a serious side to Brian Loughman, 24, a side that made him a star athlete in high school, a side that earned him an engineering degree from UC Irvine.

But the Nellie Gail resident saw his main purpose in life as sharing positive energy – and that meant cracking eggs on his own head as well. Loughman waved to strangers on the sidewalk. He struck up conversations with random people. And he didn’t shy away from making friends with people in need.

S E E W H I T I N G ● PA G E 8

NEW BUILDERS STEP IN AFTER PROJECT STALLS

SANTA ANA CELEBRATES MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE

USC FINDS ITS IDENTITY TO DEFEAT MINNESOTA

A coastal development in San Juan Capistrano is seeing signs of life as new builders have emerged to finish the stalled project that features more than 400 houses. REAL ESTATE 1

Thousands converged in downtown Santa Ana on Saturday to kick off the celebration of Mexican independence from Spain. The bicentennial bash concludes today. LOCAL 1, 5

The 18th-ranked USC football team asserted itself in a way it hadn’t this season, rallying from a deficit in the third quarter en route to a 32-21 victory over Minnesota. SPORTS 1

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Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010 | NEWS 3

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

San Diego’s Las Americas Premium Outlets and Baja-Mex Insurance are within walking distance of the U.S.-Mexico border.

POLICY ENCOURAGES ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION O

S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 4

In millions 14

12

Immigration and Naturalization Service

10

Department of Homeland Security Pew Hispanic Center High estimate

8

Low estimate

6

Congressional Research Service High estimate

4

Low estimate

2

Sources: Federal agencies and Pew Hispanic Center

‘86

‘88

‘90

‘92

‘94

‘96

‘98

‘00

‘02

‘04

0 ‘06 ‘08 The Register

Growth of the Border Patrol Total agents and the agency’s annual budget, 1980 to 2010.

25

$5

22,904 agents 2010 $3,556,759,000 budget 2010

20 15

4 3

10

2

5

1

0

‘80

‘82

‘84

‘86

‘88

‘90

‘92

‘94

‘96

‘98

‘00

‘02

Sources: Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, 3/2/2005 (1980-1990), Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (1991 only), Border Patrol (1992-2009), Budget bill (2010)

‘04

‘06

‘08

‘10

0

Budget (In billions of dollars)

n Nov. 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill that was supposed to end illegal immigration.

Instead, it became one of the biggest public policy failures since Prohibition.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most of the illegal immigrants then in the United States. To keep others out, it forbade businesses to hire undocumented workers and threatened those that did with fines.1 Almost a quarter-century later, the undocumented population has soared from about 500,000 after the amnesty to about 11 million. The primary reason: the RONALD breakdown of worksite enforcement, which Reagan had called CAMPBELL REGISTER “the keystone” of the 1986 law.2 WRITER “We’ve been running a very cynical policy for the last 15 years,” said Doris Meissner, the government’s top immigration official from 1993 to 2001. “What we are saying out of one side of our mouth is, ‘We will make it harder for you to cross the border. …

But there will be a job for you when you get here.’ ”3 “The ’86 Act was built around this idea of workplace enforcement,” said Meissner’s successor, James Ziglar, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 2001 through 2003. But when the INS tried to carry out the law, “members of Congress whose districts were affected started to complain. … So it just didn’t get funded.”4

Estimated illegal immigrant population

For the United States, by federal agencies and think tank, 1986 to 2009:

Agents (In thousands)

With worksite enforcement as touchstone, U.S. strategy tacitly sustains steady flow.

The Register

FOOTNOTES 1 For a description of the law, see Government Accountability Office, “Foreign Workers: Information on Selected Countries’ Experiences,” September 2006 (GAO-06-1055).

2 “Soared from about 500,000”: The law legalized 2.7 million out of a population estimated in 1986 at 3.2 mil-

lion; see “Unauthorized Aliens Residing in the United States: Estimates Since 1986,” by Ruth Ellen Wasem, Congressional Research Service, RL33874, Aug. 25, 2009. “… to 11 million”: See “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls,” spreadsheet derived from estimates from Congressional Research Service, Immi-

gration and Naturalization Service, Department of Homeland Security and Pew Hispanic Center. “The keystone”: from Reagan’s signing statement; see www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches /1 986/1 1 0686b.htm.

3 Interview, Doris Meissner, Dec. 17, 2009.

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NEWS 4 | Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE

PHOTOS: CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Near San Diego, the United States, at left, and Mexico are separated only by a border fence that has been breached countless times.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 3

Over the decades, presidents and Congresses of both parties have chosen other priorities for immigration enforcement – securing the border, deporting people already in jail for violent crimes, preventing illegal immigrants from getting jobs at nuclear plants or airports.

Despite the post-9/11 crackdown, more than 500,000 illegal immigrants entered the country each year between 2000 and 2006. The flow began to ebb only in 2007, when immigrants encountered a much more formidable foe than the Border Patrol: the recession.5 Federal immigration policies largely ignore the millions already here and almost entirely ignore the reason they illegally crossed the border or overstayed their visas: jobs.

The Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has focused on the border and on immigrants who break non-immigration laws.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said, “A scattershot approach where DHS targets any and all of the around 12 million people in the United States illegally does not amount to an approach that maximizes public safety.”6 These policies have contributed to California’s growing dependence on immigrant labor.

Some 1.75 million California workers, one of every 11, is here illegally.7 “What you observe in the data is not like the weather,” said Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors restrictions on immigration. “It’s the result of policy choices.”8

‘CLOSING THE BACK DOOR’ Illegal immigration became a hot issue in the early 1970s when labor unions persuaded House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino, D-N.J., to introduce a bill to fine employers who hired illegal immigrants. It went nowhere.9 In 1981, a presidential commission on immigration, headed

by Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh, recommended employer sanctions as a means of “closing the back

Jerry Conlin, a Border Patrol agent, stands near the U.S.-Mexico border during a media tour.

Border Patrol staffing and coyotes’ prices 20,000 18,000 16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000

President and percentage change in staffing Reagan 74.9%

G.H.W. Bush 7.3%

Clinton 128.7%

G.W. Bush 78.2%

$3,000 2,500 2,000

Coyote charge Border Patrol agents

1,500 1,000 500 0

0

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Notes: Coyote charges are in 2008 dollars and are for calendar year. Border Patrol staffing for fiscal years ending Sept. 30.

Sources: Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, 3/2/2005 (1980-1990), Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (1991 only), Border Patrol (1992-2008); Mexican Migration Project The Register

door to illegal/undocumented immigration, (and) opening the front door a little more.”10 After several tries, Congress passed a compromise bill containing employer sanctions in late 1986.

The new law scrapped a 1952vintage loophole that had allowed employers to hire illegal immigrants for jobs those workers legally could not hold.11 But the sanctions contained in the 1986 law were, by design, weak. Congress set the fines low and the government’s burden of proof high: Businesses had to “knowingly employ” illegal immigrants.12 Business and civil rights groups had objected to employer sanctions, Meissner recalled.

If the provisions had been any tougher, the bill would have died.13 Workplace arrests of undocumented immigrants plunged 85 percent in the first full year after the enactment of the 1986 law.

They slowly recovered, peaking at 17,552 in 1997, midway through Meissner’s eight-year tenure as INS commissioner under President Clinton. Then they fell again.14 In 2008, one of the bigger years for worksite enforcement, the odds of an undocumented immigrant getting busted on the job were about 1 in 1,300.15 The maximum fine for a business that “knowingly employs” undocumented workers is $11,000, a fraction of the amount

charged in other countries. In Germany, for example, the maximum fine is 500,000 euros ($640,000).16 But the potential amount hardly matters, because few employers are fined or even threatened with a fine. In 1992, the INS issued a record-high 1,461 notices of intent to levy a fine. In 2009, it issued just 172 such notices.17

IMMIGRATION ENFORCER From the start, worksite enforcement has been unpopular with employers. It requires a boss to play immigration cop, sorting through as many as 26 forms of identification to spot the fakes.18 Some employers ignore the requirement or pay it little mind.

Mariela, a 29-year-old illegal immigrant and Highland resident who speaks unaccented English, got her first job at a restaurant without showing any identification. Her current employer accepted a photocopy of a crudely forged Social Security card.19 Illegal immigrants surveyed by retired UC San Diego political scientist Wayne Cornelius and his students said that while most employers asked for identification, almost half of the employers knew they were unauthorized and another 11 percent probably knew.20 Raids and audits are rare, but S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 5

FOOTNOTES 4 Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

5 “More than 500,000”: “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade” by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Hispanic Center, Sept. 1, 2010. Also see “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls,” Register compilation of estimates by Department of Homeland Security, Congressional Research Service, Pew Hispanic Center and others. The illegal immigrant population rose from about 8 million in 2000 to about 12 million in 2007 before declining to 11.1 million in 2009. Pew, which does the most widely cited studies of illegal immigration, estimates the annual inflow at 850,000 from March 2000 through March 2005, 550,000 from March 2005 through March 2007 and 300,000 from March 2007 through March 2009.

6 Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, May 6, 2009. See www.dhs.gov/ynews/testimony /testimony_1 24 1 706742872.shtm.

7 “One of every 11”: 1.75 million unauthorized workers in a work force of 19 million, or 9.3 percent. See Passel and Cohn, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade,” Sept. 1,

2010. Their estimate of the total work force is about 500,000 more than the Census Bureau estimate used in these stories. See also “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants” by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Hispanic Center, April 14, 2009.

8 Interview, Steven Camarota, Nov. 18, 2009.

9 “Declining Enforcement of Employer Sanctions” by Peter Brownell, Migration Policy Institute, Sept. 1, 2005.

10 Cited in “DHS and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course,” by Doris Meissner and Donald Kerwin, Migration Policy Institute, February 2009.

11 “Loophole”: Brownell, “Declining Enforcement of Employer Sanctions,” Sept. 1, 2005. The 1952 law barred “harboring” undocumented immigrants, but the so-called “Texas Proviso” said that employing an immigrant did not amount to “harboring.”

12 “Knowingly employ”: Brownell, “Declining Enforcement of Employer Sanctions,” 9/1/2005.

13 Interview, Doris Meissner, Dec. 17, 2009.

14 “Worksite investigations, 1986-2008.xls”, provided by Depart-

ment of Homeland Security; this is more complete than summaries in the department’s official Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.

15 “One of the bigger years”: In 2008 the federal government made 6,265 immigration-related arrests as a result of employer investigations, the highest number since 1998; a small portion of those arrested were citizens, including owners and managers of businesses that were accused of knowingly employing illegal immigrants. See “Worksite investigations, 1986-2008.xls,” Register analysis of Department of Homeland Security data. “1 in 1,300”: The Pew Hispanic Center estimated there were 8.2 million illegal workers in 2008; see Passel and Cohn, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade,” Sept. 1, 2010. Assuming all 6,265 of those arrested were undocumented, the odds against an illegal immigrant being arrested through a worksite investigation were 1,309 to 1.

16 GAO, “Foreign Workers: Information on Selected Countries’ Experiences,” September 2006.

17 “Worksite investigations, 1986-2008.xls”. The Department of Homeland Security stopped reporting several metrics, including no-

tices of intent to fine, in 2004. The Register obtained the 2009 number through a request under the federal Freedom of Information Act. A notice of intent to fine is the first step in levying a fine against an employer; the number of notices filed each year fell below 500 in 1999 and has consistently remained below that number since then; it hit a record low of 22 in 2007.

18 “As many as 26 forms of identification”: The current Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, last revised Aug. 7, 2009, lists six documents that establish both identity and work eligibility, 12 documents that establish identity and eight documents that establish employment authorization. The form is available at www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-9.pdf.

19 Interview, Mariela, Feb. 12, 2010.

20 “Current Migration Trends from Mexico: What Are the Impacts of the Economic Crisis and U.S. Enforcement Strategy?” by Wayne Cornelius, UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, presented to congressional staff June 8, 2009. “Almost half”: 49.6 percent, according to the survey of illegal immigrants.

EARTHWEEK MOVES THIS WEEK TO LOCAL 8

The Orange County Register

Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010 | NEWS 5

IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 4

the consequences for the employer can be devastating.

After an audit of employee documents in the early 1990s, immigration authorities told Poway landscaper John Mohns to dismiss 50 of his 150 employees – “really good guys that we had put a lot of effort into training.”

But his ex-employees were not deported. Instead, Mohns said, most of them “went down the street and got a job with my competitors.”21 An Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants on Dec. 12, 2006, resulted in the arrest of 1,300 employees and cost the company $30 million, Swift Vice President John Shandley testified.22 Swift had been participating since 1997 in E-Verify, the federal government’s voluntary Webbased program for confirming that workers are legal. Every one of the arrested Swift workers had passed an E-Verify check.23 “Simply put,” Shandley testified four months after the raid, “a company cannot legally and practically do more than we have done to ensure the legal workforce under the current regulations and tools available from the government.”24

POLITICAL ‘THIRD RAIL’ No wonder then that Meissner calls worksite enforcement “a bit of a third rail” or that her successor, Ziglar, says “nobody wanted to touch it.”25 In 1999, responding to pressure from Midwestern congressmen, Meissner told top INS career official Mark Reed to find a way to drive undocumented immigrants out of Nebraska.

Reed sent meatpacking plants CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER letters identifying thousands of Jose Moreno, a professor at Cal State Long Beach and president of the Anaheim City School District, and workers whose employment his daughters Karina, 1 0; Melina, 6; and Olivia, 7, from the top, are framed by doors showing the girls’ documents did not match federstudies in dual-language immersion. Moreno and his wife, Lorena helped start the only dual-language imal databases. mersion program in Anaheim. His parents brought Moreno into the country illegally when he was a child.

As a result, “3,500 people fled the state of Nebraska,” Reed training the workers who X-ray said. “Two weeks later, all those Deportations luggage at airports than it did on people (who had urged action) 30 Illegal immigrant voluntary returns, criminal and worksite enforcement. kicked me out of their state for 26 non-criminal removals. ruining the economy.”

Even in the agency that enforces immigration laws inside Ziglar, the INS commissioner 580,107 Voluntary returns Nov. 6, 1986, the borders, Immigration and from 2001 until 2003 when it was Immigration Removals 1,600 Customs Enforcement, workdissolved into the Department Criminal removals* Reform and Control Act 1,400 site enforcement isn’t a priority. of Homeland Security, had no In thousands signed In 2009, the agency devoted just better luck making worksite en1,200 5 percent of its man-hours to forcement politically palatable.

1,000 worksite enforcement.31 He remembers watching a 800 264,944 congressman on television comThe Border Patrol had 3,200 600 plaining about officers when 400 128,345 lax INS enthe 1986 act 200 forcement. passed and 0 “I was litera4,000 when Bill 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2009 “The border is really lly watching it Clinton be*Removals and criminal removals combined before 1993. symbolism. It’s in the on TV and a came president Sources: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Enforce Alien Removal Module (EARM), February 2009, Enforcement Case Tracking System (ENFORCE), December 2008. workplace that it has spokesman in 1993. By the The Register brought in a lettime he left ofto happen.” ter he had sent” fice, it had TA M A R J A C O B Y foreign visitors.35 One of them is Luciano, an ilcomplaining more than douPRESIDENT OF legal immigrant who welds iron that INS raids bled to 9,200 The undocumented popuI M M I G R AT I O N W O R K S doors and window frames in were hurting agents.

Under lation, about 4.5 million when USA Anaheim. During the boom, he the harvest in President the border crackdown began in worked 45 hours a week. He now his district, ZiGeorge W. 1993, swelled to 12 million in works 15 hours a week. He stays, glar recalled. He wouldn’t idenBush, it nearly doubled again, to 2007. It declined to 11.1 million in he says, because of his daughtify the congressman but said he 17,500.32 2009, the first drop in decades.36 ters, both born in the U.S. “We was a fellow Republican.27 Last year, under President The Bush and Obama adminwant the girls to have a better Barack Obama, it had 20,000 istrations have claimed partial BORDER WAR future.”39 agents – far more than the FBI.33 credit for the drop. But it also coincided with the deepest reInstead of funding worksite In addition to expanding the BOON FOR COYOTES cession in 75 years.37 enforcement, Congress poured Border Patrol, Congress in 2006 money into border enforcement. authorized a high-tech border The recession has hit illegal Surveys of illegal immigrants And funds have continued flowfence to discourage illegal crossimmigrants particularly hard,

by Cornelius, the UC San Diego ing in ever-larger amounts since ings of the 2,000-mile frontier giving prospective immigrants political scientist, have showed 1993, even as the undocumented with Mexico. Average cost per reason to stay home. Federal Reconsistently that most immipopulation nearly tripled.28 mile: $2.91 million.34 serve economist Pia Orrenius grants make it past the Border reported last year that immiPatrol. Although about 45 perIn 2003, UC San Diego econoFor all the billions spent and grants are especially vulnerable cent are caught at least once, mist Gordon H. Hanson calcuthe thousands hired, it is unclear to a downturn because they are 97 percent eventually succeed.40 lated, the federal government whether the border crackdown less educated than other workdevoted 53 times more manhas worked.

The buildup on the border has ers and more likely to work in hours to the border than it did to At least one-third of illegal immade one big difference, howevconstruction or other recessionworksite enforcement.29 migrants walked right by border er: It has forced immigrants to sensitive jobs.38 guards. They entered legally rely on immigrant smugglers, In 2009, the Department of and overstayed their visas. Deknown along the border as Homeland Security budgeted While the recession has disspite more than a decade of ef“coyotes.” Coyote fees have ris$126.5 million for worksite encouraged prospective immifort, the government is still en nearly in lockstep with Borforcement and 27.8 times more – grants and caused 1 million imstruggling to track the comings $3.5 billion – for the Border Pamigrants to leave, millions more and goings of tens of millions of S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 6 trol. DHS spent more money are waiting it out.

FOOTNOTES 21 Interview, John Mohns, Benchmark Landscaping, Poway, Feb. 9, 2010.

22 “Problems in the Current Employment Verification and Worksite Enforcement System,” House subcommittee hearing, April 24, 2007, testimony of John Shandley, senior vice president for human resources, Swift & Co. 23 Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

24 Shandley testimony, April 24, 2007.

25 Interview, Doris Meissner, Dec. 17, 2009. Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

26 Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

27 Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

28 “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls”: The undocumented population was estimated at 4.5 million when border fund-

ing began to rise; it peaked at about 12 million in 2007.

29 “Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States” by Gordon H. Hanson, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12141, March 2006.

30 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, FY 2009.

The training budget for the Transportation Security Administration was $197.3 million. See also Meissner and Kerwin, “DHS and Immigration,” February 2009.

31 See “ICE case hours by program, 2004-2010.xls,” compiled from ICE reply July 27, 2010, to an Oct. 28, 2009, Freedom of Information Act request by the Register.

32 “Border Patrol budget, 1980-2009.xls”, Register compilation from Border Patrol, Senate Appropriations Committee and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

33 “Border Patrol budget, 1980-2009.xls”; “more agents than the FBI”: FBI website: Quick Facts, lists 13,492 special agents (see www.fbi.gov/quickfacts.htm).

34 “Secure Border Initiative Fence Construction Costs,” Government Accountability Office, Jan. 29, 2009 (GAO-09-244R).

35 “At least a third”: “Modes of Entry for the Unauthorized Migrant Population,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 22, 2006. See also “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: 1990 to 2000,” Office of Policy and Planning, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, undated but circa 2002.

“Struggling to track”: Congress in 1996 mandated an electronic system, now known as US-VISIT, to record and match entries and exits of people with visas; see Pew, “Modes of Entry”, 2006; “Homeland Security: Key US-VISIT Components at Varying Stages

of Completion, but Integrated and Reliable Schedule Needed,” Government Accountability Office, November 2009 (GAO-10-13).

“Tens of millions of foreign visitors”: “Nonimmigrant admissions, 1999-2009.xls,” from Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2009, Table 25; in 2009 36.2 million temporary foreign visitors were admitted to the U.S. for tourism, business or study.

36 “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2008.xls”. Passel and Cohn, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade,” Sept. 1, 2010.

37 “Both the Bush and Obama administrations”: See statements by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Oct. 23, 2008, and his successor, Janet Napolitano, on Nov. 13, 2009. Chertoff statement is at www.dhs.gov/xnews/speeches/sp_1 224803933474.shtm. Napolitano statement is at www.dhs.gov/ynews/speeches /sp_1 258 1 23461 050.shtm.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

NEWS 6 | Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Bright lights, the Border Patrol and a high-tech fence discourage illegal immigrants from crossing from Mexico, left, at the border in San Diego.

IMMIGRANT

The result: Undocumented workers more likely than not will get a pass from E-Verify.

That was among the findings of the most recent F R O M PA G E 5 review of the program by the government’s social science consultant, Westat. The consultant found that 54 percent of the time, E-Verify der Patrol staffing. A one-way trip that cost wrongly says that an undocumented worker is $500 when the 1986 law was passed and $722 eligible for a job.49 when the border campaign began in 1993 cost 41 E-Verify also wrongly tries to deny jobs to $2,848 in 2008. naturalized citizens. The system issues false Here’s another way of looking at it. In 2007, warnings that a particular worker is not authowhen taxpayers spent $2.3 billion on the Border rized 1 percent of the time. But naturalized citiPatrol, coyotes collected perhaps $800 million zens, who are legally equal to native-born to sneak immigrants past the guards.42 Americans, are 32 times more likely than naHard evidence is scarce, but rising coyote tives to get a false warning, requiring them to fees might force undocumented immigrants to prove the U.S. government wrong or lose their stay put rather than go back and forth between jobs.50 the U.S. and Mexico. In a 2001 study, Cornelius The agency that runs E-Verify, U.S. Citizenwrote that by driving up coyote costs, the govship and Immigration Services, said in reernment might be “keeping more unauthorized sponse to the Westat remigrants in the United port that E-Verify “accuStates than it is keeping rately detects the status of out.”43 unauthorized workers alLuciano’s wife, Mar“What we are saying out of most half the time” and is tha, last visited Mexico “much more effective” than in 2000. She was one side of our mouth is, hand-checking documents, caught on her first at‘We will make it harder for as most employers do. The tempt to return north you to cross the border. … agency also is making it and took a “very rough” But there will be a job for easier for naturalized cititrek through the desert zens to challenge false to finally make it home you when you get here.’ ” warnings.51 to Orange County. She DORIS MEISSNER About 780,000 of the nahas not dared go south T O P U . S . I M M I G R AT I O N O F tion’s 7.7 million workplacagain, not even to see FICIAL FROM 1 993 TO 200 1 es use E-Verify. Legislation her grandson born in to mandate E-Verify for all late 2009.44 hires is pending in Con“We empowered gress.52 alien smugglers,” said Reed, the former INS official, is skeptical Reed, the former top INS official. “Now they about E-Verify. It was very good at spotting fake (immigrants) have to bring their families with green cards, he said, but “it’s got a huge blind them because they can’t go back and forth. … It spot” for undocumented immigrants who claim will be worse tomorrow than it is today.”45 to be citizens.53 E-VERIFY IMPERFECTIONS He places more hope in the Obama administration’s strategy of auditing employment doc“The border is really symbolism,” said Tauments at businesses suspected of hiring unaumar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks thorized workers.

USA, a business-backed group that lobbies for In July 2009, ICE issued 652 audit notices – expanded immigration. “It’s in the workplace more than it had issued in the entire previous that it has to happen.”46 year. It announced 1,000 more audits Nov. 19.54 If she is correct, the future of worksite enBy using audits instead of raids, Reed exforcement rests with E-Verify. But despite 14 plained, “One agent can go after 300 companies years in development, E-Verify has yet to delivrather than 300 agents go after one. … Now er on its promise: a simple, nearly instant way they’ve got some real economies built into this for employers to make sure workers are legal.47 thing. They’ve got a nuclear bomb now.”

E-Verify was designed to combat the use of The question, he added, is whether the govfake documents, a problem since the beginning ernment will use it. of worksite enforcement. But while E-Verify can detect document fraud, it cannot detect C O N TA C T T H E W R I T E R : identity fraud – the use of real documents bor7 1 4-796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com rowed or stolen from legal workers.48

Worksite enforcement actions 16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0

Administrative arrests Criminal arrests Fines 18

‘92

’94

‘96

’98

‘00

’02

‘04

1,092

5,173

’06 ‘08 The Register

Sources: Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (1997, 2002 and 2003); ICE 2008 Annual Report; Peter Brownell

Behind the numbers Illegal immigrants avoid public attention. So how can they be counted?

The answer boils down to subtraction: The foreign-born population minus naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents and people here on visas equals the illegal immigrant population.

That’s journalistic shorthand taken to an extreme. The complete explanation is more complex.

Jeffrey S. Passel, now at the Pew Hispanic Center, developed the “residual” method in the late 1 980s to analyze the 1 980 census. It has become the standard, adopted by the Department of Homeland Security and by immigration experts on all sides of the debate.

Although it appears simple, there are several uncertainties built into the formula – and several ways of resolving those uncertainties.

For example, the Census Bureau acknowledges that it misses millions of people; analysts must adjust for the undercount. Through post-census surveys and analysis of birth and death records, the Census Bureau estimated that the 2000 census missed between 3.3 percent and 6.7 percent of all foreign-born people. The undercount was smallest for legal residents (1 percent to 2 percent) and highest for illegal immigrants (1 0 percent to 1 5 percent).

Experts consulted by the census at the time believed the 1 5 percent undercount for illegal immigrants was too high. In its own estimates, the Department of Homeland Security assumes a 1 0 percent undercount of the illegal population by the census.

Although the count of legal foreign-born residents is based on government records, it too has uncertainties: How many have died or left the country? Where do they live right now? What do they do for a living?

Estimates of the undocumented population tend to have a wide margin of error. Passel recently estimated there were 1 1.1 million undocumented immigrants in the country in 2009, give or take 500,000.

Given how hard it is to count undocumented immigrants, how can the census make estimates about the age, education and occupation of foreign-born residents?

The answer is a random sample based on addresses. The Census Bureau uses a “master address file,” a continuously updated list of all residential addresses in the United States.

During the once-a-decade census, it sends a short questionnaire to every address. It also sends a longer questionnaire to a sample of households drawn from the master address file. The longer questionnaire went to tens of millions of households in the once-a-decade censuses conducted in 1 970, 1 980, 1 990 and 2000.

Since the launch of the American Community Survey in 2005, the longer questionnaire has gone each year to 3 million randomly selected addresses drawn from the master address file. A Mayflower Society matron in a Boston mansion and an undocumented construction worker in a Santa Ana apartment are supposed to have an equal chance of receiving the long questionnaire.

Because the sample is random and answers are both mandatory and confidential, the Census Bureau believes it paints an accurate picture of the foreign-born population.

FOOTNOTES 38 “Tied to the Business Cycle: How Immigrants Fare in Good and Bad Economic Times,” by Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny, Migration Policy Institute, November 2009, 40 pages.

39 Interview, Luciano, Jan. 22, 2010.

40 Cornelius, cited in Meissner and Kerwin, “DHS and Immigration,” February 2009. Cornelius and his students surveyed immigrants in the southwestern U.S. as well as former immigrants who had returned home to Mexico.

41 “Border Patrol staffing and coyote charges, 1980-2008.xls,” Register analysis. Coyote charges from Mexican Migration Project (a joint venture of Princeton University and the University of Guadalajara), in e-mail from Douglas Massey, Princeton, Dec. 24, 2009; charges are in 2008 inflation-adjusted dollars. Border Patrol staffing as follows: 1980-1990 from Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, March 2, 2005; 1991 from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University; 1991-2008 from Border Patrol (e-mail, Dec. 4, 2009).

42 “$2.3 billion”: “Border Patrol budget, 1980-2009.xls”. “Perhaps $800 million”: Register calculation based on the following: Illegal im-

migration increased by a net of 500,000 that year (see “Illegal immigrant estimates, 1986-2008.xls”); we assume that a third overstayed visas and that 95 percent of the rest, 316,000, hired a coyote, paying $2,500 each to cross the border illegally; see “Border Patrol staffing and coyote charges, 1980-2008.xls”. An alternate method of measuring the coyotes’ revenue, suggested by David FitzGerald of UC San Diego, is to simply multiply the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border by $2,500. This is a conservative estimate because it disregards the return flow of immigrants, estimated by Pew Hispanic Center at 400,000 per year; counting that return flow, 900,000 illegal immigrants would have had to enter the U.S. in 2007 to make a net increase of 500,000, and most of the 900,000 would have used coyotes.

43 “Death at the Border: The Efficacy and ‘Unintended’ Consequences of U.S. Immigration Control” by Wayne A. Cornelius, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UC San Diego, Working Paper 27, December 2001.

44 Interview, Martha, Jan. 22, 2010.

45 Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

46 Interview, Tamar Jacoby, Sept. 24, 2009.

47 Congress mandated the Basic Pilot, predecessor of E-Verify, in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

Basic Pilot was one of three electronic verification pilots authorized by the 1996 law; the other two were dropped in 2003. See “Immigration Enforcement: Preliminary Observations on Employment Verification and Worksite Enforcement Efforts,” Government Accountability Office, June 21, 2005 (GAO-05-822T).

48 E-Verify cannot detect identity fraud: “Findings of the E-Verify Program Evaluation,” Westat, December 2009.

49 Westat, “Findings of the E-Verify Program Evaluation,” December 2009.

50 Westat, “Findings of the E-Verify Program Evaluation,” December 2009.

51 “Westat Evaluation of the E-Verify Program: USCIS Synopsis of Key Findings and Program Implications,” USCIS, Jan. 28, 2010.

52 “780,000”: This is the number of offices, including branch offices,

using E-Verify; e-mail from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman Mariana Gitomer, Aug. 30, 2010. Between Oct. 1, 2009, and Aug. 14, 2010, 14 million prospective employees were run through the system. “7.7 million”: This is the most recent number of business “establishments,” a term that includes branch offices and thus is comparable to the E-Verify number; from U.S. Economic Census, 2007. “Legislation to mandate E-Verify”: HR 2028 by Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, and HR 2083 by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.

Broader immigration reform bills, including the outline released by Senate Democrats in May, also mandate E-Verify.

53 Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

54 “In July 2009”: ICE media release – www.ice.gov/pi/nr /0907/09070 1washington.htm “Nov. 19”: ICE media release – www.ice.gov/pi/nr/09 1 1/09 1 1 1 9washingtondc2.htm ICE does not have an estimate of the annual number of audits it has conducted; in its July 27, 2010, reply to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Register, the agency said it does not centrally track the number of audits.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010 News 7

The Orange County Register

1

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Jose Moreno, 4 1, looks at his childhood pictures from Guasave in Sinaloa, Mexico, with daughters Melina, 6, at top, and Olivia, 7, at their home in Anaheim.

‘I CONVINCED MYSELF I WAS BORN IN THE U.S.’ Assimilation came easily to Jose Moreno, but not for his Mexican parents.

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Jose Moreno lived his childhood in the shadows.

He arrived in California at age 4, the youngest in a family of illegal immigrants.

He and his siblings were taught to shut the curtains, keep the television volume low and stay out of trouble.

His parents split their four children among three schools to avoid notice.

Growing up in the segregated La Colonia neighborhood of Oxnard, the two younger children quickly lost their Spanish.

By second or third grade, “I was totally American,” Moreno recalled. “I convinced myself I was born in the U.S.” He would tell people that he was born at St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard – and he believed it himself.

But the transition to American life, while easy for him, was hard on his parents.

His mother, a social butterfly in Mexico, “dove into the telenovela world,” watching Spanish-language soaps for three hours a night after returning home from work.

Jose Moreno Job: Latino studies professor, Cal State Long Beach; Anaheim City School District board president Home: Anaheim Birthplace: Guasave, Sinaloa, Mexico Age: 4 1 Status: Naturalized citizen Family: Married, four children His father, a teacher in Mexico, worked maintenance in a cannery. An intellectual with no outlets and no time for further schooling, he became a recluse.

“The one requirement he had for us (was) doing well in school,” Moreno said.

The children did very well.

That was partly because of their parents’ urging but also because they knew that if they got in trouble, “we risked our family presence.

We risked our family.”

For the Moreno children, school was “a sanctuary place,” he said. “A school for many immigrants can be the only humane place where kids can be kids.”

In the mid-1970s, the risk haunting the family became real. Immigration authorities raided the factory where his mother worked and sent her home with a deportation notice. The family hired a lawyer to

stave off deportation with repeated appeals.

At least once a year, the family drove to Los Angeles to immigration court. Moreno remembers the judge questioning the family, even the children. He’d ask about school, whether they’d gotten in trouble, their feelings about the United States, “cultural loyalties.” The children understood a wrong answer could mean deportation. “That’s something I wouldn’t wish on any child,” Moreno said.

In 1986, Congress approved an amnesty for illegal immigrants who had been in the country since 1980. The Morenos applied immediately and were accepted.

Amnesty opened doors for the Moreno children.

His sister had deferred medical school for three years, knowing she could not get financial aid as an illegal immigrant. Post-amnesty, she earned her medical degree and became an obstetrician. An older brother became a surgeon.

Jose Moreno earned a doctorate in education from Harvard and became a college professor.

Amnesty came too late for the eldest brother. Years before, he had joined a gang and gotten into drugs. He died of an overdose at age 36.

“He encountered the real nastiness of being a male immigrant,” Moreno said.

MEXICAN IMMIGRANT GOES WHERE OPPORTUNITIES ARE

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Hilda Cruz

The Mexican-born granddaughter of American citizens, smuggled into the U.S. at age 9, Hilda Cruz learned young what it meant to be an illegal immigrant.

She learned as a child “to stay indoors as much as possible and la migra was a green bus.”

But the real lesson began in her teens.

While in high school, she worked at a pharmacy in Santa Ana. She loved the job and the owner, “a wonderful old man who became my mentor in the customer service world.”

That ended when she was asked about her Social Security number. It was fake.

Next stop: sales clerk at a children’s clothing store.

“Same thing there,” Cruz remembered.

“I realized that I was here illegally and that getting a job was going to be harder and harder because they wanted to see my documents,” she said.

Cruz is part of a generation of immigrant children

Job: Community organizer Home: Riverside Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico Age: 4 1 Status: Naturalized citizen Family: Married, children legalized by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The amnesty, which remains controversial nearly a quarter-century later, allowed her and millions of others to build new lives in the United States.

Cruz, a teenager when the 1986 law passed, volunteered with the Catholic diocese’s amnesty program. She filled out her own application, got a visa, then a green card and finally, in 1999, U.S. citizenship.

After marrying her high school sweetheart and starting a family, she worked a succession of jobs.

Apart from a few job-related classes, her education stopped when she earned her GED. But, she added, “I gave myself a Ph.D. in

motherhood.”

She was a teacher’s assistant in the Santa Ana schools for seven years, then a part-time outreach and social justice director for a Catholic parish. She now works as a community organizer for an interfaith nonprofit in San Bernardino.

“I think God just took me from place to place,” Cruz said. “I was able to learn what I need to know and then move on.”

Her five brothers and sisters became a teacher, a teacher’s assistant, a police officer, a sheriff’s deputy and a social worker.

“We got a wonderful opportunity,” Cruz said. “We blossomed.”

Cruz doubts that her family could have gotten similar opportunities if they had remained in Mexico.

Mexico, she said, “has changed for the worse.”

“It saddens me to see this great huge wall, to see those who are here undocumented seen as criminal when all they are trying to do is survive,” she added. “Give us a chance. Give them a chance. My family got a chance.”

SUNDAY PRICE: $ 1.50

•

SUNDAY, SEPT. 26, 20 1 0

•

FOUNDED IN 1 905

«AUTUMN COLORS AMAZE SPORTS

TRAVEL

UCLA STUNS TEXAS

»

IMMIGRATION As more than 6 million foreign-born workers labor on California soil, some people benefit economically more than others.

WHO WINS? If you are middle class and well educated, immigrants make your life easier and cheaper.

WHO LOSES? If you are less educated, whether an immigrant or not, you are hurt by immigrants who do the work for less.

SEPT. 1 2

SEPT. 1 9

TODAY

OCT. 3

California relies more on immigrant labor than any other state and almost any developed country. That’s the result of decades-long economic and demographic shifts as well as political choices.

More than 1 0 million undocumented immigrants have moved to the United States since Congress vowed a crackdown in 1 986. A key reason: the government’s failure to lock them out of jobs.

Immigrants have driven down wages in low-skilled trades.

But they’ve made life easier for middleand upper-income Californians.

Reforming U.S. immigration policy means grappling with polarizing choices such as amnesty and a national ID card.

STORIES BY RONALD CAMPBELL ON NEWS 3-7

Budget impasse endangers preschool

CSU presidents earn top salaries As system faces budget cuts, officials defend pay on small campuses.

S

itting on the floor with 3-year-old Luciana MARK RIGHTMIRE, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER Gonzalez at the statefunded Hands Together pre- Amy Sanchez, left, and Luna Contreras look at books school, I get lost in the mo- together at Hands Together preschool in Santa Ana. ment and forget why I’m Not quite, I think. Luciahere. na needs two more wads to Luciana, big brown eyes make a snowman. But I under matching bangs know better than to offer topped with a plastic turqu- advice. My daughter long oise barrette, thrusts a wad ago taught me about the of purple play clay toward hazards of critiquing art. my face.

DAVID WHITING And I’m here to learn why “Snowman!” she anREGISTER COLUMNIST nounces.

S E E W H I T I N G ● PA G E 1 2

I

n the California State University system, the title of president brings a big payday regardless of the size of the campus.

The presidents of Humboldt, Sonoma, Channel Islands, Bakersfield, San Marcos and Stanislaus receive more than $300,000 in compensation, but oversee fewer than 10,000 students. Channel Islands has

only a slightly larger enrollment than Santa Ana High School.

A faculty association official cited a sense of entitlement among the reasons behind trustees overpaying for what are perceived to be prestigious posts.

But CSU officials say the pay is appropriate for the responsibility of running a university – of any size.

STORY BY TONY SAAVEDRA ON NEWS 1 6

SAN CLEMENTE CONDO SOLD TO TWO PARTIES

JUDGE BARS STAFFING CHANGES AT JAILS

CALIFORNIA LAGS ON HIGHWAY PROJECTS

After closing on a San Clemente condo, Douglas Garhartt and Brandon Lively found themselves in a legal battle with a group of investors that had purchased the same property. REAL ESTATE 1

The Sheriff’s Department is barred from staffing changes at its jails for now, a judge said, approving deputies’ request to keep the department from shifting jobs to civilian jailers. LOCAL 8

California has not begun 41 percent of highway projects for which it received federal stimulus money, trailing only Virginia on a percentage basis, an analysis shows. NEWS 1 8

COURTESY OF CAL STATE CHANCELLOR’S OFFICE

353,000

$

-

The salary of Humboldt State University President Rollin C. Richmond, shown above

TODAY’S WEATHER The Orange County Register is a Freedom Communications newspaper.

Copyright 20 1 0 Customer service toll-free 1 -877OCR-7009 [627-7009]

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Inland

Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010 | NEWS 3

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE

PHOTOS: CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

All eyes are on drivers as they roll into a Laguna Beach day labor center to hire for the day. Day laborers run toward cars and shout for work. As a group, immigrants are not as well educated as natives. One in three immigrant workers lacks a high school diploma.

IMMIGRATION’S BENEFITS ARE SPREAD UNEVENLY The well educated and middle class profit most from a cheap supply of workers.

Depressed wages, however, have injured the lowest rungs of the socio-economic strata.

If you are middle class and college educated, immigrants make your busy life a little easier – and cheaper.

Over the past generation, immigrants such as manicurist Trang Le, a citizen, and cosmetologist Maria Rosa, who immigrated illegally, have flocked to the hairdressing and cosmetology business. Since 1970, wages in that field have dropped by 20 percent.1 Immigrants such as Martha, an undocumented RONALD worker in Anaheim, have CAMPBELL largely taken over the REGISTER housekeeping business.

WRITER Wages for housekeepers have dropped by 30 percent since 1970.

No state and almost no developed economy has absorbed so many immigrant workers so quickly as California. The arrival of more than 5 million foreign workers over the past four decades raises a basic question:

of dollars for public services.

But the truth is that there are winners and losers. The winners from mass migration are the people in the middle and at the top of the economic pyramid. The losers are those at the bottom.

Economists agree that immigrants have depressed wages for the least-educated workers. In California, where immigrants dominate the ranks of the least educated, that means immigrants largely are hurting other immigrants.

The burden on taxpayers is a murkier issue. In 2007, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers concluded that over the long term, immigrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in services. But other studies say that the poorest and least-educated immigrants – including most illegal immigrants – cost more than they pay.

And finally, there is the impact on the

Day laborers pay $ 1 to take part in a work lottery. The chosen then pay another dollar for the privilege of working.

Who wins, and who loses?2 Among foes of immigration, particularly illegal immigration, it is an article of faith that everyone loses. Immigrants, they say, have driven down wages for natives while saddling taxpayers with the bill for billions

S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 4

Education, the workforce and earnings

High school graduate

Bachelor’s degree

Dropouts

High school graduate

Bachelor’s degree

Dropouts

High school graduate

The mean yearly income of workers depending on the level of their education: Dropouts

High school grads

Some college

Dropouts

Bachelor’s degree

2,500,000 1,051,443

2,529,338

2,528,378

1,233,757

2,137,707

High school Bachelor’s degree graduate

3,000,000

2008

1,500,000

500,000

Dropouts

High school graduate

Bachelor’s 0 degree

Graduate study

$120,000 $106,978.28

$76.387.90 $70,004.66

$60.887.30

2,000,000

1,000,000

966,557

2,203,952

726,014

784,345

1,211,176

464,224 Bachelor’s degree

1,870,595

2000

1,968,916

2,522,777

1,676,807

1,395,954

943,260 154,220

364,480

820,480

1,639,820 51,900

544,200

2,229,300 196,600

390,100

2,097,100 Dropouts

Foreign-born

1990

625,764

1980 2,763,520

1970

Native-born

2,212,531

The number of native- and foreign-born workers in California’s workforce:

100,000 80,000 60,000

$40,565.53

$42,650.98

$39,121.66 $31,341.68

$33,186.65 $23,313.59

Note: Wages are adjusted for inflation 1970

1980

1990

2000

2008

Sources: IPUMS, The Register

FOOTNOTES 1 “Occupations and wages, 1970-2008.xls”: Register analysis of IPUMS data. See the CPI worksheet for inflation-adjusted wages for 90 occupations. See the comparisons worksheet for changes in the native-immigrant balance and mean, inflation-adjusted wage for 13 occupations. See the CPI worksheet for inflation-adjusted wages for 90 occupations. Other worksheets (1970, 1980, etc.) list the mean annual wages in “nominal dollars” (as of that year) for more than 300 occupations.

2 “Five million workers over the past four decades”: “Native and foreign-born workers, CA, 1970-2008.xls”, Register analysis of IPUMS data. California added 5.4 million immigrant workers over the period.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

40,000 20,000 0 The Register

NEWS 4 | Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The Rev. Arturo Querijero Ferreras immigrated to America in 2004. He now leads a small congregation at St. Matthew Church in Orange.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 3

economy. Highly skilled immigrants such as Budapest, Hungary-born Andrew Grove, who headed Intel for many years, and Sergey Brin, the Moscow native who co-founded Google, helped transform California’s economy.

But Martha, the housekeeper, and Trang Le, the manicurist, have remade the economy too. Low-paid housekeepers have allowed women with advanced degrees to work longer hours. Vietnamese immigrants such as Le have made manicures a commonplace luxury.

BLUE-COLLAR PARADISE An analysis by The Orange County Register of nearly 40 years of census data indicates that immigration has contributed to a sharp decline in real, inflation-adjusted wages in many jobs requiring little formal education. But wages have risen for jobs requiring a college education – even in fields such as software development where immigrants greatly swelled the supply of workers.

In short, well-educated natives have competed successfully with immigrants.

The Register analyzed changes in wages and the proportion of immigrants in 90 occupations that employ about 80 percent of the California workforce.

Few occupations illustrate the changes better than auto mechanics and registered nurses.

In 1970, auto mechanics earned slightly more and registered nurses earned slightly less than the statewide average wage, about $34,930 adjusted for inflation. U.S.-born workers dominated both fields.3 By 2008, the mean annual wage for RNs had more than doubled.

Auto mechanics, meanwhile, had suffered a 16 percent decline in earning power. That’s like working eight weeks a year for free.

Both occupations have absorbed tens of thousands of immigrants.

Why have these two jobs, both once firmly planted in the middle of the California middle class, moved in opposite directions?

Education is a big part of the answer.

Foreign-born workers and occupations

Occupations with the highest percentage of foreign-born workers compared with U.S.-born workers in 2008 in California.

Foreign-born Textile sewing-machine operators U.S.-born 55,217 total workers / 91.5% foreign-born

Farmworkers 245,338 / 84.4%

Housekeepers, maids, butlers, stewards 222,561 / 81.2%

Packers and packagers by hand 85,663 / 75.8%

disadvantage in competing with native workers: language.

At the bottom of the educational scale, an immigrant high school dropout who speaks English well can expect to make 70 percent more than an immigrant dropout who speaks English poorly.8 In today’s economy, most of those workers are condemned to low-wage jobs.

BEATING THE ODDS

Gardeners and groundskeepers 218,412 / 69.2%

Assemblers of electrical equipment 140,497 / 69%

Painters, construction and maintenance 94,152 / 65.4%

Masons, tilers and carpet installers 54,837 / 64.8%

Machine operators 121,925 / 64.3%

Cooks, variously defined 372,851 / 61.6%

Occupations with the highest number of foreign-born workers in 2008 in California.

Cooks, variously defined 229,802 foreign-born / 61.6%

Truck, delivery and tractor drivers 208,151 / 45%

Farmworkers 207,152 / 84.4%

Managers and administrators

201,008 / 24.8%

Housekeepers, maids, butlers, stewards 180,725 / 81.2%

Construction laborers 164,227 / 57.6%

Nursing aides, orderlies and attendants 163,117 / 44.9%

Supervisors and proprietors of sales jobs 162.132 / 30.6%

Janitors 158,1242 / 54%

Gardeners and groundskeepers 151,150 / 69.2% The Register

Source: IPUMS

Today, as in 1970, few auto mechanics go to college. But today’s nurses are much better educated than their counterparts of 40 years ago. In 1970, most RNs had two years of college or less. Today, most have at least a bachelor’s degree.4 In the California of 1970, it was still possible to drop out of high school and enter the middle class through blue-collar jobs in auto shops and factories.

By 1980, the dropout’s gateway to the middle class was narrowing. By 1990, it had all but shut.

The difference in pay between the best-educated workers and high school dropouts has widened with time. In 1970, a typical worker with a graduate degree earned twice as much as a high school dropout.

By 2008, he earned nearly 4 1⁄2

times as much.5 Native workers got the message: Education pays.

In 1970, just 40 percent of native workers made it past high school. By 2008, 71 percent had gone to college.6 With better educations, native-born workers moved up the job chain. Factory workers went to college, or their children did, and became teachers, accountants and managers.

Nearly half of the state’s immigrant workers have gone to college.

But most of the state’s workers who were dropouts – and 90 percent of the least-educated workers, those who never even started high school – are immigrants.7 Many of these poorly educated immigrants have another

Not all, however. There are opportunities even at the bottom of the job ladder, even in the worst recession in 75 years.

When Maria Rosa, an illegal immigrant, sneaked across the border from her native Mexico in 1990, she was 27 years old and had a ninth-grade education. She quickly fell into a series of low-paying jobs: hotel housekeeper, flower arranger, banquet server.9 But she was ambitious. The Anaheim resident spent part of every day studying English.

She went to cosmetology school and got a new job as a hairdresser and manicurist.

Now, with both of her U.S.born children in gifted programs, she is taking classes part time at night. She hopes to get her high school diploma this year, then study psychology in college.

“People see problems,” Maria Rosa said. “I see solutions.”

Alex Ortega, 35, crossed the border at age 16, having never made it past middle school.

He, too, followed the familiar trail of low-paid work: painting houses, making clothing, laying carpet.10 But seven years ago, after learning the carpet business, he opened his own store.

“I’m the only employee,” Ortega said. “I sell, I install, I do everything.”

Ortega got a work visa a few years ago and is applying for a green card. He hopes to become a U.S. citizen someday.

The carpet shop has given him a tentative hold on the middle class. He, his wife, their three children and small white poodle, Jack Jr., live in a Garden Grove tract home. A latemodel truck is parked outside.

He hopes to expand into kitchen remodeling.

ECONOMISTS DEBATE George J. Borjas is a Cuban immigrant, a Harvard economist and the leading exponent S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 5

FOOTNOTES 3 “Occupations and wages, 1970-2008.xls”: See especially the comparisons worksheet.

4 “Education score by occupation, 1970-2008.xls”: Register analysis of IPUMS data. See “CollGrads” sheet; on line 244, percentage of auto mechanics with a four-year college degree or better rose from 2.1% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2008; on line 64, percent-

age of registered nurses with a four-year degree or better rose from 21.4% in 1970 to 60.9% in 2008.

5 “Wages by nativity and education, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data. See CPI worksheet for wages in inflationadjusted dollars. Also see “Total personal income by education, 1970-2008.xls,” CPI worksheet. Personal income is the broadest

gauge of income, including wages and other forms of income such as dividends.

6 “Educational attainment of CA workforce, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data. See the native worksheet.

7 “Education by nativity for workers, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data.

8 “Income by education and ability to speak English, 20062008.xls,” Register analysis of census PUMS data.

9 Interview, Maria Rosa, Dec. 16, 2009.

10 Interview, Alex Ortega, Jan. 21, 2010.

EARTHWEEK MOVES THIS WEEK TO LOCAL 2

Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010 | NEWS 5

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 4

of the view that immigration is driving down wages.

In a widely cited 2003 paper, Borjas wrote that immigration reduced the wages of the average U.S.-born worker by 3.2 percent from 1980 to 2000.

High school dropouts were hit hardest, suffering an 8.9 percent wage cut, while even college graduates saw a 4.9 percent drop.11 The Register found similar trends among less-educated California workers. From 1970 to 2008, dropouts’ wages fell 25 percent after adjusting for inflation while high school graduates’ wages dropped Santa Ana residents Angel, 42, right, and his 70-year-old father, Ignacio, usually get work through 16 percent. But contrary to the Laguna Beach day labor center. However, they were lucky this day and scored work from a friend.

Borjas’ conclusion, the Register found that college gradunatives. There are laborers and ates enjoyed a 15 percent wage engineers but not many in the increase, and those with gradumiddle, with skills comparable ate degrees got a 50 percent to most native workers. raise.12 Even at the bottom, he arPoorly educated workers are gued, an influx of immigrants caught in a bind because of the brings opportunity for natives. influx of immigrants competMore immigrant construction ing for jobs, Borjas said. While workers need English-speaking a carpenter could become, say, supervisors. More immigrant a plumber if there were too taxi drivers need Englishmany immigrant carpenters in speaking dispatchers. More imhis field, he said, a high school migrant landscapers need Engdropout cannot easily become lish-speaking managers and a college graduate.13 salespeople.

Borjas said even the bestBut the arrival of millions of educated native workers are new immigrant workers is bad hurt by immigrants. While the news for one group, Peri said: Register’s analysis indicated older immigrants. Unlike most that wages rose for college natives, older immigrants are Irma Ronses, a manager at the Laguna Beach day labor center, graduates, Borjas said that similar in education and skills to right, was born in Mexico but is an American citizen. “the wages for these workers the newcomers. He calculated would have gone up even more” that the wagunauthorized workers.19 6 million illegal residents file if there had es of immitax returns. Social Security esFor example, a Georgia meat been no influx grants who timates that half of the undocuprocessor reported paying of well-eduarrived bemented pay into the system.17 wages to a 31-year-old Texan “If there is a U.S. state or an cated immifore 1990 who was receiving disability The IRS issues “Individual economy in the world where grants. were 17 perbenefits. After five investigaTaxpayer Identification Numthe labor market conseTo all this, cent to 20 tions, Social Security concludbers,” ITINs, to taxpayers who quences of immigration UC Davis percent lowed the Texan really was disare ineligible for Social Securishould have been dramatic, economist er than they abled but that identity thieves ty numbers. It believes most California clearly qualifies.” and Italian would have had used his Social Security ITIN holders are unauthorized U C D AV I S E C O N O M I S T immigrant G I O VA N N I P E R I A N D been had imnumber to report $915,000 in workers, a category that inCOLLEAGUE J. WILLIAM Giovanni Peri migration wages over 16 years from 58 cludes illegal immigrants and AMBROSINI has a onestopped in employers.20 people such as tourists who are word answer: 1990.16 in the U.S. legally but not alThe Center for Immigration California. lowed to work. In 2005, it colStudies, which favors restricPAYING THE TAXMAN In each of the past four declected $5.2 billion in taxes on tions on immigration, estimatades, Peri said, California has $95 billion in income from peoed in 2004 that illegal immiDozens of economists and inabsorbed a greater number of ple using ITINs.18 grants contributed $7 billion a terest groups have debated immigrants than Israel did year to Social Security but cost An obscure Social Security whether immigrants, particuright after the Soviet Union the federal government a net fund sheds light on the hidden larly illegal immigrants, concollapsed and a higher percent$10 billion overall. The Contax payments of illegal immisume more in public services age increase than Miami did afgressional Budget Office said in grants. than they pay in taxes. ter the Mariel boat lift from Cu2008 that if illegal immigrants The “Earnings Suspense Here again, there are clear ba in 1980.14 were driven “off the books,” it File” is a multibillion-dollar winners and losers.

“If there is a U.S. state or an would cost Social Security stash of pay records with misThe biggest winner is the Soeconomy in the world where about $22 billion over 10 years.21 matched names and Social Secial Security Administration, the labor market consequences curity numbers. Many miswhich collects billions of dollars “At the federal level,” said of immigration should have matches are the result of innoannually from illegal immiformer Immigration and Natubeen dramatic,” Peri and colcent error: someone who grants who are ineligible for ralization Service Commissionleague J. William Ambrosini changes her name because of benefits. er Doris Meissner, “it’s convenwrote recently, “California marriage or divorce but neThe biggest losers are state ient to look the other way.”22 clearly qualifies.”15 glects to alert Social Security. and local governments.

UNCLEAR COSTS Yet Peri finds little impact on But the file has grown so quickContrary to popular belief, natives’ wages, save among the ly, from $30 billion posted in most illegal immigrants work While the federal governleast educated.

1998 to $89.7 billion posted in “on the books” and, therefore, ment gets billions of dollars in The reason, Peri said, is that 2007, that officials believe must pay taxes. The Internal immigrant workers differ from S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 6 much of the money comes from Revenue Service estimates that Santa Ana residents Angel, who asked that his last name not be used, left, and his father, Ignacio, wait unsuccessfully to be hired at the Laguna Beach day labor center.

PHOTOS: CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

FOOTNOTES 11 “The Labor Curve Is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market,” by George J. Borjas, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2003.

12 “Wages by nativity and education, 1970-2008.xls,” Register analysis of IPUMS data. See CPI worksheet.

13 Interview, George J. Borjas, Feb. 16, 2010.

14 Interview, Giovanni Peri, May 26, 2010.

15 “Immigrants and the Labor Market in California, 1960-2005,”

by Giovanni Peri and J. William Ambrosini, May 2010. Prepared for the Gifford Center for Population Studies at UC Davis.

16 “How Immigrants Affect California Wages and Employment”

by Giovanni Peri, California Counts, Public Policy Institute of Cal-

ifornia, February 2007.

17 “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments,” Congressional Budget Office, Publication #2500, December 2007. CBO said researchers for the Urban Institute, Migration Policy Institute, Pew Hispanic Center and the Center for Immigration Studies all assume a 55 percent compliance rate by illegal immigrants with income, Social Security and Medicare taxes. “Social Security estimates”: “The Impact of Immigration on Social Security and the National Economy,” by Joel Feinleib and David Warner, Social Security Advisory Board, Issue Brief #1, December 2005.

18 “It believes most ITIN holders legally cannot work in the Unit-

ed States”: See “Immigration Enforcement Benefits and Limitations to Using Earnings Data to Identify Unauthorized Work,” Government Accountability Office, July 11, 2006, GAO-06-814R. “Collected $5.2 billion in taxes”: See “IRS ITINS 2001-2005.xls,” provided to the Register by IRS spokesman Raphael Tulino.

19 “Grown so quickly”: Numbers contained in correspondence from Social Security Administration to the Register March 18, 2010. “Much of the money”: “Status of the Social Security Administration’s Earnings Suspense File,” report by SSA Inspector General James G. Huse Jr. to House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, Nov. 18, 2002.

20 “Social Security Number Misuse for Work and the Impact on

the Social Security Administration’s Master Earnings File,” by Inspector General Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr., Report #A-03-07-27152, Sept. 29, 2008.

21 “$7 billion a year to Social Security:” “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget,” by Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Statistics, August 2004. “Cost Social Security about $22 billion”: Letter, Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orzag to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, April 4, 2008; the letter addressed potential costs of HR4088, a 2007 bill that would have required all employers to electronically verify the immigration status of new workers.

22 Interview, Doris Meissner, Dec. 17, 2009.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

NEWS 6 | Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Chef Danny Godinez of Anepalco’s Cafe came to America from his native Mexico in 1 997 for work opportunities and the weather in California. He studied culinary arts at Saddleback College and runs the restaurant in Orange.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 5

Nurses and mechanics

Behind the numbers

In 1970, registered nurses and auto mechanics made an average of about $35,000 a year in inflation-adjusted wages. By 2008, nurses had doubled their income while auto mechanics suffered a 16 percent pay cut. Tens of thousands of immigrants flocked to both fields over the years. A key difference: Nurses in 2008 were much better educated than their 1970 counterparts.

taxes from illegal immigrants, most of the bills for their health care and schooling go to state U.S.-born registered nurses and local governments.

How much is anyone’s guess.

Foreign-born registered nurses After reviewing 29 studies, the Average wage for nurses Congressional Budget Office said Number of workers, there was a consensus that illegal in thousands 200 immigrants consume more in state and local services than they pay in taxes.23 150 But, the agency said, “that impact (on state and local budgets) is most likely modest” – less than 100 5 percent of total spending in most states and a higher amount, but still less than 10 percent, in 50 some parts of California.

Not so, says the Federation for American Immigration Reform, 0 1970 1980 1990 which favors slashing legal immiSource: IPUMS gration by two-thirds. In a 2004 report, the group said that illegal cities where many low-skilled immigrants cost California $8.8 immigrants settled.26 billion more than they pay in taxes. Half of the bill comes from As a result, she and colleague schooling U.S.-born children of ilJose Tessada reported, women legal immigrants, who the group with professional or doctoral desays should not be treated as citigrees spent more time at work. zens.24 In economic terms, it’s a simple tradeoff: A female physician, The contrast between the Conlawyer or professor earns more gressional Budget Office’s “modmoney by hiring someone else to est” impact and the advocacy clean her house, do her laundry group’s $8.8 billion estimate for or care for her children.27 California reveals the many uncertainties surrounding this isAn earlier version of Cortes’ sue. No one lists immigration staand Tessada’s study carried the tus when signing a tax return or provocative title: “Cheap Maids enrolling a child in and Nannies: How school or visiting Low-Skilled Iman emergency migration Is room.

Changing the LaEvery cost estibor Supply of mate relies on staHigh-Skilled Estimated contribution to tistical profiles of American WomSocial Security by illegal the illegal immien.” immigrants in 2004 grant population – Cortes and Testheir numbers, insada also found come, age, family that the more size, tax payment and use of pubschooling a woman had, the lic services such as hospital more likely she was to hire doemergency rooms. Those statismestic help. About 3 percent of tics become steadily less reliable women with high school diploas one drills down from nation to mas hired housekeepers; the states to counties.25 rate rose to 15 percent of women with a college degree and 25 per‘CHEAP MAIDS AND NANNIES’ cent of those with graduate degrees.

The biggest gainers from imMartha, the undocumented migration may be middle- and housekeeper in Anaheim, cleans upper-class natives, particularly one house a day, six days a week, women. Immigration has helped collecting $60 to $90 cash for make cheap personal services a each house. A high school graducommon feature of middle-class ate and social worker in Mexico, life in California. she has no complaints about University of Chicago econocleaning other people’s houses: mist Patricia Cortes found that “I earn more (doing) something prices for housekeeping, gardenelse than what I studied.”28 ing, child care and other services fell during the 1980s and ’90s in Immigration has made life

$7 billion

U.S.-born auto mechanics Foreign-born auto mechanics Average wage for auto mechanics

Average wage $80,000 $70,000 $60,000 $50,000 $40,000 $30,000 2000

$20,000 2008 The Register

easier for women in smaller ways as well.

Consider the manicure.

From 1987 to 2002, the number of manicurists in California almost doubled. During that same period, Vietnamese women such as Trang Le largely took over the business.

Vietnamese immigrants expanded the market for manicures through innovations such as standalone nail salons offering walk-in service, economists Maya N. Federman of Pitzer College and David E. Harrington and Kathy J. Krynski of Kenyon College, Ohio, wrote in a 2006 study.29 The new Vietnamese manicurists drove out some nonVietnamese competitors and dissuaded more from entering the business, Federman and her colleagues wrote. But the number of manicurists per capita rose by 45 percent, “implying that the Vietnamese manicurists found many new nails to polish.”

Set aside the debates over wages and budgets, and you are left with this: For many Californians, mass immigration has meant cheap nannies and gardeners, cheap restaurant meals and cheap construction labor.

“We are all complicit in this,” said Meissner, the immigration commissioner under former President Bill Clinton. “We have all enjoyed lower prices” because of immigration.30 C O N TA C T T H E W R I T E R :

7 1 4-796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com

The Register based its analysis of wages and immigration in California on nearly four decades of data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some of this information is readily available among the hundreds of tables the census publishes after each once-adecade national population count and annual American Community Survey.

But to get the full picture, we used “microdata” – random samples of raw census questionnaires, minus personally identifiable information such as names and addresses. Microdata allowed us to compare the wages of natives and immigrants in dozens of occupations across decades.

We obtained microdata for 2005 through 2008 directly from the Census Bureau’s Public Use Microdata Sample, or PUMS.1 The historic data comes from IPUMS-USA – the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, a service of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota (usa.ipums.org/usa). The authors are Stephen Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder and Matthew Sobek.2 The Census Bureau occasionally changes how it lists occupations. IPUMS produced a standardized list of occupations for the entire period from 1 970 through 2008, making comparisons possible.

We analyzed wages and the proportion of foreign-born workers in some 300 occupations from 1 970 through 2008. Dozens of occupations had only a few thousand workers; even with the large sample sizes that the census uses, seemingly big changes in those occupations could be due to chance.

So we narrowed our focus to 90 occupations, each of which had at least 50,000 workers in 2008.

Some 1 4.7 million people, 80.5 percent of the state labor force, worked in those 90 occupations in 2008.3 We also calculated the mean wage for each occupation, then adjusted for inflation. All historic wages and incomes listed in the accompanying story and charts are adjusted to 2008 levels based on the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers, the CPI-U, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.4

FOOTNOTES 23 “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments,” Congressional Budget Office, Publication #2500, December 2007.

24 “The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Californians,” by Jack Martin and Ira Mehlman, Federation for American Immigration Reform, November 2004. “Should not be treated as citizens”: A key case establishing “birthright citizenship” for persons born in the U.S. to foreign parents was United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, decided 6-2 by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1893. Ark

was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents; after he returned from a visit to China in 1895, port authorities in San Francisco refused to admit him, arguing that he was a Chinese national and that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred his entry. The court declared he was an American citizen, based on the first clause of the 14th Amendment. Opponents of this interpretation argue that Congress can, under the fifth clause of the 14th Amendment, restrict birthright citizenship to descendants of legal residents. For text of US v. Wong Kim Ark, see

supreme.justia.com/us/1 69/649/case.html.

25 CBO, “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments,” December 2007.

26 “The Effect of Low-Skilled Immigration on U.S. Prices: Evidence from CPI Data,” by Patricia Cortes, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2008).

27 “Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Educated Women,” by Patricia Cortes and Jose Tessada, draft paper, June 2009. Cortes and Tessada excluded data on women in the top

immigrant cities – including New York, Miami and every California city – “to show that our results are not driven by outliers.”

28 Interview, Martha, Jan. 22, 2010.

29 “Vietnamese Manicurists: Are Immigrants Displacing Natives or Finding New Nails to Polish?” by Maya N. Federman, David E. Harrington and Kathy J. Krynski, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 59, issue 2 (2006).

30 Interview, Doris Meissner, Dec. 17, 2009.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010 News 7

The Orange County Register

1

IMMIGRATION AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE

A PRIEST’S UNCOMMON PATH A LIFE DEFINED BY WAR

FINDS SOLACE IN PEACE

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Arturo Querijero came to the United States for love.

He was a Roman Catholic priest, a missionary in Guatemala, who wanted to marry. So when his superiors sent him to the U.S. to raise money, he sought a new life.

Querijero had spent most of his 20s and 30s as a seminarian and priest in Central America. As a young priest in Guatemala, he chaired an interfaith group on human rights – a dangerous job in the aftermath of a 36-year civil war.

One day in 2002, two armed men entered Querijero’s church and took him away in their car. They drove him to a soccer field, let him out and told him to look at the trees at the far end. He heard their rifles click. They told him to run.

His religious superiors sent him to Rome for two months. Two years after his return, in the summer of 2004, they sent him away again, this time to the United States. He filled in for vacationing American priests, saying Mass, preaching sermons and, in return, taking the collection – $10,000 on a good day – for the Guatemalan mission.

While raising money, he searched for a new home, one where no one knew Arturo Querijero, the priest, and no one would be scandalized if he married.

He had fallen in love years earlier, before his ordination. He had thought that he and his girlfriend would break it off after he became a priest. Now he knew better.

He told some friends, fellow priests, that he was going to quit the priesthood, get married and work for a relative in Denver, driving a

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Arturo Querijero Ferreras leads a congregation, comprised mostly of immigrants, at St. Matthew Church.

Arturo Querijero Ferreras Job: Priest Home: Anaheim Birthplace: Manila, the Philippines Age: 45 Status: Legal permanent resident Family: Married, one child recycling truck.

“We can’t picture you driving a truck,” they told him. At their urging, he visited St. Matthew Church in Orange, part of the Ecumenical Catholic Church, a descendant of the “Old Catholic” movement, which broke with Rome over papal infallibility in the 1870s.

He joined the tiny church as a priest, married and began a ministry to fellow immigrants. The church sponsored him for a religious visa and then for a green card.

Today, he volunteers with economic and social justice groups. He has talked to business owners on behalf of their workers – something he would never have thought of doing in Guatemala – and with city officials about affordable housing and child care.

“Imagine,” Querijero said, “I came to the United States planning to leave the priesthood. And I ended up here.

“I believe there’s more to it than being here accidentally in the U.S.,” he added.

“We are led as exiles to this land to do something.”

He was 22 in 1979 when the Red Army invaded.

He was 32 in 1989 when the Soviets left and a brief, false peace came to his homeland.

And he was 36 in 1993, his country again convulsed by war, when the United States granted him refugee status and permission to immigrate.

“I had (a) great job and happy life in Afghanistan,” Fraidoon Rasoul said, “but the war (took) away everything from us.”

He had been an accountant, a well-educated man in a nation where few men and almost no women finish high school.

He had kept the books for an export-import company that sold Russian cars and Japanese TVs. The company sold these foreign goods at a steep markup to those who could afford them. Somebody, whether a company man or government official Rasoul never knew, pocketed the difference.

Then the war came, wrecking his comfortable life.

By 1986, he was in Pakistan, one of millions of Afghans who fled the fighting. That year, he applied to immigrate to the United States. His sister, who was married to an American citizen and living in Orange County, sponsored him.

Then he waited.

Seven years passed. At last, in February 1993, permission came. Rasoul, who had never boarded a plane in his life, flew 13 time zones from Karachi to Orange County via Manila, Tokyo and Seattle.

He spent much of his first year in school, learning English.

He found work the next year in the shipping department at

Fraidoon Rasoul Job: Assembler Home: Garden Grove Birthplace: Kabul, Afghanistan Age: 53 Status: Naturalized citizen Family: Married, three children a meat packer in Kalamazoo, Mich. Next came a job making metal and plastic parts at a hydraulic machinery maker in Grand Rapids.

But after a few years, like millions of Midwesterners before him, Rasoul got tired of the winter chill and longed for Southern California. Working nights, he recalled, he would often have to clear snow from his car roof before returning home. Even for someone raised in Kabul, where winter temperatures dip well below freezing, the cold and wind of Michigan was too much.

In 1997, he returned to Orange County, taking a job as a book binder.

The 9/11 attacks riveted Americans’ attention on Afghanistan. Rasoul shakes his head at the memory, saying one word, “tragic.”

But in other respects, 2001 was one of the best years of his life: He became an American citizen, brought his fiancée here from Pakistan, married her and had the first of their three children.

He now works as an assembler at a medical devices maker. Nearly a quarter-century after fleeing Afghanistan, Rasoul has no regrets and no desires to return.

“I don’t want to go back because here I’m safe, I’m happy,” he said. In Afghanistan there is only “war, fighting. …

Why? Why fight?”

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/immigration

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NO EASY ANSWERS AN IMPERFECT IMMIGRATION SYSTEM ROILS AMERICANS. CONGRESS CAN’T AGREE ON A SOLUTION, WHICH APPEARS ELUSIVE.

LEONARD ORTIZ, THE REGISTER

Martin Benson, left, and David Emmes have led South Coast Repertory since founding it in 1 964.

A dream to cherish at SCR

I

n 1964, two young guys with freshly minted degrees from San Francisco State University decided to start a theater company in Orange County. Almost five decades later, South Coast Repertory cofounders Martin Benson and David Emmes are preparing to surrender the reins of their creation, which grew to become one of the nation’s most prestigious theater companies.

Their path to success was anything but assured in the early years, when money was tight, Hollywood’s siren call was loud and seductive, and survival sometimes depended on the kindness of strangers.

STORY BY PAUL HODGINS ON NEWS 9

PHOTOS: CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

HOW CAN THE U.S. BREAK EMPLOYMENT’S LURE? Millions of illegal immigrants came to the United States for work. Without an effective way to deny them jobs, they’ll probably keep coming. But breaking the attraction of jobs could require a secure ID card for everybody, including American citizens, and stiff fines for employers who hire illegal immigrants.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE TO THOSE HERE ILLEGALLY? Some 1 1 million illegal immigrants live in the U.S. Presidents Bush and Obama have said they should be given a chance to legalize. That’s political poison to many. But there aren’t enough agents to deport them all.

IS IT TIME TO SHUT THE DOOR? For the past decade, the U.S. has admitted a million permanent immigrants each year and hundreds of thousands of temporary guest workers. Before the recession, the booming U.S. economy created plenty of jobs for them and for natives. Does it still make sense to welcome so many?

S E R I E S AT A G L A N C E

SEPT. 1 2

SEPT. 1 9

SEPT. 26

TODAY

California relies more on immigrant labor than other states and most developed countries. Economic and demographic shifts have shaped decisions.

More than 1 0 million undocumented immigrants have moved to the U.S. since 1 986. A key reason: the government’s failure to lock them out of jobs.

Immigrants have driven down wages in lowskilled trades. But they’ve made life easier for middle- and upperincome Californians.

Overhauling U.S. immigration policy means grappling with polarizing choices, such as amnesty and a national ID card.

STORIES ON NEWS 3-6 | READER COMMENTS ON NEWS 7

ACTIVISTS RALLY IN D.C. TO INSPIRE DEMOCRATS

BUDGET DETAILS ARRIVE AS STALEMATE LINGERS

INVESTMENTS GONE BAD TAKE A TOLL

Thousands of activists rallied in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, calling on young or disillusioned Democrats to vote in the November elections.

NEWS 20

New details about California’s budget deal emerged, including estimates of revenue and federal aid the state will receive and of cuts on which the parties agreed. NEWS 1 8

Bankruptcy court records indicated that nearly 700 mostly older investors entrusted their savings in an Irvinebased apartment company that declared bankruptcy. REAL ESTATE 1

DAVID WHITING REGISTER COLUMNIST

Horse whisperer challenges boundaries

T

here are times when we take a deep breath, leap over the precipice that marks the end of our comfort zone and discover we can fly.

In many respects, Kat Swigart embodies the bold men and women who built Orange County astride thousand-pound animals that could carry them from San Clemente to La Habra in a single day.

In short, Swigart is a self-described horse person.

But you might call her a horse whisperer. She doesn’t just ride, teach riding and care for horses.

This woman who chucked her MBA S E E W H I T I N G ● PA G E 1 6

TODAY’S WEATHER

The Orange County Register is a Freedom Communications newspaper. Copyright 20 1 0 Customer service toll-free 1 -877-OCR-7009 [627-7009]

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Inland

Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010 | NEWS 3

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE DECISIONS AHEAD

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Phuc Tran, 4 1, of Westminster practices in a mock swearing-in ceremony at St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove.

DARING TO TOUCH THE THIRD RAIL An overhaul of immigration policy means Americans must grapple with polarizing issues, such as amnesty and a national ID card. nearly 20 times the legal supply. n May 15, 2006, in a nationLegal immigration to U.S. by type Some 7.8 million illegal immially televised speech, PresTotal legal immigration grants, most of them unskilled, ident George W. Bush chalIn thousands in 2006: 1,266,129 are working in the U.S.10 lenged the Senate to pass 1,200 an immigration overhaul They far outnumber the imbill within the month.1 migration authorities. They always will, no matter how many Thirteen months and 13 days 1,000 Other more Border Patrol officers later, hopelessly deadlocked, the 800 Congress authorizes.

Senate gave up. Most of Bush’s Employment “We need to fundamentally Republican allies had deserted reform the system,” said James him.2 600 Ziglar, commissioner of the ImUnderscoring immigration legmigration and Naturalization islation’s political toxicity, Sen. 400 Immediate family Service from 2001 to 2003.

John McCain later disavowed the “There’s no magic bullet, bill he had once whether it’s building a fence or championed.3 200 having 100,000 Border Patrol Now President Family-sponsored agents.”11 Barack Obama is 0 trying to honor his Here are some strategies get'00 '01 '02 '03 '04 '05 '06 '07 '08 '09 promise to overting attention now.

Immediate family: spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens. ● Border security: Fortifying the haul immigration.4 Family-sponsored includes grandchildren, spouses of children, brothers and RONALD Mexican border has been the It won’t be easy. sisters, adult children of both U.S. and legal foreign-born residents.

CAMPBELL Immigration legisOther includes refugees and those seeking political asylum. central focus of immigration REGISTER policy since the mid-1990s. And lation never is.

Source: Department of Homeland Security The Register WRITER since then, the illegal immigrant The last major impopulation has more than doumigration law, in SYSTEM FAILURE bled.12 1986, drew on ideas proposed more Over the past decade, Presidents than a decade earlier.5 But putting more agents and more Bush and Obama and successive ConHaunting the debate is the failure of technology on the border is popular. gresses have spent billions on the Borthe 1986 act to curb illegal immigration.

The failed 2007 bill and pending legisder Patrol and prosecutors. Their two The law granted legal status to most of lation promised additional resources principal aims: block immigrants at the 3.2 million illegal immigrants who for the border. And both the old bill the border and deport those already in lived in the United States at the time. and the leading Democratic proposal jail.8 Nearly a quarter-century later, at least contain a trigger: No immigrantNeither tactic sufficed. The illegal 10.5 million more illegal immigrants friendly changes will take effect until immigrant population grew by have settled here – exceeding the entire the border is secure.13 6 500,000 a year for most of the past population of Michigan.

The border-first emphasis is “a way decade. It took the recession to stem When she signed her state’s immiof looking like you’re doing something the tide.9 gration enforcement law in April, Ariabout immigration,” said Steven CaAt its heart, the failure of the immizona Gov. Jan Brewer called illegal immarota, research director for the gration system is economic: Employmigration “a crisis we did not create Center for Immigration Studies, ers want cheap labor. Illegal immiand the federal government refuses to which campaigns for restrictions on grants want jobs. fix.”7 The demand for unskilled labor is S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 4 The truth is more complex.

O

FOOTNOTES 1 After describing his own plan for an immigration overhaul, Bush noted that the House of Representatives had already passed a bill. “The Senate should act by the end of this month so we can work out the differences between the two bills, and Congress can pass a comprehensive bill for me to sign into law,” he said. The full text of his speech is at georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news /releases/2006/05/200605 1 5-8.html.

2 “Most of Bush’s Republican allies”: The June 28, 2007, motion to halt debate failed 46 to 53, 14 short of the 60 required. Voting in favor were 12 Republicans, 33 Democrats and one independent; voting against were 37 Republicans, 15 Democrats and one independent. For roll call, see senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call _vote_cfm.cfm?congress=1 1 0&session=1&vote =00235#position.

3 “McCain disavowed”: During a Republican presidential candidates’ debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Jan. 30, 2008, McCain was asked if he would vote for the

McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, if it came to a vote on the Senate floor. His answer: “No, I would not, because we know what the situation is today. The people want the border secured first.” See the debate transcript at cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/0 1/30/GOPdebate .transcript/index.html.

4 Obama outlined his plan in a July 1, 2010, speech at American University. For the text, see whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarkspresident-comprehensive-immigration-reform.

5 The centerpiece of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was workplace sanctions, or fines against employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Rep. Peter Rodino, D-N.J., first promoted the idea in a 1973 bill. A presidential commission endorsed it in 1981. See Part 2 of this series for additional background.

6 “Failure of the 1986 act”: See Part 2 of this series. “Some 11 million”: “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2009.xls,”

Register compilation of estimates from Pew Hispanic Center, Congressional Research Service and Department of Homeland Security. “Exceeding the entire population of Michigan”: Michigan had 10 million residents in 2008; see “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008.xls,” Register compilation of Census data.

7 Gov. Jan Brewer: Official text for her remarks is at azgovernor.gov/dms/upload/SP_0423 1 0_Support OurLawEnforcementAndSafeNeighborhoodsAct.pdf.

8 For border, see “Border Patrol budget, 1980-2009.xls,” Register compilation of data from Border Patrol, Senate Appropriations Committee and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. For prosecutions, see “FY 2009 federal prosecutions sharply higher,” Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University, Dec. 21, 2009, trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/223/.

9 “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2009.xls,” Register compilation of estimates by Department of Homeland Security, Pew Hispanic Center and Congressional Research Ser-

vice.

10 “Nearly 20 times the legal supply”: About 200,000 unskilled workers were admitted in 2009 under the H-2A and H-2B programs; see “Nonimmigrant admissions, 19992009.xls” “7.8 million illegal immigrant” workers: see Passel and Cohn, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade,” Sept. 1, 2010.

11 Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

12 “More than doubled”: See “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2009.xls” 13 For official documents on the McCain-Kennedy bill, go to thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d1 1 0:SN1 639: Click on the “CRS Summary” link to read the Congressional Research Service summary. For the Democrats’ conceptual proposal, go to nationaljournal.com/congressdaily /issues/images/graphics_20 1 0/cd- 1 00428-rsm -bill-outline-draft.pdf.

14 Interview, Steven Camarota, Aug. 23, 2010.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

NEWS 4 | Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE DECISIONS AHEAD

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Supporters of Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law get vocal before the All-Star Game at Angel Stadium on July 1 3.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 3

immigration. “It’s sort of a default policy.”14 ● Amnesty: Three words sank the 2007 bill: “path to citizenship.” The proposal would have granted legal status to most of the nation’s illegal immigrants if they registered and paid a fine. The Democratic plan contains a similar provision.

Presidents Bush and Obama accepted the continued presence of illegal immigrants as inevitable. Both called for legalization. Obama said that deporting them “would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive.”15 ● Worker ID card: During the debate over the 1986 immigration act, Congress rejected a proposal for a national identification card – a bugaboo for both the right and the left. Instead, it decided workers could use several existing forms of ID to establish they were in the nation legally and authorized to work.16 That didn’t work.

A tamper-proof Social Security card or a secure identity card is likely to be a key part of the next immigration law. The failed 2007 bill would have encouraged – and the current Democratic alternative would require – workers to present a secure ID whenever they start a new job. To defeat identity thieves, the card would carry a photo and biometric data such as fingerprints or an iris scan.17 It will cost billions. In the late 1990s, when federal officials first began grappling with the use of fake IDs by illegal immigrants, the Social Security Administration estimated a tamper-resistant card would cost between $3.9 billion and $9.2 billion.18 ● Mandatory E-Verify: E-Verify, the Web-based system for confirming people are authorized to work, has been voluntary since its inception in 1996. All the leading bills in Congress would make it mandatory. The agency that runs E-Verify, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, pegged the cost for a mandatory system at $765 million over four years if just new hires are screened.19 E-Verify covers roughly one in every 10 U.S. employers – but a much larger share of the big employers. Close to one-third

U.S. and California foreign-born workforce

California historically has had a higher percentage of foreign-born residents and workers than the United States as a whole. Since 1970, California consistently has had at least twice the nationwide percentage of immigrant workers.

Percentage foreign workers 40% 35% 30%

Foreign workers in the U.S. in 2007: 23.9 million (15.6%) Foreign workers in California: 6.3 million (34.4%) U.S.

California

25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2007 The Register

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS

of new hires this year went through an E-Verify check.20 ● Guest workers: America has two channels for importing labor. One is fast, cheap, responsive to employers – and illegal.

The other is slow, expensive and usually requires a lawyer.21 Both the 2007 bill and the leading Democratic proposal call for admitting hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to fill unskilled jobs. The idea is that these legal workers would displace illegal immigrants on the job. ● DREAM Act: More than 2 million illegal immigrants came to America as children. The DREAM Act – short for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act – would extend conditional legal status to high school graduates and green cards to those who complete two years in college or the military.22 California’s version of the DREAM Act, passed by the Legislature in 2001, extended instate tuition at the University of California and California State University to eligible illegal immigrants. But until they become legal residents, most can’t find jobs to match their education. 23 ● AgJOBS Act: Pushed by big farm interests and the United Farm Workers, the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act would allow illegal immigrants who worked in the fields at least 150 days in a twoyear period to legalize. They and their families would get

temporary “blue cards” and eventually could become legal permanent residents.24

HARDER CHOICES Those ideas have all found their way into pending legislation. But other, more controversial ideas could get traction – particularly if Congress stalemates and if illegal immigration begins growing again. Here are a couple of those ideas. ● Data sharing: If E-Verify doesn’t work, the government could turn to more intrusive ways of finding illegal workers.

In a 2006 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office reviewed letting Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service share their databases with immigration authorities. The GAO warned that sharing the data “could involve divulging information about hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. citizens and work-authorized aliens.”25 A milder form of data sharing – the Bush administration’s 2007 attempt to send employers “no-match” letters identifying workers whose information did not match Social Security records – provoked opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO. A federal judge halted the letters, and the Obama administration later gave up the idea.26 ● Birthright citizenship repeal: The 14th Amendment grants ci-

Critical dates in immigration history 1 907: The great immigration wave of the 1 890s and 1 900s crests as 1,285,439 immigrants are admitted to the United States. During the decade from 1 900 through 1 909, 8.2 million immigrants are admitted. That record stands until the 1 990s, when the United States was three times larger than it had been in 1 9 1 0.

1 924: Congress passes and President Calvin Coolidge signs the National Origins Act, setting nationality quotas limited to 2 percent of each nation’s share of the U.S. population in 1 890.

The quota system severely reduces immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which had surged dramatically after 1 890. For example, immigration from Italy is capped at 4,000 per year, down from a peak of 200,000. Overall immigration is capped at 1 50,000 per year.

1 942: In a wartime measure, Congress allows farmers to bring in temporary workers from Mexico. The bracero program is repealed in 1 964.

1 952: Congress passes the Immigration and Nationality Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. The law modifies the nationality quotas set by the 1 924 law and creates new preferences for immigrants with special work skills or family ties to current residents. Truman opposes the bill because he considers the nationality quotas discriminatory.

1 965: Congress passes and President Lyndon Johnson signs the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1 965. The law abolishes nationality quotas and sets up a new system of family preferences.

1 98 1: Responding to increased concern over illegal immigration, a presidential commission recommends levying fines against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

1 986: Congress passes and President Ronald Reagan signs the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law offers amnesty to illegal immigrants who were in the country before Jan. 1, 1 982; nearly 2.7 million people get amnesty and legal permanent residence. The law also imposes sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 5

FOOTNOTES 15 See Obama speech, July 1, 2010, at whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/remarks-president-comprehensive -immigration-reform.

16 “Lessons from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,” by Betsy Cooper and Kevin O’Neil, Migration Policy Institute, August 2005.

17 For a discussion of biometric IDs, see “The Next Generation of E-Verify: Getting Employment Verification Right,” by Doris Meissner and Marc R. Rosenblum, Migration Policy Institute, July 2009.

18 “Illegal Aliens: Fraudulent Documents Undermining the Effectiveness of Employment Verification System,” Government

Accountability Office. GAO/T-GGD-HEHS-99-175, July 22, 1999.

19 “Employment Verification: Challenges Exist in Implementing a Mandatory Electronic Employment Verification System,” Government Accountability Office. GAO-08-895T, June 10, 2010.

20 USCIS spokeswoman Mariana Gitomer, e-mail, Aug. 30, 2010. Some 219,000 employers representing 780,000 worksites – about 10 percent of the national total counted by the Census Bureau – are enrolled in E-Verify. From Oct. 1, 2009, through Aug. 14, 2010, they ran 14 million queries. The Government Accountability Office estimated that a mandatory E-Verify would process 63 million queries each year. See “Employment

Verification: Challenges Exist in Implementing a Mandatory Electronic Employment Verification System,” GAO-08-895T, June 10, 2008.

21 “It is critical not to lose sight of the fact that illegal immigration has a clear economic logic: It provides U.S. businesses with the types of workers they want, when they want them and where they want them.” See “The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration” by Gordon H. Hanson, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2007.

22 “DREAM vs. Reality: An Analysis of Potential DREAM Act Beneficiaries” by Jeanne Batalova and Margie McHugh, Migration Policy Institute, July 2010.

23 For more on the DREAM Act in California, see universityofcalifornia.edu/educators/counselors /resources/materials/AB540_08.pdf (UC system) and fullerton.edu/ab540/ (CSU system).

24 The most recent version of the AgJOBS bill was introduced in May 2009 in the House by Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., and in the Senate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. See thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d1 1 1:1:./temp ˜/bdKH1z::|/home/LegislativeData.php.

25 “Immigration Enforcement: Benefits and Limitations to Using Earnings Data to Identify Unauthorized Work,” Government Accountability Office. GAO-06-814R, July 11, 2006.

EARTHWEEK MOVES TO LOCAL 11 THIS WEEK

Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010 | NEWS 5

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE DECISIONS AHEAD

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A driver confronts backers of Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game at Angel Stadium.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 4

tizenship to everyone born in the United States. Several Republican senators have proposed hearings to explore repealing birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Two House bills, including one introduced

by Rep. Gary Miller, R-Diamond Bar, would try to do this by revising immigration law.27 There are 4 million U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants; the Miller bill, as written, would only apply to children born in the future.28 ● Limit legal immigration: A million legal immigrants have entered the U.S. each year over the past 20 years – more than three times the rate during the 1960s. If the “jobless recovery” continues, the decades-old political consensus in favor of expanded legal immigration could break down.29

Immigrant workers, population During the past 20 years, immigrants have spread beyond the “gateway” states – California, New York, Texas and Florida.

Nevada, Arizona, Illinois and New Jersey now host large immigrant populations and workforces.

Percentage of foreign-born workers, 2007 Under 5%

10% to 15%

5% to 10%

15% to 24%

27% 25.6%

25.6% 34.9%

Percentage of foreign-born population, 2008 Under 5%

10% to 15%

5% to 10%

15% to 20%

Greater than 20%

20.5%

GETTING TO ‘YES’ George W. Bush and Barack Obama both sought a “comprehensive” immigration overhaul, a bill that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants, tighten enforcement and admit more immigrant workers.

Bush couldn’t persuade his fellow Republicans. Obama so far hasn’t been able to move the issue through the most Democratic Congress in decades.

And the next Congress probably will be more Republican.

Tamar Jacoby sees potential for a comprehensive bill coming from a divided Congress. She heads ImmigrationWorks USA, a business group that favors increased immigration.

“No one in their right mind would be hopeful and rosy,” Jacoby said. But “both Democrats and Republicans have a big stake in getting immigration behind them before 2012.”30 Democrats, she said, have to keep their promise to Latino voters to enact immigration legislation; just trying won’t be enough.

Meanwhile, “Republicans probably think there won’t be another Republican president until they get immigration off their demerit list with Latinos.”

As for her own group’s favorite cause, importing more labor, Jacoby admits it will be hard to get anywhere in the midst of a recession. But a flexible cap, one that admits few immigrants now but more when the economy booms, might pass, she said.

“Even in the worst of times,

Greater than 25%

27.9%

Source: U.S. Census

The Register

we need some workers,” she said. Even now, “people aren’t leaving Detroit … to clean toilets in hotels or pick fruit.”

Mark Krikorian heads the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restrictions.

He believes there is no chance for a comprehensive bill in the next two years.

“The core dynamic” of comprehensive bills was to trade legalization for the promise of stronger enforcement. The 2007 bill died, he said, because “nobody believes the promise of future enforcement.”31 That leaves “small ball” legislation, such as the DREAM Act and AgJOBS, Krikorian said.

The first covers the most sympathetic group of illegal immigrants, the second a powerful interest group.

“Small ball may be what you want to do,” Krikorian said.

“When I hear the word ‘comprehensive,’ I grab my wallet and look for cover.”

AN UNEASY HISTORY The United States has a long

history of uneasy relations with its newest immigrants.

In the 1850s, the “Know Nothings” sought unsuccessfully to end the mass migration of Irish and German Catholics.32 In the 1870s and the early 1900s, Californians persuaded the federal government to shut out Asian immigrants.33 In 1924, having made their peace with the Irish and Germans, restrictionists slammed the door on Jewish and Italian immigrants.34 In 1965, a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Rep. Emanuel Cellar of New York, co-authored the bill that welcomed a new wave of immigrants.

Mexicans have dominated that wave, accounting for nearly one-third of all immigrants, legal and illegal, since 1990. Only two other ethnic groups in American history have dominated immigration to that extent: Irish and Germans in the 19th century.35 In time, Mexican immigrants S E E I M M I G R A N T ● PA G E 6

Critical dates in immigration history 1 990: The illegal immigrant population reaches 3.5 million, passing pre-amnesty levels. It hits 7 million in 2000 and about 1 2 million in 2007.

1 994: A presidential commission warns that the prohibition on employing illegal immigrants has broken down because of the widespread use of phony immigration documents. Separately, Congress and President Bill Clinton begin rapidly increasing the Border Patrol’s budget; it doubles between 1 994 and 1 998.

1 996: Congress orders immigration authorities to test ways of verifying that people legally can hold jobs. The mandate leads to today’s voluntary, Web-based E-Verify system. Congress also authorizes the federal government to permit local law enforcement agencies to enforce immigration law.

2003: The Department of Homeland Security is created. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is shut down, its responsibilities divided among three new Homeland Security agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection (including the Border Patrol) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

May 2005: Sens. John McCain, RAriz., and Edward M. Kennedy, DMass., propose an immigration bill. Illegal immigrants could become citizens after paying a fine.

Employers could import temporary immigrant workers.

May 2007: President George W. Bush outlines his ideas for immigration changes in a nationally televised address. Two days later, senators announce a deal paralleling Bush’s proposal: legal status for illegal immigrants who pay fines, tighter border security and a program to admit 400,000 to 600,000 temporary workers annually. The proposal provokes a firestorm among conservatives.

June 2007: The Senate fails to end debate on the immigration bill, effectively killing it.

July 20 1 0: President Barack Obama calls for a comprehensive immigration overhaul. His proposal would let illegal immigrants apply for citizenship after registering and paying a fine. It also would include stepped-up border enforcement and an improved system for verifying worker eligibility.

Sources: Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Government Accountability Office, Migration Policy Institute, Center for Immigration Studies, The Orange County Register

FOOTNOTES 26 No-match letters: See Federal Register, Oct. 7, 2009, for a brief history of the rule. edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf /E9-24200.pdf.

27 LEAVE Act, HR-994; see thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery /D?d1 1 1:1:./temp/˜bduqf0::|/home/LegislativeData.php?n =BSS;c=1 1 1|.

28 “4 million U.S.-born children”: See Passel and Cohn, “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States,” April 14, 2009.

29 “A million legal immigrants”: See “Legal immigration summary, 1907-2009.xls,” from Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.

30 Interview, Tamar Jacoby, Aug. 27, 2010.

31 Interview, Mark Krikorian, Aug. 30, 2010.

32 The “Know Nothings” drew their name from the answer members were supposed to give when asked about the movement: “I know nothing.” Organized as the American Party, it ran former President Millard Fillmore for president in 1856.

33 See Part 1 of this series.

34 The 1924 law set nationality quotas based on each sending country’s share of the U.S. population in 1890 – after the peak of the Irish and German immigration and before immigration from southern and eastern Europe took off. As a result, 70 percent of the annual quota was reserved for just three countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. See “Three Decades of Mass Migration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 1995.

35 “Mexicans have dominated”: Mexicans make up about 32 per-

cent of all current immigrants, legal and illegal; that compares with 33 percent for Irish from 1850 to 1870 and 26 percent for Germans from 1850 to 1900. See “Mexican Immigrants in the United States, 2008,” Pew Hispanic Center, April 15, 2009; see also “Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States” by Gordon H. Hanson, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12141, March 2006.

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

NEWS 6 | Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE DECISIONS AHEAD

LIMITED OPPORTUNITIES Job prospects dry up for Mexican immigrant.

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Mariela has her feet in two lands. Mexican by birth, she is American by education, culture and attitude.

She is also among a generation of illegal immigrants brought here as children, educated at public expense but stuck in dead-end jobs because of their legal status.

She’s a shift manager at a coffee shop, a job she got six years ago with a fake Social Security card.

An honors graduate of Cal State San Bernardino with a degree in social work, she earns perhaps half what she could make as a social worker.

“At this point, there’s nothing else I can do,” Mariela said. “I can’t work with my degree. You might get hired, but when they ask for an ID, there’s nothing I can give them.”

Her father, a gardener, moved from Mexico to the San Bernardino area in 1988. The family, including 8-year-old Mariela, followed in 1990.

Growing up in a traditional Mexican family – “You’re Mexican, that’s it,” her father would say – Mariela nonetheless quickly became American. Her English is unaccented, her clothing and jewelry straight out of a shopping mall.

She did well in high school but

Mariela Job: Coffee shop manager Home: Highland Birthplace: Puebla, Mexico Age: 29 Status: Undocumented Family: Married

thought college was out of reach.

State law at the time charged illegal immigrants out-of-state tuition – two to three times the instate rate – at the University of California and California State University.

AB540, enacted in 2001, opened college doors to illegal immigrants who had graduated from California high schools, lived in the state for at least three years and prom-

ised to seek legalization.

Mariela took advantage of AB540 to get her degree.

If she could get a social work job, Mariela said, she would like to work with battered women.

Mariela hopes to return to school soon to earn a master’s degree. It will take two years and cost her at least $12,000.

But it won’t solve her fundamental problem. It won’t make her legal.

As the wife of an American citizen, she could apply for citizenship. But because she entered illegally, Mariela said, she would have to return to Mexico first.

And there is a further complication: Mariela is pregnant with her first child, due on Christmas Day. “Hopefully something’s got to give,” she said.

CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Mariela, left, and her husband, Ramon, watch an impromptu dance during a birthday celebration for her mother. Mariela, an honors graduate of Cal State San Bernardino with a degree in social work, was born in Puebla, Mexico, and is undocumented. Ramon is an American citizen.

IMMIGRANT F R O M PA G E 5

and their descendants – like Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians before them – will win political and economic power.

For now, however, millions of them can only watch as Congress debates the broken immigration system and their future.

Since the collapse of Bush’s immigration plan in 2007, attempts to broker a compromise have gone nowhere.

People on one side advocate an enforcement-only approach, saying nothing else should be done until the border is finally secured. People on the other side say nothing can be done until the country accepts the presence of millions of illegal immigrants.

“Once polarization starts, it tends to be the opposite of a virtuous circle,” said Jacoby, the immigration advocate.

Obama, she said, needs to stop attacking the Arizona immigration law and explain what he will do to improve enforcement. Republicans, she added, “need to be telling other Republicans, ‘Tone it down.’ ” Krikorian, the advocate for restrictions on immigration, said that outside Washington, the public has already adopted a calm, unpolarized stance – in favor of stronger enforcement.

Look at the changing public reaction to employer audits, Krikorian said.

In 1999, during President Bill Clinton’s administration, senior Immigration and Naturalization Service official Mark

Reed checked the immigration status of workers at several Nebraska meatpackers. The audit forced 3,500 illegal workers to flee, disrupting business and outraging Nebraska officials. Reed, the INS and the Clinton administration ducked for cover.36 Fast-forward 10 years. In the summer and fall of 2009, the Obama administration sent audit notices to nearly 2,000 employers. It was orders of magnitude bigger than Reed’s brief one-state, one-industry campaign. Yet few objected.

“The center of gravity has clearly moved toward more enforcement,” Krikorian said.

“Things that were unacceptable in the past clearly are within the pale now.”

Reed, a consultant now, says a crackdown on employment could push millions of illegal immigrants home.

“They came here to work,” Reed said. “So you don’t (need to) arrest anybody. This is all about jobs.”37 But James Ziglar, the former INS commissioner, said an enforcement-only approach won’t work.

“Until we reform our laws with regard to how people get here and how long they stay, we will never get control of immigration,” Ziglar said.

“You can put all the guards, all the fences you want at the border, and you can do all the worksite enforcement you can, and you will still have illegal immigration.”38 C O N TA C T T H E W R I T E R :

7 1 4-796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com

FOOTNOTES 36 For Reed’s account of the 1999 Nebraska audits, see Part 2 of this series.

37 Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

38 Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

VALUED SKILLS RUN INTO BUREAUCRACY

By RONALD CAMPBELL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

More than a hundred years ago, there would have been nothing unusual about the son of an Irish dairyman immigrating to the United States.

Dire poverty drove nearly 4 million Irish here in the 19th century. One million came in a single awful decade, the 1840s, the years of the potato famine.

But no one must flee Ireland anymore. A typical year’s worth of Irish immigrants would barely fill a large college dorm.

That makes Walter O’Brien, O’Brien hacker turned computer entrepreneur, noteworthy. O’Brien came to America not because of need but because of want. He was an exile in his own land.

At age 9, in that most Catholic of countries, he quit going to church.

At 11, he began teaching himself about computers. Telling his father then that he wanted to work with computers was, he said, like telling him he wanted to be a ballerina.

By 12, he had hacked into NASA’s network.

At 13, he was working for an Irish bank, doing business under his hacker nickname, Scorpion.

At 18, he represented Ireland in the International Olympics in Infomatics, a competition for young computer programmers.

His father, the dairy farmer,

Walter O’Brien Job: Business executive Home: South Pasadena Birthplace: Wexford, Ireland Age: 35 Status: Naturalized citizen Family: Single

told a television reporter at the time, “He’s some kind of typist, but they pay him well.”

At 22, in 1997, O’Brien moved to the United States. He has rarely returned home.

“If you succeed (in Ireland), there’s so much jealousy,” he said.

“And if you fail, the attitude is, ‘I told you so.’

“That was not quite me.”

Since his arrival in California, O’Brien has worked for an Oracle subsidiary and mutual fund manager The Capital Group. He now runs Scorpion Computer Services, a corporate information technology consultant.

O’Brien is impatient with his adopted country’s immigration system. It took 11 years for him to become a citizen.

He entered in 1997 on an H-1B visa. After four years, he earned his green card under a quota for aliens with “extraordinary ability” – a quota so competitive that just one in every 3,000 immigrants qualifies.

Then, like every other green card recipient, he had to wait five years to apply for citizenship.

And then he had to wait an additional year for an interview.

“Either make it tough but quick,” O’Brien said, “or don’t bother me.”

For more coverage, go to ocregister.com/investigations

The Orange County Register

IMMIGRATION AND THE DECISIONS AHEAD

Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010 News 7 1

Readers sound off on investigative series T he Register has received more than 500 comments about its series on immigrants and the California economy.

Here’s a sample.

‘A STATE POWERED

BY IMMIGRANTS’ (posted online Sept. 1 0, 20 1 0, published Sept. 1 2, 20 1 0) Teamsterphilip: “Thank you for adding relevant facts to the discussion about immigrants in California. The United States immigration policy has created a second class of residents who are now called “illegal immigrants.” One hundred years ago we would have called these same people “welcome Immigrants” because they filled important employment gaps. The real criminal in this scene is the employer who knowingly hires these immigrants.

That employer enjoys the current system. When he knows the person is “illegal” he can pay that person a lower wage, withhold benefits, and even eliminate required safety rules because he knows the illegal worker will not turn him in to authorities.”

Michael Sumners (via e-mail): “A story of ‘immigrants’ or the issue of ‘immigration’ is simply what the illegal alien activists call it to try and own the conversation [and] deflect the subject away from the real issue(s) of illegal immigration. The issues of legal and illegal immigration are two very different subjects that do not belong under the same banner.”

SouthOC: “The fact is that the American middle class is dying thanks to uncontrolled immigration. Wages have been undercut and educational systems have been over burdened.”

Philip Henderson (via e-mail): “Thank you for your

thoughtful research on the issue of immigration and its effect on the California economy. All the rhetoric from politicians seems to be based on emotion rather than facts. In your story you state the facts – people don’t have to like the facts, but they can use the information to craft sensible laws to protect our State.”

Anaheimlvr: “I am impressed with Ronald Campbell’s balanced reporting of the history and data about immigration, legal and illegal, in California.

Unlike the many others making comments, I actually read the entire article. California and the U.S. have had laws restricting immigration which had great success. Likewise, both legal and illegal immigration has had positive and negative impacts upon California’s economy and society. Those who argue that the only way to deal with illegals is to deport them are not considering how un-realistic and expensive this would be. … I support both a secure border and a pathway for citizenship for those who are illegal. This seems the most humane way to deal with the problems we currently experience with illegal immigration.”

“THE LAW THAT FAILED” (posted online Sept. 1 7, 20 1 0, published Sept. 1 9, 20 1 0) Steve3: “Bravo! Finally an article that addresses the root problem rather than just feeding the polarization that exists on this issue. Immigrants are an important part of our economy. Attempting to close the door on them at the border while jobs are available to them if they can cross is a classic political ‘solution.’ ” OCFan92648: “Good Article

with plenty of facts. It seems pretty straightforward that we need serious workforce enforcement to solve this problem. I don’t understand how the government (IRS) can be so diligent in collecting taxes from hard working Americans, but we can’t simply validate whether someone is in the country legally. It’s pretty obvious it’s about motivation and priority, not ability.”

“WHO WINS? WHO LOSES?”

(posted online Sept. 24, 20 1 0, published Sept. 26, 20 1 0) Rdeight: “What? We all lose from mass in-migration to California. Jammed freeways and highways (except on illegal-alien boycott day, when illegal aliens and their sympathizers stay home).

Schools, even in Caucasian areas, that are up to 93% Hispanic, where assemblies and parent-teacher nights

have translators because so few speak English. Strained social services and emergency rooms that are like waiting rooms in Third World hospitals.”

CMGirl: “Something I have a huge issue with is having the culture and traditions of my country changed because of a huge influx of people in the country illegally. The American culture is one of assimilation. We have people from many

countries here but for the most part we all try to become American. We speak a common language – we love our country – we are loyal to our country, etc. Illegal aliens spoil that process in so many ways. Some of them assimilate but many of them have no desire to.”

Fstedie: “Wow, a wellrounded and unbiased article on immigration from OCR. Kudos.”