IT IS hard to believe now, but as recently as 1960 the first language of the majority of immigrants coming into California was English. Since then, though, English-speaking immigrant numbers have been in steady decline, and the consequences continue to echo through the politics of California and the nation as a whole.

It took California more than 200 years to become the most heavily populated state in the union, but since California overtook New York in the population stakes in 1962 its numbers have almost doubled again, and most of the new immigrants have not been native English-speakers.

In 1970, 78 per cent of Californians were Europeans. But by 1996 that proportion had fallen to 52 per cent, with 30 per cent being Latino, 7 per cent black and the remaining 11 per cent mainly Asians. By 2002 white European Californians will be in a minority in the state.

As the population has grown and changed, so the willingness of the state’s voters to support public services has declined. It would be an oversimplification to say that the rise in immigration is the direct cause of the collapse of many of California’s education, health and welfare services. But it wouldn’t be much of one. The Californian dream was a white dream. When it began to go sour, the state’s politics began to reflect white fears.

With the state’s economy buoyant, the focus of the white voter backlash against California’s immigrants has moved from jobs and benefits to language. The centrepiece of this year’s — now almost routine — electoral confrontation over immigration has been Proposition 227, a measure that set out to emasculate the state’s bilingual education programme, which was easily carried — by 61 per cent to 39 per cent — in a referendum last week.

Proposition 227 requires all California state schools to teach classes in English unless parents request otherwise and can show good reason why they should get exemption. Instead of the current, open-ended bilingual teaching arrangements — which in practice often means that many classes are taught in Spanish — all children who do not speak English fluently are required to undergo “immersion” teaching in English for one year and henceforth to be taught in English alone. Some 1.5 million Latino children are likely to be directly affected.

More generally, however, Proposition 227 was the issue through which traditional white Californian voters expressed their fears about the changing nature of the new multiracial California. According to exit polls, whites voted in larger numbers for the policy than any other ethnic group. Sixty-seven per cent of whites voted for 227, and 57 per cent of Asians. Fifty-two per cent of blacks voted against, as did 63 per cent of Latinos, the largest ethnic and linguistic minority in the state.

However, whites are disproportionately more likely to vote compared with Latinos and Asians. Whites may be only 52 per cent of the population of California, but they constituted some 69 per cent of those who turned out to vote. Conversely, while 30 per cent of Californians are Latinos, they made up only 12 per cent of the turn-out.

The immediate consequence of the passing of Proposition 227 was a flurry of legal challenges in the state courts. Several California civil rights groups went straight to law to try to block its implementation, while some teachers groups said that they would defy it. The passing of Proposition 227 “forces us to be saboteurs”, the Los Angeles Times quoted a veteran Latino teacher in East Los Angeles as saying.

But the wider effect will be felt in many other states, especially if Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley magnate who sponsored Proposition 227, has anything to do with it. “I think this initiative will represent the beginning of the end of bilingual education around the United States,” Unz said within hours of the result.

If Unz is right, it is because late-20th century migrants see themselves the way their predecessors did a hundred years ago. Throughout America’s history, immigrants have seen mastery of English as both a precondition for personal advancement and as a testimony to their Americanness. For many Americans that aspiration is as strong as ever. Opinion polls taken before the referendum — and whose sampling methodology makes them more representative of the population as a whole — point in that direction. The polls indicate that 227 was supported by clear majorities among whites, blacks and Asians — with Asians the most pro-227 group — and that Latinos were evenly divided on the measure, with perhaps even a majority in favour.

But what if the sociology and the culture of migration has changed in a shrinking world? Migrants of the late 19th century made an almost total break with their past. But today’s migrants retain more links with their homeland. Telephones, the Internet, television and air travel mean that it is much easier, especially when the homeland is across the border in Mexico instead of across an ocean. Migration no longer implies the same caesura and finality that it used to.

This does not mean that migrants to an English-speaking culture no longer have the incentive to learn English. They do. But the incentive is in some ways not as great. In a more integrated world, monocultural though it has become in many ways, diversity is paradoxically able to thrive. The campaigners for Proposition 227 want to see an integrated California, but they might get a shock if the integration caused the migrants to use their latent voting power.



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