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22 Immigration Reform and the Browning of America: Tensions, Conflicts, and Community Instability in Metropolitan Los Angeles James H. Johnson Jr., Walter C. Farrell Jr., and Chandra Guinn OUR NATION IS IN THE midst of a rather dramatic demographic transformation that is radically changing all aspects of American society, including the racial and ethnic composition of our neighborhoods , schools, workplaces, and social and political institutions. As a consequence of heightened immigration-legal and illegal-and high rates of birth among the newly arrived immigrants, nonwhite ethnic minority groups are projected to surpass non-Hispanic whites to become, collectively , the numerical majority of the U.S. population by the fifth decade of the twenty-first century . Unfortunately, the nation's emerging multiethnic , demographic realities are not welcomed or embraced by everyone. In fact, the intolerance to immigration-induced population diversity has become so intense that, in some states and cities, police departments are now required to record and maintain statistics on the incidences of racially, ethnically, and religiously motivated violence (Johnson, Oliver, and Roseman 1989). Indeed , it has been argued that one of the root causes of the Los Angeles civil unrest of 1992 was the failure of local elected officials to implement human relations policies to mitigate the widespread intolerance that had accompanied recent changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the Los Angeles population (Johnson and Farrell 1993; Johnson et al. 1992; Luttwak 1992; PostrelI992). We believe that the racial and ethnic intolerance underlying the nation's changing demographic realities strongly challenges, and indeed may very well threaten, our ability to establish viable, stable, racially and ethnically diverse communities and institutions (Guthrie and Hutchinson 1995; Johnson et al. 1989; McDaniel 1995; Miller 1994; Rose 1989; Schultz 1993; Stanfield 1994; Teitelbaum and Weiner 1995). To our way of thinking , the nation's growing antagonism toward racial and ethnic diversity, as evidenced by California initiatives like Proposition 187 and Proposition 209 and continuing efforts at the federal level to curtail benefits that currently accrue to tax-paying, legal immigrants (Alarcon 1995; Bowermaster 1995; Hing 1993b; Jost 1995; Lee and Sloan 1994; Valenzuela 1995), is also bad for business and thus threatens the nation's competitiveness in the global marketplace. Moreover, and perhaps most significant in terms of the future viability of U.S. cities, especially those port-of-entry communities where large numbers of newly arriving immigrants have settled (Roberts 1994), these issues were altogether ignored in President Clinton's National Urban Policy Report Empowerment: A New Covenant with America}s Communities} released in July 1995 (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1995). If U.S. cities are to recapture their former premier status in American society, it is imperative , in our view, that we gain a fuller understanding of the nature and basis of this growing intolerance of demographic diversity and then develop strategies to resolve the underlying conflicts (Johnson and Farrell 1993; Johnson and Oliver 1989; Johnson et al. 1989). Elsewhere we have demonstrated how recent immigration reform policies have contributed to growing income inequality in the United States (Johnson and Farrell 1998). In this chapter, we highlight the root causes of the growing opposition to both immigrants and U.S. immigration policy-the nativist backlash; present a typology of the community-level conflicts that have arisen as a consequence of heightened immigration-legal and illegal-to the United States over the last thirty years; and outline the conditions under which diversity can be brought to the forefront as one of society's strengths. Immigration Reform and the Browning ofAmerica 391 BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT Over the past thirty years, the onglll, size, and composition of the legal immigration stream into the United States has changed dramatically, largely as a consequence of the promulgation of the HartCeller Act of 1965 and more recent amendments to it (especially the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990). Between 1920 and 1965 legal immigration to the United States averaged about 206,000 per year, with the major flows originating in northern and western Europe. Since the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, the volume of immigration has increased sharply, averaging over 500,000 per year between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, and the origins of the dominant flows have changedthey now originate in the Asian Pacific Triangle region (see figure 22.1). Prior to 1965 immigration from the countries that make up this region was prohibited based on various unfounded theories about...

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