Sinking Our State

California's "Save Our State" initiative is masquerading as an attack on welfare.

Ron K. Unz from the November 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Or consider those places in America where the deepest (usually) unspoken concerns have already been realized, and white Americans of European origin ("Anglos") have already become a minority of the population. San Jose--the third largest city in California and 11th largest in the nation--is one such example. It has a white population of less than 50 percent and contains mostly Asian and Hispanic immigrants--20 percent and 30 percent respectively--including large numbers of impoverished illegal immigrants. San Jose has a flourishing economy, the lowest murder and robbery rates of any major city in America (less than one fifth the rates in Dallas, for example), and no significant ethnic conflict.

Or consider El Paso, Texas, the most heavily Hispanic (70 percent) of any of America's largest 50 cities. It also has one of the lowest rates of serious crime or murder, with a robbery rate just half that of Seattle, an overwhelmingly white city of similar size. The state with the lowest percentage of whites in the population (about one third) is Hawaii, hardly a boiling cauldron of racial hostility. And despite its heavy urbanization, Hawaii has among the lowest crime rates of any state in the nation, with less violent crime than Idaho and Nebraska.

Furthermore, immigration remains crucial to some of the most important sectors of the American economy. Silicon Valley depends upon immigrant professionals to maintain its technological edge. A third of all the engineers and chip designers there are foreign born, and if they left (or if their future inflow were cut off), America's computer industry would probably go with them.

In fact, many of the largest and most important technology companies of the 1980s in California and elsewhere were created by immigrants, including Sun Microsystems, AST, ALR, Applied Materials, Everex, and Gupta. Borland International, a premier software company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was founded by Philippe Kahn, an illegal immigrant. Those immigrant companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs for native Americans and have paid billions of dollars in taxes. Without immigrants, America's unchallenged dominance in such industries as computer hardware and software, telecommunications, and biotechnology would be lost.

Today's unfolding immigration debate amounts to an attempt to snatch economic defeat from the jaws of victory. California's Prop. 187 is an early round in that debate, and it represents a referendum on the concept of immigration. If it wins, America loses.

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