Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles

Chapter 9 Racism or Poverty Intolerance?

150 Chapter 9 Racism or Poverty Intolerance? E XPLAINING THE deflection of Latino immigration from Los Angeles, and (by inference) from other traditional destinations, on the basis of intolerance to poverty, these chapters have ignored racism and ethno-racial prejudice. Yet these two factors might plausibly explain why California, Los Angeles, and various suburban municipalities enforced housing, industrial, and occupational laws that discouraged Latino influx and settlement. Los Angeles cities might have strengthened enforcement of existing housing, industrial, and occupational laws on the basis of underlying , if unspoken, racism or cultural antipathy to Mexican and Central American immigrants. After all, Latino authors do complain of racism and anti-Latino bias in California.1 Additionally, no one can deny the existence of racist attitudes and ethno-chauvinism in Los Angeles or in California. The Golden State rejected Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century for reasons that included racism and perhaps served Latino immigrants the same way a century later. Why Racism Cannot Explain Latino Dispersal However, the plausible does not always survive close examination. When the topic of racism is fully explored, compelling reasons emerge why racism cannot replace poverty intolerance as an explanation of Latino deflection from Los Angeles, from California, and even from other traditional reception states. First, consider southern California’s history. Latinos were not the first immigrants deflected. Six decades earlier, southern California had rejected some four hundred thousand English-speaking, native-born white Protestants. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, dust bowl internal migrants fleeing rural poverty (“Okies and Arkies”) migrated to southern California. Fearing additional expenses for welfare relief and public education , Los Angeles “declared war” on “the indigent influx.”2 Los Angeles’s chief of police dispatched 150 officers to California’s southeastern border Racism or Poverty Intolerance? 151 with orders to form a “bum blockade” against the Okies. Los Angeles police met the Okies’ truck caravans at the San Bernardino County border, illegally turning them away.3 “Don’t migrate; just keep on moving,” the sheriffs said. “How can I keep on movin’ unless I migrate too?” the Okies sang back.4 Enshrined in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, this reception reminds us that, when they are also poor, native-born, white Protestants have also been unwelcome in southern California. Los Angeles’s solution in 1936 was to deflect the unwanted migrants elsewhere. Then as now, of course, de- flection was not wholly successful. Some Okies settled in California despite the bum blockade. In 1939, the Federal Writer’s Project reported that for these in-migrant Okies, “the workmen’s compensation law failed to operate , the State’s minimum wage law . . . was ignored, and medical aid was denied.”5 Second, racism and ethno-religious prejudice were simply not part of the public debate over immigration in southern California during the last three decades of the twentieth century.6 Squalor was.7 “Is your community becoming a Third World city?” asked the Save Our State website, home to Los Angeles’s most aggressive anti-immigrant movement.8 This much is a matter of public record. The California public also perceived Latino immigrants as poor, but family loving and hard working.9 This is a favorable public image, not a hostile one. The public dialogue in southern California did not include racist or xenophobic language. Hence, the claim that racism drove the regional deflection has no visible basis in the public record. Even Victor Hanson’s Mexifornia, an anti-immigrant diatribe, boasts of the author’s numerous Mexican kinsmen.10 Only an ingenue would suppose that racism and ethno-religious prejudice did not exist in southern California just because certain words were not spoken in public. But antiimmigrant is not the same as anti-Latino, the issue at hand here. Anti-illegal immigrant is not the same as anti-immigrant. Open anti-illegal immigrant opinions surfaced in the 1994 plebiscite on Proposition 187, and in the Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial campaign of 2003. At that time, candidate Schwarzenegger and the California Republican Assembly openly opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. “Stop illegal aliens” was the official CRA slogan.11 Manifestly anti-illegal immigrant, this political slogan was not manifestly anti-immigrant, much less anti-Latino. If those who opposed illegal immigration in California had also invoked antiLatino appeals or racist vocabulary, as they did in the nineteenth century, then it would be easier to conclude that their opposition to illegal immigration stemmed from racism. Third, the...