As California Goes...

The contention that California is the nation's bellwether is so common that you want to argue with it--and of late many have, contending that the state is now too Democratic, too liberal socially, too rabidly environmentalist to be a national trend setter. But in its demographic patterns, on immigration and related issues, California's experience in the past fifteen years has run a course that eerily foreshadows today's bitter national immigration debate. In particular, the way California, with its unprecedented ethnic diversity, now manages its social and economic challenges, and the way immigrants assimilate, is almost certain to be a crucial test for the nation and, very likely, for the rest of the world.

Demographically, what California was a generation ago, America is now; what California is, America is likely to become. The Golden State, for all its reputed liberalism and its rapid Hispanicization, may not be so different from the rest of the nation, just a generation or two ahead of it. And the score so far is not nearly as dismal as the nation's rabid immigration opponents think it is. It may even be surprising.

The most obvious element in the story is demographic. As recently as 1960, 80 percent of Californians were Anglo whites; in that year, the most common native language of California immigrants, the largest number of whom came from Britain or Canada, was English. Just forty years later, California, the world's seventh- or eighth-largest economy, became America's first large minority-majority state. Currently, according to the state's demographers, roughly 41 percent of California's 37 million residents are Anglos (what the census calls non-Hispanic whites), 37 percent are Latinos, 12 percent are Asians and 6 per­cent are African-Americans. About 27 percent of California residents are immigrants, the vast majority of them from Latin America or Asia. One-fourth of its school­children come from a home where students are studying English as a foreign language. In another generation Latinos will be an absolute majority, and there will be 2 million fewer non-Hispanic whites than there are now.

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