State News

Bay Area In Latino Baby Boom

Len Ramirez
KPIX
August 30, 2001

California is in the middle of a baby boom, and this one has a Latin
flavor.

In 50 years, Hispanics are expected to become the largest ethnic group
in the state. But it won't be because of any new wave of immigration.
It's because of birth rates.

Hispanic women have an average of 3.3 children, a number well above the
rates for Black, Asian and White women.

San Jose State Student Gina Roberti comes from a large Hispanic family
and wants one of her own.

"My great grandmother had 13 kids. My grandma had five. My mom had 3,"
Roberti said. "I plan to have a large family to keep the tradition
alive. Maybe four, at the most."

Mexican American Studies professor Gregorio Mora Torres says both
tradition and religion play a role in the high birth rate.

"The Catholic Church preaches that one should not reject God's gifts,
and that children are a gift from God," he said. "Most of these people
are coming from rural backgrounds, where you need a large family to farm
the fields and take care of the parents in their old age."

The impact is being felt in the schools, where Hispanic children are the
majority in many urban school districts, and at social service agencies
like the Gardner Health Center, where almost all the clients are
Hispanic. Over the last year, demand for services has risen 30 percent.
"A provider, a doctor now has to see two patients in a given time slot
where he would normally have to see one, it really gets pretty busy,"
said Christina Rodriguez, with the Gardner Health Center. Experts say
that Hispanic birth rates are expected to slow as immigrant populations
settle, assimilate, and become more educated.

© Copyright 2001 KPIX

California Maps Network of Open Space as Animal Lifeline

Jon Christensen
New York Times
August 28, 2001

Murrieta, Calif. — The bobcat looked stunned, as if it had been caught
in the glare of headlights. It had just been startled by a research
camera's flash, triggered by an infrared sensor, as it traveled through
the Tenaja corridor, one of the tenuous natural stretches connecting
wildlife habitats in California.

Conservation biologists say bobcats have been figuratively caught in the
headlights of suburban traffic, along with long-tailed weasels, mountain
lions, badgers, coyotes and other animals photographed as they have
traversed the Tenaja corridor.

The biologists predicted that if such corridors were overrun by
freeways, subdivisions, streets and shopping malls, the fragmented
islands of natural habitat that remained would lose species, with the
biggest carnivores — mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes — the first to
go.

If such keystone species are lost, biologists say, the rest of the
ecosystem can begin to unravel.

So last November, 152 scientists, conservationists, and state and local
officials met at the San Diego Zoo to map wildlife corridors that they
believed had to be protected to ensure biological diversity alongside
the sprawling human diversity of California, the most populous state.

The Tenaja corridor was one of 232 critical habitat linkages noted in a
report and atlas from the November conference published this summer by
the California Department of Parks and Recreation, the United States
Geological Survey, the San Diego Zoo, the Nature Conservancy and the
California Wilderness Coalition. The corridor links the isolated Santa
Rosa Plateau Ecological Preserve to the larger Cleveland National Forest
in the Santa Ana Mountains southeast of Los Angeles.

For many years, conservation biologists have debated whether wildlife
corridors are effective in linking habitats and protecting animals.
While some scientists remain skeptical, the debate has steadily turned
in recent years to how best to design wildlife corridors, according to
the researchers who advocate their use. The California effort is the
latest and most ambitious example.

"We want to show that we can have a 21st-century civilization in the
midst of an 18th-century landscape," said Mary Nichols, director of the
California Resources Agency, which oversees state parks, forests and
rivers and has embraced wildlife corridors as a top priority. "We've
learned as a result of advances in conservation biology that simply
protecting chunks of land, even on a large scale, is not adequate to
protect many species and the plants they depend on."

California officials are now using the detailed maps just published to
identify corridors that ought to be protected from development and, in
some cases, restored.

Ms. Nichols said the state had recently protected two of the corridors.
In Coal Canyon, on the north end of the Santa Ana range, the state paid
$14.7 million for 680 acres of land zoned for development near a highway
exit. The California Department of Parks and Recreation plans to remove
the paved road under the highway, leaving the underpass, and restore
natural vegetation along a narrow creek that connects the Santa Ana
Mountains to the Chino Hills north of the highway.

The state also recently bought a 2,675-acre ranch in Southern California
for $5.6 million. The ranch is between two state parks, Anza-Borrego and
Rancho Cuyamaca, and serves as a corridor for wildlife migrating between
the mountains and desert east of San Diego.

The state spent $221 million buying land for conservation purposes last
year and that figure is likely to go up, Ms. Nichols said. Last year,
voters approved two bond measures that provided $4.1 billion for
protecting parks and watersheds. A growing part of the money spent by
the state on land is being used to acquire wildlife corridors, state
officials said.

"Linkage-type acquisitions are our most important acquisitions," said
Richard Rayburn, chief of the Natural Resources Division of the
California state parks department. "Linking preserves is the best way to
make preserves bigger."

Dr. Paul Beier, a biologist at Northern Arizona University, said: "In
Southern California, it's the only way." Dr. Beier's research on
mountain lions in the Santa Ana Mountains has provided some of the
strongest scientific support for the growing effort to protect wildlife
corridors in California.

Dr. Beier and his students put radio collars on 32 cougars to study
their movements from 1988 to 1992. They found that the animals used
areas like Coal Canyon and the Tenaja corridor and tended to avoid urban
areas.

When the animals did not, they often got into trouble. Twelve mountain
lions were hit by cars. The police in Oceanside shot one mountain lion
after it wandered into town.

Dr. Beier concluded that the Santa Ana Mountains, which include about
1,287 square miles of undeveloped land, were too small to support a
viable population of mountain lions.

Young mountain lions will have to travel from other areas through
corridors to keep the Santa Ana population from becoming extinct, Dr.
Beier said. In conservation biology, that is called the rescue effect.

Whether corridors will encourage that kind of influx of wildlife is not
known. "There's almost no science of corridors," said Dr. Daniel
Simberloff, a biology professor at the University of Tennessee, who is
skeptical about the value of wildlife corridors compared with core
habitat. People advocating them "don't have real evidence of the
viability of populations with or without corridors," Dr. Simberloff
said.

Many corridors are designed to provide for movement instead of core
habitat, he added, yet they can be very expensive. In his papers, Dr.
Simberloff has warned that corridors can also serve as pathways for
invasive species and diseases.

Dr. Beier found no evidence of these negative effects when he analyzed
32 studies of corridors, he reported in a 1998 paper in Conservation
Biology. But he agreed that the scientific evidence in support of
wildlife corridors was still weak, largely because appropriate studies
were difficult to design and carry out. But time is running out,
especially in Southern California, he said.

"In areas that are largely urbanizing," Dr. Beier said, "they are our
only option. We have all the state parks and wilderness areas we're
going to get. We can tweak the margins. But to make them viable over the
long term, we have to think about how we're going to link them."

Ms. Nichols, the state resource director, agreed that the debate was not
settled. "I don't think we have all the answers, but every fragment is
making it clear we have to be looking at the issue of corridors," she
said. "All the information points in the direction and usefulness of
corridors."

In an attempt to redefine the debate, the recent statewide report used
the terms "linkages" and "connectivity" instead of corridors. The areas
identified in the report ranged from narrow choke points, like the Coal
Canyon underpass, to long stretches of rivers and broad swaths of
redwood forest.

The picture is both daunting and surprisingly hopeful. Of the 232
linkages in the report, more than half were deemed to be high priorities
because of development threats and good opportunities for conservation.

Many of the high-priority areas are already part of formal conservation
plans. And agencies are working on buying land where there are willing
sellers and local support for the corridors. But the science and
practical details of wildlife corridors are still being worked out.

The Tenaja corridor illustrates how the debate about wildlife corridors
has moved from large-scale theory to microdesign, said Dr. M. A.
Sanjayan, director of conservation science for the Nature Conservancy in
California.

The organization hoped to persuade area landowners to keep most of their
property wild. But with more property owners building big houses and
clearing their five-acre parcels for horse pastures, the conservancy
decided that it would have to buy enough land to provide steppingstones
for animals moving between the two areas.

The conservancy has spent about $6 million assembling 1,250 acres in the
corridor. It needs to buy 400 more acres to protect the corridor
completely. The conservancy hopes to recoup some of the cost by selling
parcels of 20 to 40 acres each to buyers who are willing to build on
only 5 acres or less and keep the rest of their property wild. The
placement of each house will present a new complication, Dr. Sanjayan
said. "You have to think like a mountain lion or bobcat," he said.

Judy Kollar bought the first parcel in the corridor. Although she plans
to build a small house, she does not want it to be in the way of
wildlife, especially mountain lions. "I love that piece of land, but the
thrilling part of it for me is the concept," she said. "Even though I
have title to that property, I am the intruder."

© Copyright 2001 New York Times

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Teaching without a license, a growing American trend

Thomas Hargrove
Scripps Howard News Service
August 21, 2001

As opening bells announce the new academic year, more than a million
public school children will face an unprecedented number of instructors
who are not certified or fully credentialed to teach them.

Tens of thousands of public school instructors in the United States have
been given so-called "emergency certificates," "temporary waivers" and
"provisional exemptions" because of a profound shortage of teachers,
according to a series of studies of school computer records conducted by
Scripps Howard News Service.

Among them will be former airfreight booking agent Joan Booth, 49, of
Los Angeles. She hopes to earn her teaching certificate this year or
early next, although she's also starting her third year as a full-time
instructor of sixth grade remedial math, reading and writing.

"There's nothing like jumping in and getting your feet wet," said Booth
during a break in summer school instruction at Bunche Middle School.

She and nearly half of the 33 instructors at her school are teaching
with so-called "emergency credentials," according to Scripps Howard's
analysis of computer records maintained by the California Department of
Education. Fifty-five percent of the instructors at the Compton Unified
School District, which includes Bunche Middle School, did not have
teaching certificates last year.

California, like many states, is using temporary permits so that adults
with college diplomas immediately can assume classroom instruction while
they attend night and weekend classes to learn how to teach. These
provisional instructors usually are given three years to complete the
necessary coursework and pass the state-approved qualification exams to
receive permanent teaching certificates.

The Scripps Howard study found that at least 75,740 people nationwide
were teaching on temporary certificates last school year. The actual
number is probably much higher. Many states and school districts have
adopted a "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy when it comes to reporting
teacher accreditation.

If these teachers had average class sizes - and many face severe
overcrowding - then at least 1.9 million public school students had
uncertified teachers.

"This is one of the few truly market-driven phenomena in American
education," said Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for
Education Information and co-author of a study of alternatives to
traditional teacher certification.

Feistritzer, who approves of the new, alternative methods of training
teachers, estimates that at least 150,000 instructors have been licensed
since 1983 under conditions that would not have been permitted in most
public schools 30 years ago.

The boom in nontraditional instructors has prompted a robust debate.
Some education reformers suggest alternative certification programs will
bring much-needed experts into education, often attracting older
teachers who have business and professional experience.

But other education experts say students score significantly lower than
average on standardized achievement tests when their instructors are
uncertified or are not educated in the field they teach.

Uncertified and alternative-certified teaching will be at an all-time
high when most public schools open their doors this school year,
Feistritzer said.

Booth's principal, Frank Sifuentes, said he's had to scramble to fill
vacancies during his first years at the middle school.

"I had to do my own recruiting, trying to beat the bushes to find people
who were both competent and who would stay," Sifuentes said.

He said dedicated and talented amateurs like Booth are worth the time
and money to train into professionals. Booth has a bachelor's degree in
art and art history, qualifying her for a temporary certificate.

"I came in with my emergency credential and joined the intern program at
the Compton Unified School District," Booth said. "I think I am learning
more this way than through a traditional (education college)
institution. They are very concentrated courses once a month. We get the
information we need without the fluff."

Forty-eight public schools in California do not have a single certified
teacher, according to state records. The majority of teachers at another
92 schools are teaching on emergency credentials. In all, 34,670 people
were teaching on emergency certificates in California last year and
another 9,172 were given "temporary waivers" to teach.

"We certainly are not outside of the concept of traditional teaching,"
said Lisa Blair, principal of Ernestine C. Reems Academy of Technology
and Art in Oakland, Calif. Although none of her 19 teachers is
accredited, all are working to pass final certification. "They will be
fully accredited, but generally it is taking one or two years," she
said.

Uncertified teaching isn't limited to California. A study released in
March by Texas A&M University found that 9,793 of the 38,444 new Texas
teachers hired by public schools last school year (or 25.5 percent) were
not fully certified in the field they were hired to teach. The study did
not estimate lack of certification for teachers already employed.

"The pressing issue facing our state's school districts is not only
recruiting someone for a position, but making sure that person is
well-prepared to teach," said Texas Education Commissioner James Nelson.

New York state officials estimate there will be about 12,000 temporary
teaching licenses in effect this school year, an all-time high for the
state. The New York State Board of Regents has set a goal of eliminating
all temporary licenses by 2003.

"Yes, it's a challenge," said state school spokesman Tom Dunn. "But the
regents feel that there is no way that students of the state of New York
can meet the learning standards without adequately prepared teachers."

New York, like California, also maintains computer records of
accreditation rates. Those files indicate at least 16 school districts
have 25 percent or more of their entire teaching staff on a
"provisional" status. Only six districts report that none of their
teachers are provisional.

Many other states, such as Florida, do not keep track of uncertified
instructors. Florida has both an "alternative certification" program and
a "fast track" policy to allow teachers certified in other states to get
approval quickly.

"We don't keep those numbers," said JoAnn Carrin, spokesman for the
Florida Department of Education.

Although uncertified instruction is a boom industry in America, there
has been little study into whether it hampers children. One who has
examined the issue is Mark Fetler, manager of standards and assessment
at the California Department of Education.

He studied 800 schools, comparing mathematics scores by students who had
experienced teachers accredited to teach math and by those whose
teachers were inexperienced or not fully credentialed. Students with
certified math teachers consistently scored better.

"We found that whether or not the teacher has the appropriate credential
is more important even than the total amount of teaching experience a
teacher has," Fetler said. He said lack of teacher certification "is a
very big problem. It's a particularly thorny problem in the areas of
math and science."

But many education supervisors defend alternative teaching certificates,
especially in school districts with large numbers of temporary
certificates or emergency waivers. Probably the nation's least-certified
teaching staff for a major school system is Los Angeles' Compton Unified
School District, where 755 of its 1,367 teachers were using emergency
credentials last year.

"Credentials are very important, yet they do not guarantee teacher
quality," said Randolph Ward, state-appointed administrator for the
district. "What we find at Compton is that when we get emergency
credentialed people, they come in totally open-minded. That allows us to
teach them the best practices of instruction. Too often, when we have
veteran teachers with established instructional strategies, they tend to
be resistant to change."

© Copyright 2001 Scripps Howard News Service

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On California's Urban Border, Praise for Immigration Curbs

Mireya Navarro
New York Times
August 21, 2001

Imperial Beach, Calif. — Not too long ago in this coastal city south of
San Diego and a stone's throw from Mexico, residents said they felt
under siege.

Rick B'Tello, who manages the beachfront Seacoast Inn, said Border
Patrol agents routinely chased illegal immigrants up the beach, each
time prompting about half of his horrified guests to check out of the
hotel. At the Tijuana Estuary, a national wildlife refuge, Brian
Collins, a biologist, said illegal crossers trampled rare plants and the
nests of endangered birds on their furtive way north, sometimes even
eating the birds' eggs for breakfast.

Worse, Imperial Beach officials said, the hordes passing through — the
Border Patrol said it once arrested more than 2,000 immigrants here in
one 24-hour period — gave this city with a population of about 26,000 a
negative image that kept families and visitors away.

These days, though, the wildlife refuge is peaceful, tourists are coming
in droves, and more people are moving in than out. Residents here mostly
credit Operation Gatekeeper, the federal government's seven- year-old
effort to strictly guard the westernmost 66 miles of the
California-Mexico border.

The Border Patrol's tighter enforcement, which has been spreading east
to Arizona and Texas as well, has been widely condemned by human rights
advocates for channeling immigrants into remote mountains and deserts,
where hundreds of them have died of exposure. But in urban areas like
Imperial Beach that took the brunt of the illegal traffic, grateful
residents say the stepped-up vigilance has all but sealed the once
popular smuggling routes across their beaches, parks and backyards and
helped revive the area's economy and improve the quality of life.

Among the signs of prosperity in this working-class bedroom community
are higher occupancy rates at hotels and record attendance for beach
events like the U.S. Open Sandcastle competition, a 28 percent increase
in home prices this year and neighborhoods no longer disturbed by large
groups of illegal immigrants and the armed federal agents who trailed
them.

"When I hear comments that Operation Gatekeeper doesn't work, well, it's
worked for us," said Imperial Beach's mayor, Diane Rose. "Suddenly,
people feel comfortable walking along the beach with their children in
the evening. Your evenings are not disrupted anymore. People want to
live here."

The quality-of-life problems of border communities are not well
publicized, and they are not the kind of issue that makes or breaks
government policy. But some immigration experts say these problems add
another point of view to a national debate that has lately focused on
the risks to the illegal immigrants. A General Accounting Office report
released in August said that other communities where border enforcement
had increased had experienced economic improvement and lower rates of
crimes like theft.

In Nogales, Ariz., officials reported that as crossings declined, many
small convenience stores that catered to illegal immigrants went out of
business and large retailers took their place, attracting legal shoppers
from both sides of the border. In Brownsville, Tex., shoplifting
incidents dropped and a park near the Rio Grande is used again by
families, the accounting office reported.

"This isn't just a matter of whether the neighborhood is messy," said
Mark S. Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies in Washington, which advocates immigration controls. "People
have a right to expect that their neighborhood isn't going to host this
kind of civic disorder. It affects how secure people feel."

The heavy use of urban areas like Imperial Beach for illegal crossings,
Border Patrol officials say, stemmed from the relatively easy access the
western end of the border afforded immigrants looking for work in places
like Los Angeles. At one point, it was estimated that 25 percent of all
crossings along the 2,000-mile Southwestern border came through the
westernmost five miles starting at the Pacific Ocean.

But a turnaround began in 1994 when the Immigration and Naturalization
Service focused resources along its San Diego sector — installing lights
and ground sensors; more than doubling the number of Border Patrol
agents, to 2,000; completing fencing along 47 miles of the border and
starting a new secondary fence as reinforcement.

Johnny N. Williams, director of the service's western regional office,
said the San Diego sector of the border was now under control, with a
30-year low in immigrant arrests and drug seizures also sharply down.

A recent tour along the first few miles of the border attests to the
transformation — once a wild stretch populated by border crossers,
smugglers, bandits and federal agents in pursuit, the area was deserted
except for the occasional Border Patrol vehicle. Only six men were seen
biding their time on the Tijuana side of the corrugated steel fence that
serves as the international boundary.

But while San Diego was calming down, the illegal traffic shifted
elsewhere, and arrests of illegal immigrants rose in other border areas,
like Douglas, Ariz. In those places, the G.A.O. found, residents now
complain of loss of business, destruction of private property and
environmental degradation.

More troubling, by moving eastward to more dangerous terrain, many
illegal immigrants have died from exposure to extreme heat or cold while
trying to cross. The high death toll — more than 1,000 known deaths in
the last four years alone, according to Border Patrol figures — and the
increased illegal flow through other points of the border have led to
criticism by civil rights advocates that Operation Gatekeeper is not
only ineffective but inhumane.

"This is not about quality of life but life itself," said William
Aceves, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego
and Imperial Counties, one of the groups that have taken their
complaints to the human rights commissions of the Organization of
American States and the United Nations.

Many border residents said they had mixed feelings about the immigrants
themselves, but not about relaxing their end of the border.

Some residents noted that many crossers had also died here, drowned in
lagoons or run over by cars in mad dashes across the freeway. Even
today, parts of I-5 south of San Clemente have chain-link fencing on
medians and "Caution" signs with the silhouettes of a man, a woman and a
child in pigtails hurrying along.

Even those torn about the plight of the illegal immigrants, like Melissa
Espinosa, 24, a second-generation Mexican-American, said they supported
Operation Gatekeeper. Ms. Espinosa said she was not allowed to play in
certain areas while growing up in the San Diego section of San Ysidro to
avoid encounters with crossers. When she was a teenager, she said,
federal agents stopped her on the street regularly, asking her to name
the governor of California to check her citizenship status.

But her exasperation with the immigrants often gave way to compassion.
She used to give directions to some who were mistakenly headed back to
Mexico, she said, and sometimes alerted them to Border Patrol agents
nearby. "I felt sorry for them, but it was very invasive," said Ms.
Espinosa, a waitress.

Bud Harbin, 64, a former member of the Imperial Beach City Council who
said he could count as many as 70 illegal immigrants passing through his
neighborhood most nights, said the trespassers had stolen four of his
cars, crouched down in his bushes and once hid in a room of his house.
On many nights, he said, women in the neighborhood who lived alone or
whose husbands were out would call on him to check on a noise or a
prowler.

Not all border residents are delighted with the enforcement. A few miles
east, in San Ysidro and Otay Mesa in the southern part of the city of
San Diego, views of the illegal immigrants are tempered by economic ties
that draw millions of crossers from Mexico to the area legally, many to
shop.

In those parts, people say they are more troubled that the government is
using resources to curb the illegal traffic that could go to paying for
more inspectors so that legal crossers do not have to wait for hours to
have their documents checked.

"We could be using the money to open up legal gates," said Alejandra
Mier y Teran, executive director of the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce.
"I view it as an opportunity cost. Our businesses are losing money
because of this."

But in Imperial Beach, residents worry about how long the enforcement
will be maintained. The immigration agency's strategy is to increase
control of the border in phases, but attrition within the Border Patrol
is a big concern, as is question of whether the agency will continue to
receive adequate financing to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

"We would never allow it to go back to what it was before," Mayor Rose
said. "We couldn't afford it economically. We have to make sure the
resources we need happen."

© Copyright 2001 New York Times

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Development threatens California wildlife habitat

Kathleen Wong and Stephanie Greenman
Environmental News Network
August 20, 2001

Almost 60 percent of the secret trails used by California's wildlife to
travel between healthy habitat patches are threatened by development.
The loss of these corridors threatens not only the future health but the
very existence of the state's most charismatic animal species, according
to a recent report issued by 160 biologists.

For the first time, the biologists compiled maps of the corridors used
by the largest and widest-ranging species in the state, including
mountain lions, bobcats, Pacific fishers, wolverines, badgers, salmon,
steelhead and mule deer. Hemmed in by human development, the animals are
now reduced to traveling through narrow areas ranging from a few feet to
a few miles wide to find mates, hunt prey, and satisfy inborn migration
patterns.

Southern California faces the most severe habitat loss in the state,
making linkages there even more important to maintain gene flow between
isolated populations. The report calls corridors such as the Tahoe Gap
and the Altamont Hills "biodiversity bargains" that should be preserved
by conservation easements, culverts under roads, and other measures.

© Copyright 2001 ENN

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NPG Note: NPG's poll of Georgia voters is mentioned in the 18th paragraph of the following article.

Affluenza epidemic: Bigger is badder

Richard Louv
San Diego Union-Tribune
August 12, 2001-3

So, how's your life these days?

Or, to put it in the vernacular of the social scientists who measure our
level of income, rate of divorce and so on: How's your quality of life?
Are you feeling affluent, or have you caught affluenza?

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau released a snapshot of our national
social health, as measured over the past decade. The portrait of
Americans that emerges shows that, all in all, we did pretty well in the
1990s -- depending on your definition of wellness. We're
better-educated, making more money, all that. But wait, there's more:

* When it comes to quality of life, traffic has become the great
equalizer.

The average commuting time increased from 22.4 minutes in 1990 to about
24 minutes in 2000. No big deal, really, until you look at the numbers
for more rural areas of the country.

For example, in California we commute an average 26.7 minutes -- not an
unexpected hike in a state famous for its traffic jams. But in
relatively poor, rural West Virginia, never known for its cosmopolitan
crunch, the daily commute is 25.5 minutes -- nearly as long as
California's. In New Hampshire, the land of Birkenstock sandals, the
commute is now a hair longer than for drivers in Florida -- the fourth
most populous state.

* SUV-humans rule.

We drive bigger cars and more of them. The percentage of American
households with three cars in the driveway is nearly double the
percentage of families with no car. But that spread narrowed in the
'90s. In 1990, just over 11 percent of American households didn't own a
car. Today, just over 9 percent are carless. Despite the hopeful
predictions of futurists, we're not taking mass transit, or
telecommuting, or carpooling in any greater numbers than a decade ago
(in fact, carpooling dropped).

Oddly, in many areas of the country, including San Diego, surveys show
increasing support for investing public dollars in mass transit.
Apparently we're willing to talk the talk, but not ride the rails.

* We're in the age of the mini-mansion.

Over the past decade, the median size of the American house jumped from
5.2 to 5.8 rooms; the percentage of homes with eight or more rooms
climbed faster. Many of these mini-mansions for the upwardly mobile
middle class boast family rooms the size of the 1950s tract homes in
which many of us grew up. In the '90s, larger houses meant a 35 percent
increase in the median housing loan, after adjustment for inflation.

San Diego feels the change more than most regions.

Drive to what urban experts now call the exurbs of San Diego, and you'll
see a proliferation of massive homes housing small families. That's one
reason San Diego ranks fifth in the nation in the median price of homes,
according to the National Association of Realtors' most recent
statistics.

Add the three trends together and you get a paradigm shift.
Mini-mansions may be expensive, but they're more affordable out in the
exurbs, which (along with traffic) adds miles to the commute. Almost 15
percent of Americans spend more than 45 minutes getting to and from
work. But that's progress.

Are we getting our money's worth?

When the Census Bureau reported its recent findings on the '90s, most of
the media coverage focused on the increase in prosperity: Look how well
we're doing economically. But intimate personal and family life is a
tough commodity to buy at the minimart on the way to work. Of course, we
can always call home on the voice-activated mobile phone. And whatever
happened to . . . friends? To dropping by? To hanging out?

If there's anywhere that progress -- in the form of more cars, bigger
houses and growing exurbs -- is happening at a faster clip than Southern
California, it's Georgia, particularly in the sprawling environs of
Atlanta.

According to a Mason-Dixon poll released last month, 69 percent of
Georgia voters polled now believe that quality of life in the state will
deteriorate if current growth and population trends continue; 65 percent
say that they are spending more time in traffic and less time with
family; and more than half don't believe that state officials are
balancing growth with maintaining quality of life.

The validity of the poll is undercut somewhat by who commissioned it:
Negative Population Growth, a Washington-based population policy
organization.

Nonetheless, for many folks, progress 1990s-style feels like the
giddiness that comes with a fever.

In fact, a briskly selling new book suggests that all this progress may
be making us ill. "Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic," likens the
current definition of prosperity to "a painful, contagious, virally
transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting
from the dogged pursuit of more."

The authors, John De Graaf, David Wann and Duke professor emeritus
Thomas Naylor, fill a third of the book with the malady's symptoms.
Among them: Each year, Americans spend more on jewelry, watches and
shoes than on higher education; we now work longer hours than people in
any other industrial country, even Japan; and only 60 percent of us
could maintain our lifestyle for more than a month, based on what we've
saved.

The affluenza epidemic, according to the authors, is rooted in "the
obsessive, almost religious quest for economic expansion that has become
the core principle of what is called 'the American dream.' It's rooted
in the fact that our supreme measure of national progress is that
quarterly ring of the cash register we call the gross domestic product."

And it's rooted, they say, in the assumption that "somehow, each of us
can pursue that with single-minded purpose end without damaging the
countless other things we hold dear."

If such thinking catches on, we'll be dusting off that old '70s
age-of-limits maxim: "Less is more." Who knows, maybe Jerry Brown, the
political guru of that time, will make a hairless comeback.

On the other hand, sudden poverty syndrome may have already become the
trendier disease. "Affluenza" and the census post-mortem arrived just in
time for the dot-com crash.

FOR SALE: Internet-ready mini-mansion with minibar, four-car garage,
within commuting distance of San Diego. Almost.

© Copyright 2001 San Diego Union-Tribune

Back to Index

Children of Latino immigrants choosing to have smaller families

Anne Martinez
San Jose Mercury News
August 12, 2001

The two-story San Jose home with a dining table that seats 12 and a
garage transformed into a playroom just isn't enough space for the
tightknit Soto family.

There's Josefina Soto, 68, the matriarch whose home is the hub for
countless weekend gatherings. There are her 11 children and their
spouses. And there are her 23 grandchildren, some college-age, some
barely out of diapers.

The family has grown so large over the years that the Sotos now
celebrate Thanksgiving outside over four 20-pound turkeys, 12 pumpkin
pies and a steady supply of rice and beans. But even as their numbers
grow with each new grandchild, the Soto family is shrinking.

Armed with more diplomas, fatter wallets and loftier dreams, the current
generation of the Soto family is choosing to have fewer children than
the last. They and families like them are quietly slowing the Latino
baby boom that is transforming the state. And as they do, they are
offering California powerful evidence that the boom will ultimately
diminish.

The longer Latinos live in the United States, the more their families
begin to mirror those of other native-born Americans. Josefina Soto,
like other Latino immigrants who have crossed the border, brought with
her centuries-old traditions that value large families.

But like many other middle-class Americans, the newest generation of
Sotos has begun to place greater value on careers and the perks that
often come with having a small family: more summer vacations and
after-school dance lessons.

The Sotos' lives weave an American tale of assimilation and ascension,
one played over time and again since the birth of this country.

New way of life

"I don't want to push my grandchildren to get married too soon," Soto
explained on a recent morning as she watched over two of her younger
grandchildren. "Let them get married and have kids when they want to. In
my day, if you were 15, they were already talking about marriage."

It was the late 1940s when Soto, a native of Tampico, Mexico, crossed
the Rio Grande at 16, wading through chest-deep water in search of a
better life than her job ironing pants for 35 cents a dozen could offer.
She was an orphan with a third-grade education, in charge of sending the
pennies she earned home to her three younger siblings.

But at 19, when she married her late husband, a Texas-born
Mexican-American, her life changed. She would spend the next 16 years
creating a family that would go further than she ever imagined.

She never longed for a prescribed number of children. Like many Latino
women who cross the border holding traditions rich in family values, she
left that decision up to her faith.

"Once I started having children, I had as many as God wanted," Soto
says.

She embraced each new child with unbridled anticipation. Until Soto -- a
day after her 32nd birthday -- found herself sitting in a San Jose
hospital bed cradling her 10th child.

She was tired, and her body was weak. She pleaded with the nurse for
what was once unthinkable. "Forgive me, but I can't have any more kids,"
she told the nurse. "I want my tubes tied before I get pregnant again."

The nurse scoffed at the idea, pointing out that as a practicing
Catholic, Soto shouldn't dare take the decision out of God's hands. The
nurse never relayed the request to the doctor, and Soto went on to have
one last child three years later.

Soto admits it was tough in the beginning, raising 11 children on her
husband's $1.25-an-hour job as a truck driver and the meager pay he
earned later as a janitor. The family lived its early years in a
two-bedroom home near downtown San Jose, spending the summer picking
strawberries and onions. Back then, they celebrated Thanksgiving over a
modest dinner of chicken and canned goods delivered to needy families.

But Soto has no regrets. She watched all 11 children graduate from high
school. She marveled as each went on to college; two received their
associate's degrees. And she beamed with pride when they bought their
homes -- all but one within 10 minutes of her East San Jose Camelot.

"Who would've thought that a woman with no parents would come to this
country not knowing the language and be here today surrounded by all
this family?" Soto said on Easter Sunday as the aroma of menudo and
homemade tortillas filled the kitchen and her family gathered for the
second time that weekend.

Bound by more than just blood, the Sotos enjoy one another's company as
much as they do a well-orchestrated Easter egg hunt. The tradition
played itself out this year as it has in the past, with the adults
scurrying around like children, hiding dozens of candy-filled eggs in
the front yard.

Jose Soto, one of Josefina's five sons, dropped to his knees and began
to furiously dig a shallow hole in his mother's flower bed. There, he
hid the ultimate treasure for the older grandchildren -- an oversize
yellow plastic egg stuffed with coins and dollar bills. This time, he
thought, he'd fool them.

Fat chance.
"Oh, my poor plant. They're going to kill it," Josefina Soto shouted as
her 22-year-old granddaughter, Veronica Segovia, unearthed the precious
pot amid cheers and laughter.

Josefina Soto couldn't help but smile. It is moments like these, she
said, that define a family.

Higher stakes

By the time her children began having their own families, Soto noticed
how much times had changed since the days of picking fruit and packing
11 children into the back of a station wagon. Most of her children
married in their early or mid-20s. Only one had four children; most had
fewer than three. They and their spouses landed better jobs with better
pay.

The stakes suddenly seemed higher, too, as they tried to build better
lives for their children.

Maria Segovia, the oldest, bought a second, more spacious home with a
swimming pool in Tracy. Rosemary Garcia, the next-eldest daughter, lived
paycheck-to-paycheck to send her oldest son to the prestigious
Bellarmine College Preparatory school in San Jose. And Cruz Soto Jr.,
the oldest son, recently paid $1,200 to send his youngest son to
Washington, D.C., on a school field trip.

"My parents would have never been able to afford that. With 11 kids,
they couldn't afford to do a lot of things," Cruz Soto said as his son,
Marcos, anxiously counted the hours until leaving for D.C. the following
day. "For us, if we have the money, we do it."

For many of the Soto siblings and other parents like them, weighing the
trade-offs that come with a large family evolves from generation to
generation.

For Latinos, the average number of children per family drops from 3.5 to
2.6 between the first and second generations, according to Hans Johnson,
a demographer who is studying Latino birth rates at the Public Policy
Institute of California. By the third generation, demographers project,
the fertility rate drops to 2.0 children per family.

Grace Garcia, the middle child of the Soto family, is ahead of the
curve. The way she sees it, paying for the after-school swimming
lessons, theater classes and summer vacations to New York and Yosemite
would require too many sacrifices if she had more than two children.
She'd have to work full time and give up her "free Fridays," when she
spends the day volunteering at her children's elementary school.

Beyond the extra quality time that comes with fewer children, Grace
Garcia believes there is a greater good to having a small family:

"Zero-growth population," she said with a grin, repeating the term she
learned in the fourth grade and has never forgotten. "Resources are so
limited, if we continue to have children at the rate my parents did,
we'd deplete those resources."

She gleefully points out that her sister, Rosemary Garcia, is known
affectionately within the family as "Fertile Myrtle," a nickname that
was coined after Rosemary gave birth to her third child and stuck after
she had her fourth. But even Rosemary admits she had second thoughts
about having her fourth child, realizing the financial sacrifices she
and her husband would have to make.

"When Jose made it through his first year at Bellarmine, I thought: `OK.
We made it, we didn't go broke, we ate,' '' she said of her oldest son.
"I couldn't believe when he graduated. We actually did it."

Changing expectations

Now Jose Garcia, Rosemary's first child, is a 22-year-old junior at the
University of California-Berkeley studying anthropology. He is at the
helm of a new generation of the Soto clan, driven by new ambitions and
new priorities.

Graduating from high school, though still a milestone, is far from the
end of the road for this bunch. Part-time jobs are only necessary to
help pay for luxuries their parents don't already provide: gas for the
new Dodge Ram (a graduation gift), a weekend manicure or tickets to a
must-see concert.

And having a family?

Only after they earn a college degree, land the perfect job, settle down
with the person they love and buy a home, in that order. The Sotos, like
others in their generation, have become increasingly pragmatic.

"I need to be able to take care of myself first before I take care of
anyone else," Veronica Segovia, a San Jose State University student,
said of the prospect of having children one day. "I want to live
comfortably and give my kids what they want, not just what they need."

And just as their expectations evolve, so do their definitions of what
constitutes a large family. Maria Segovia described her decision to
"only have three children" as opting for a small family. But when her
daughter, Veronica, talks about the possibility of having a large
family, three seems like plenty.

Yet the thought of three children makes Tony Garcia's head spin.

"It's too expensive around here to have a big family," said the
20-year-old computer science student at San Jose State University.

Garcia is the second of Rosemary's four children. He doesn't hesitate
when asked how many children he hopes to have one day. He has thought
about this already. He knows. He wants either two or none.

Even he couldn't imagine having a child without a sibling.

© Copyright 2001 San Jose Mercury News

Schools learn: Growing is a pain
As enrollment soars, campus officials try to maintain a personal touch
with students.

Sandy Louey
Sacramento Bee
Aug. 12, 2001

Getting from one class to the next at Laguna Creek High School takes
some savvy navigational skills.

"You can't walk a straight line," said senior Jessica Mijares, 17. "You
end up dodging a lot of people and twisting every which way."

The halls will be even more crowded this fall when the Elk Grove Unified
School District campus swells from 2,800 students to more than 3,100
students and becomes the Sacramento region's largest high school.

"It's like having a large family and adding another family member," said
Principal Stephen James.

School officials say the trend toward high schools with 3,000 or more
students, common in huge cities such as Los Angeles or New York, could
become the standard in the Sacramento region if Elk Grove, Folsom
Cordova and other fast-growing districts don't build more campuses.

"It's going to get much worse before it'll get better," said Elk Grove
Superintendent Dave Gordon.

Every three days his school system gets enough new students to fill a
high school classroom. The district's target enrollment for its high
schools is 2,200 students, but each of its five campuses has 2,300 or
more.

While large high schools can offer an array of classes and extensive
opportunities for sports teams and clubs, there's increasing attention
being paid to school size by researchers and educators who say that big
isn't always better.

"You want a school large enough to offer a breadth of programs, but you
want the atmosphere to be more personalized," Gordon said.

That can be tough with 3,100 teenagers on one campus.

The incoming freshman class at Laguna Creek High is, by itself, 850
students, larger than the overall size of 600 to 800 students
recommended for high schools by the National Association of Secondary
School Principals.

One reason the campus is hitting the 3,000 mark is because the district
is a year behind schedule on a new school, Franklin High, that should
open in fall 2002. Even when that school opens, Laguna's enrollment is
expected to fall no lower than 2,800 students.

Laguna's staff members have spent the summer gearing up on all fronts
for Aug. 27 -- the start of school.

They've added 16 portable classrooms, bringing the total number of
portables on the 7-year-old campus to 36.

The school will stick with three lunch periods. But it has expanded the
cafeteria to accommodate more bodies -- 525 instead of 403 -- and put
more tables outside.

The campus will have five vice principals and seven counselors; a vice
principal and counselor hired this summer are among 16 new
administrative and support staff coming on board.

The school is also bringing in 20 additional teachers, so class size can
be kept at 34 to 36 students, except for freshmen English and algebra
classes, which will have 20 students.

"We're not putting more jelly beans in a jar," James said.

Junior Zach Jiru, 16, said he likes a big campus because of its
diversity. "It doesn't limit the opportunity of the types of people you
can find," he said.

It also allows for a deeper talent pool, said Jiru, who plays varsity
football. "It improves on what we have. The more kids you bring in the
better," he said.

But a gigantic campus makes it easier for the quiet or struggling child
to get lost in the crowd, said Mary Kirby, mother of an incoming
freshman.

"They have so many children there. How can they keep track of
everybody?" she asked.

One way Laguna tries to connect with students is through its advocacy
program, in which students meet weekly with the same teacher for four
years. That teacher offers help ranging from freshman survival skills to
career advice.

Even so, large schools and large classes make it hard to build
relationships, said Susan Boone, a Laguna science teacher.

"It's almost like you're walking through someone else's campus," she
said of the sea of faces she sees when she crosses the grounds.

When she taught at West Sacramento's River City Senior High School in
the 1980s, it had 1,000 students.

"That was ideal. I knew everybody," she said. "Smaller is better."

That school since has grown to about 1,500 students.

Smaller might be the ideal, but it's not the reality. Half of all high
schools in the United States have more than 1,500 students. Some have as
many as 5,000.

In California, the average high school size is 1,800 to 2,200 students.

Officials say the average size of state schools has been creeping up
since the mid-1980s due to rising land costs, a lack of construction
funding and a steady flow of new students.

There also has been increasing interest in the effects of school size.
That interest, in part, is a natural progression of the
class-size-reduction movement. But the rash of school shootings across
the nation also has educators looking for ways to help students feel
less alienated.

Research has found that students at smaller schools generally have
better attendance, higher graduation rates, are more involved in
extracurricular activities and feel more connected to their schools.

"Everyone feels more engaged in the school," said Mary Fulton, a policy
analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit group
that develops education policy. "Students are more likely to participate
if they're not overwhelmed by the numbers and the competition."

Money is usually the major obstacle that districts face in fostering
smaller high schools.

The average cost of an 1,800-student high school in California is $52.1
million -- $41.7 million for construction and $10.4 million for land --
according to the state Department of Education.

Trustees in the Folsom Cordova Unified School District are considering
putting a bond measure of about $50 million before Folsom voters to help
finance a second high school in the city, as well as new elementary
schools and other improvements. The new high school campus, which would
be partly funded by the state, is expected to cost $43.5 million.

State-of-the-art Folsom High School was built just two years ago for
2,200 students, but officials say enrollment already is at 2,300 and
will exceed 3,000 in three years. For now, officials say, they're using
"creative" class scheduling in an effort to accommodate students without
sacrificing academic quality.

Folsom Cordova Superintendent Norm Siefkin said he's alarmed about high
schools going above 3,000 students.

"The question isn't whether you accommodate them," he said of additional
students. "The question is the level of the quality of educational
services that we believe our students deserve."

At the other end of Sacramento County, Elk Grove Unified has plans to
build at least four more high schools by 2010 just to keep up with
growth. But a statewide battle over the distribution of school
construction funding has slowed the building boom.

"Unfortunately, we just can't build fast enough," said school board
President Brian Myers. "Laguna Creek is a symptom of the current
problem. If we don't solve it, it'll become a permanent problem for the
district."

Some districts wanting a small-school environment have broken their high
schools into sub-units such as schools-within-a-school, academies or
learning communities. Often, the same group of students and teachers
spend several years together, and the more personalized learning
environment helps improve achievement, supporters say.

"They're pretty new," said Michael Carr, a spokesman for the National
Association of Secondary School Principals. "It's hard to say if it's
the answer to the big-school problem."

The small-school approach is a key piece of the Sacramento City Unified
School District's plan to overhaul its high schools. The idea is to
start small, theme-based learning communities as early as this fall. A
team of teachers would be grouped with 150 to 250 students for two or
more years, said Dana Gonzalez, director of the reform effort.

"It's so that (students) feel like they belong and they want to go to
school, that there are people who care about them," she said.

© Copyright 2001 Sacramento Bee

Latino baby boom propels growth spurt

John Hubner and Annie Martinez
San Jose Mercury News
August 11, 2001

In a sharp break from past patterns, the Latino population growth that
is transforming California is fueled not by immigration but by a baby
boom among the Latinos who are already here.

Even if no one else crosses the Mexican border, Latinos will probably
become California's ethnic majority within 50 years.

Latinos now constitute one-third of the state's population, but over the
past decade they made up 80 percent of its growth. Only 20 percent of
Latino growth was due to immigration, according to a study by the
non-partisan Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Two main forces are driving the surge in births: changes in federal
immigration law that drew many Latinas to California during the 1980s
and '90s, and the higher birthrates of Latinas, many of whom come from
rural Mexico. They bring with them an agrarian tradition that is built
on large families.

The boom is likely to fade in coming years, as the next generation of
Latinas becomes more Americanized and their birthrates fall. But by the
time it is over, California's population will have been transformed.

The soaring population of Latino children promises to place significant
demands on the public schools, as well as on state-run health and early
childhood development programs. And it will force legislators -- who
have spent much of the past decade debating immigration policy -- to
focus on domestic issues.

In many parts of the state, especially in rural areas, the
transformation is already well under way. In 39 of 58 counties, the
Latino population grew by more than 50 percent during the 1990s.

This population is young, and it is getting younger. Latino children
make up the single largest group of the state's school-age population.

The fertility rate for Latinas is higher than for any ethnic group in
California. In 1998, according to the state Department of Finance,
Hispanic women had an average of 3.3 children, while black women
averaged 2.0, Asian women 1.9 and white women 1.6.

A complex array of economic, cultural and religious factors account for
this disparity.

Because these mothers come from places where large families have long
been synonymous with security, they hold dramatically different views
than native-born Americans on what makes a large family. But their
beliefs resemble those of some other groups that have profoundly
influenced American history, such as the Irish immigrants of 150 years
ago and Italian immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century.

To these mothers, four children seems ``manageable.''

On a recent afternoon inside the Clinica de Salud in Salinas, Rufina
Perez nursed her month-old son, Bryan, and talked about wanting a
``small'' family -- four children in all. Working six days a week in the
fields and taking night classes at the local high school would make it
difficult to have a larger family, she explained.

"It'd be beautiful to have four children and give them the education
that we couldn't have," said Perez, who never enrolled in school in
Mexico. Her boyfriend, Porfilio Morales, completed the fourth grade.
"When our kids go to school, we're going to need to help them with
their homework; right now we wouldn't be able to."

© Copyright 2001 San Jose Mercury News

Survey Looks at Calif. Wildlife

Associated Press
August 7, 2001

Human encroachment threatens 59 percent of California's wildlife corridors,
a new study has found.

The 79-page report details for the first time 232 migration corridors used
by the state's wildlife. A majority of those are threatened by development
and 14 percent have already been lost, according to the study.

The thin links are crucial for the long-term survival of species such as
chinook salmon, bighorn sheep and bald eagles, scientists said.
In California, many of those animals already live on isolated preserves
hemmed in by development.

“Wildlife corridors are an essential component of any conservation strategy
on the basis that the natural habitats have been fragmented,'' said Paul Spitler,
executive director of the California Wilderness Coalition.

The Davis-based group cosponsored the study with The Nature Conservancy,
U.S. Geological Survey, Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species
and the California Department of Parks and Recreation. The goal is to promote
the issue in discussions of conservation policy, which has focused on core
habitat areas but not on the links that join them.

In November, 160 scientists met at the San Diego Zoo to discuss the issue.
"Missing Linkages: Restoring Connectivity to the California Landscape'' was the result.

The survey -- believed to be the first to canvass an entire state -- stresses
the importance of corridors in preserving genetic diversity and the long-term
health of wildlife populations, scientists said.

“They foster or maintain genetic flow -- that is when animals move from
one small population to another, they take their genes with them and
thereby increase the genetic diversity of the population at large,'' said
Barbara Dugelby, a Texas wildlands ecologist and expert on the issue.
“It's true for everything from cougars down to butterflies.''

M.A. Sanjayan, director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy,
said Southern California fares the worst. Eighty percent of its corridors used
by wild animals are threatened.

“Movement corridors are of critical importance if we are to maintain the
pieces we already have in the long run. Otherwise, these islands of
habitat will continue to erode in biodiversity,'' Sanjayan said.

Rolling back the threat can be as simple and cheap as placing a culvert
under a highway project or as complicated and expensive as securing
and preserving land slated for development, Spitler said.

© Copyright 2001 Associated Press

INS Penalty System Falls Down on Job

Enforcement: Failed employer sanctions are no longer an option as U.S.,
Mexico look to new immigration strategies.

Jonathan Peterson
Los Angeles Times
August 6, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Employer sanctions, touted 15 years ago as the nation's
key tool for stemming illegal immigration, failed in practice, offering
a cautionary tale as the nation once more focuses on the issue of
undocumented workers.

Without fanfare, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has slashed
its work site enforcement efforts in recent years, resulting in a
dramatic drop--as much as 97% over two years--in arrests of workers and
fines and warnings issued to employers, government records show.

Remarkably, as the White House and Congress begin a sweeping debate on
immigration policy, the sanctions--which were designed to penalize
employers for hiring undocumented immigrants--are an afterthought. "They
have not worked," conceded Doris Meissner, who served as INS
commissioner for seven years until last November. "There really is not
any reliable way for employers to comply with the law," which she
described as "very, very weak."

Employer sanctions were undermined by a booming market in phony
documents, the needs of employers to fill their job openings, widespread
resistance to the creation of a national identification card--and by
politics.

U.S. and Mexican officials are scheduled to meet this week in
Cabinet-level negotiations on new approaches to immigration, including
an expanded guest worker program that would enable many illegal workers
to remain in the country, perhaps leading to permanent status for some.
Just last week, Democratic leaders urged an even broader approach that
would allow undocumented workers of all nationalities to remain in the
United States.

Whatever emerges from the process, some experts maintain that it can
succeed only with effective implementation at the workplace.

Yet, "neither Republicans or Democrats or a broad range of interest
groups is prepared to support an employer sanctions program that
actually would work," Meissner said. As a result, she added, enforcement
of immigration laws in the workplace "will have to be addressed from
some other angle."

As crackdowns in the workplace sparked political backlashes in the
1990s, Congress declined to build on the approach, and in 1999 the INS
shifted its enforcement focus away from sanctions.

"Nobody wanted to make employers cops. Nobody wanted to make employers
forensic document experts," said Joseph R. Greene, assistant INS
commissioner for investigations. "That was in some ways the breakdown of
the system."

Popular '80s Approach Proves Ineffective

Today's system was born in the emotional immigration debate of the
mid-1980s, when sanctions became a politically popular counterweight to
a broad amnesty for immigrants who had entered the country unlawfully.

While the INS had long patrolled the U.S. border, in the 1980s it faced
growing pressure to assert effective control over the U.S. workplace,
the obvious lure for millions of illegal immigrants.

The sanctions, passed by Congress in 1986, were a series of civil and
criminal penalties--including fines and even imprisonment--faced by
employers who failed to comply with the law. Employers were required to
document the legal status of their workers and were subject to checks of
the paperwork--as well as unannounced site visits by INS agents.

Yet the intensified workplace focus was controversial from the start,
sparking Hollywood images of grim INS agents raiding factories filled
with desperately poor, unskilled workers.

The immigration agency took on its new mission energetically, bearing
down on a water bed factory near San Diego in an early show of force.

"The first day of the trial I walked in--the government had 15
prosecutors and there was me," recalled Peter N. Larrabee, who was the
attorney for Mester Manufacturing of El Cajon in the groundbreaking 1987
case. Ultimately, Mester was fined $3,000 for six counts of hiring
illegal workers, in a decision that was hailed by advocates of employer
sanctions.

Yet as the INS escalated enforcement, illegal immigrants kept making
their way into the American workplace.

When sanctions were first approved, illegal immigrants often were blamed
for taking jobs from American citizens who needed them. But as the 1990s
progressed and the U.S. unemployment rate fell to depths not seen in 30
years, that theory came under attack. An array of industries, from
agriculture to meatpacking to hotels, restaurants and construction, were
increasingly reliant on immigrant labor to fill job openings that no one
else was applying for.

Employer sanctions "were going against the labor market," explained
Dmitri Papademetriou, head of the Migration Policy Institute in
Washington. "People needed the employees, and employees needed the
jobs."

Moreover, the INS was never given the resources to carry out the
difficult mission. Today's number of agents charged with monitoring all
U.S. workplaces--1,899 as of June--has been declining in recent years.

To comply with the sanctions law, employers had to determine that a
worker's identification appeared "reasonably genuine," a relatively easy
test that could be fulfilled with various sorts of documents.

But rising concerns that foreign-born job applicants were facing
discrimination led Congress in 1990 to ban employers from demanding them
to produce INS documents.

While employers risked INS sanctions if they hired illegal immigrants,
they risked fines from the Justice Department's Office of Special
Counsel if they violated the legal rights of their employees.

Against this confusing backdrop, a black market in identification papers
flourished and, increasingly, companies located outside such immigrant
strongholds as California, New York and Texas--found themselves with
large cadres of illegal employees.

Michael Satran, owner of Interstate Roofing in Portland, Ore., remembers
with some pain the day in November 1999 when INS officials examined the
paperwork he had collected for his predominantly Latino work force. Soon
after, officials ordered him to fire 76 of his 128 employees, including
his foremen and some workers with 10 years' seniority at his company.

"Everything was done right," Satran said of his record-keeping. "We
didn't make any mistakes." Of those workers let go, he said, 56 had
managed to get valid Oregon driver's licenses, according to his own exit
interviews with the workers.

Satran was not fined. Rather, he suffered the loss of more than half his
work force to nearby competitors. "Every one of [the fired workers]
except one went to another roofing company in the Portland area. The
other one went to a landscaping company."

Critics of the sanctions say such stories illustrate the untenable
position of employers--squeezed between one part of the law that
requires them to hire only legal workers and another part of the law
that forbids them from discriminating against the foreign-born.

Just last week, Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, N.J.,
agreed to pay $75,000 in civil penalties for its illegal demands that
noncitizen employees provide their official immigration papers.

"Employers are required to walk a very, very thin line," said Russell L.
Lichtenstein, the attorney for Tropicana. The resort was "caught between
the proverbial rock and a hard place," he said.

INS Eases Off Enforcing Sanctions

Such complaints have met an increasingly sympathetic reception from
politicians. After INS agents swarmed into the onion fields of Vidalia,
Ga., in 1998, arresting 20 illegal workers and sending more scurrying
for cover, several members of Congress complained to U.S. Atty. Gen.
Janet Reno, as well as the U.S. secretaries of Agriculture and Labor.
Efforts in 1999 to target illegal workers in Nebraska's meatpacking
industry, known as Operation Vanguard, prompted a similar backlash.

The same realities now challenge U.S. and Mexican officials as they try
to bring order to a system that was overwhelmed by economic forces.

"If you're the INS, the moral of the story is Congress is telling them
not to enforce the law," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the
conservative Center for Immigration Studies. He would like to see an
effective program of employer sanctions.

By 1999, the INS was ready to formalize a new set of enforcement
priorities, deemphasizing employer sanctions while making violent
immigrants, the smuggling of humans and document fraud top concerns
inside the United States.

Since the new policy has taken effect, INS statistics show a striking
drop-off in the enforcement of workplace sanctions affecting employers
and employees. In 1998, the number of employer fines was 7,115; by last
year that figure had fallen to 178. In 1998, the number of workers
arrested due to workplace enforcement actions was 13,875. By last year,
the figure had dropped to 953.

"You look at the numbers--what you see is the result of that policy,"
said the INS' Greene. But he maintained that if the economy weakened to
the point where illegal immigration was harming domestic workers,
"resources would be shifted accordingly."

By last year, even the AFL-CIO--traditionally worried about the effect
of cheap labor on its union members--abandoned its support of employer
sanctions and came out for an amnesty program. Labor leaders had
concluded that sanctions were not deterring illegal immigrants from
seeking U.S. jobs. At the same time, the union argued that some
employers were exploiting their most vulnerable employees, threatening
to report them to INS.

"These employer sanctions worked not to penalize employers, but to
penalize workers," said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the
Service Employees International Union in Los Angeles.

National Identity Cards Unpopular Alternative

Despite widespread displeasure with sanctions, there was never much
support for another measure that might have led to greater immigration
control: a national identification card. Technology has made the
possibility of a counterfeit-resistant card increasingly plausible. But
such a document, which could be issued only to citizens or permanent
residents, raises deep fears of the government invading individuals'
privacy.

Meissner said the opposition to such a card is at the heart of the
matter: "From a civil liberties standpoint, we're not comfortable with a
single national identification system. That is the core rub."

Still, observers on various sides of the debate question whether the
issue of illegal immigration can be effectively addressed without
employer sanctions or some way to ensure that American jobs are filled
with authorized workers.

While the goal of a big, new guest worker program would be to bring many
undocumented workers into a legal system of employment, the concern is
that--without sanctions or some other lever over employers--companies
could still face temptation to hire illegal immigrants.

B. Lindsay Lowell, a scholar at Georgetown University's Institute for
the Study of International Migration, worries that an expanded guest
worker approach might make those illegal immigrants who do not qualify
more vulnerable to exploitation than ever before.

"A large-scale guest worker program without meaningful employer
sanctions would be very problematic," he said.

Greene said that new technologies for identification, if applied to a
new guest worker card, might ease some of the headaches caused by false
documents in the workplace.

"You can certainly make it harder for the bad guys," he said, promising
that "we'll be looking at that problem in a very different way in 2001
and 2002 than we did in 1986."

© Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

100-year high in California's percentage of foreign-born
But increase slows as other states make gains

Carol Ness
San Francisco Chronicle
August 6, 2001

Just over one-quarter of Californians were born in another country, a
level not seen since the 1890s, according to new U.S. population
estimates for 2000 released today.

California's population is an estimated 25.9 percent foreign-born,
higher than any other state, after four straight decades of torrid
immigration growth that cooled somewhat in the late '90s.

Nationally, the percentage of people born elsewhere hit an estimated
11.2 percent, its highest point since 1930. Altogether, 13.3 million
immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1990s, more than 4 in 10
of the 30.5 million U.S. foreign-born residents.

The numbers, though estimates, solidify the emerging portrait of a
nation being transformed by arrivals from outside its borders. And they
paint California as a fading siren, no longer alluring to people from
other states and losing some of its attraction for those from other
countries, especially Mexicans.

While California remains the top U.S. destination for newcomers, its
share of all new U.S. immigrants during the decade dropped from
one-third in the 1970s and 1980s to one-quarter in the '90s, a
considerable decrease. Still, it absorbed an estimated 3.3 million
immigrants in the '90s and now is home to 8. 6 million.

Native Mexicans make up by far the biggest group in California, about 44
percent. An additional 10 percent are from other Latin American
countries. People from Asia constitute 34 percent of California's
immigrants.

Nationally, Mexicans and Asians account for 28 percent of all
immigrants.

DESTINATIONS CHANGE

The new numbers show that many Mexican immigrants who in previous
decades would have come to California instead headed for job
opportunities in less saturated states stretching from Nevada to Kansas
to the South, bypassing the 20th century's main immigration magnets,
such as New York and Chicago.

Because during the '90s so many immigrants settled in other states,
California's share of the nation's foreign-born, after rising steadily
throughout the century to a peak of 32.7 percent in 1990, dropped to
about 28 percent in 2000.

Altogether, 15 states now have foreign-born populations above 10
percent. Still, no other state threatens California's dominance. No. 2
New York lags behind, with 20.4 percent of its residents foreign born,
followed by New Jersey, Florida and Hawaii at around 17 percent.

"California is still leading the pack, but the rest of the country is
catching up," University of Southern California demographer Dowell
Myers said.

The numbers are sure to provide fodder for highly charged state and
national debates over immigration, public services for newcomers,
bilingual education, and new federal proposals for amnesty and guest
worker programs.

The immigration figures drive another California phenomenon: Almost 4
in 10 Californians ages 5 and older speak a language other than English
at home, the highest percentage in the country. That's up from roughly
about 3 in 10 in 1990. Many speak Spanish (25.7 percent) or an Asian
language (8.8 percent). Many are children born here, to immigrant
parents.

Two other states approach California in this category: New Mexico,
where an estimated 35.5 percent use another language at home, and
Texas, with 32 percent.

Nationally, the rate is about 17.6 percent.

FLUENCY VARIES WITH AGE

Most, in California and nationally, also speak English well or very
well, although that varies with age. More than four-fifths of
school-age children speak English well or very well, dropping to more
than 3 in 5 for working-age adults and over half for the elderly.

Among foreign-born Californians, about 60 percent are not citizens,
about the same percentage as the nation as whole. That's down from
close to 70 percent, though, in the past decade.

California ranks 25th among the 50 states in the proportion of its
immigrants who are not naturalized. Still, with by far the largest
foreign- born population of any state, California has more noncitizens
than any other.

The new numbers are not from the 2000 census but from the Census
Supplemental Survey, an experimental national sample of 700,000 homes
conducted throughout last year.

But because the survey covered many of the same questions as the census
long form, including immigration, language and citizenship, its results
are a preview of the same breakdowns from the 2000 census, which won't
be available until 2002 and 2003.

Census Bureau officials cautioned that the results are not precise, and
can't be directly compared to the 1990 census, because they exclude
people living in group housing such as prisons, nursing homes and
college dorms. Also,

because it's a survey, albeit a large one, the numbers carry varying
margins of error. And some questions were asked differently.

The survey was the first of several such tests to see if, done on a
larger scale and annually, they can replace the census long form by
2010.

The survey hit only about 1,200 of the nation's 3,000 or so counties.
Surveys went to 83,323 homes in 34 of California's 58 counties.

While the numbers aren't exact, they can be useful because the survey
sample was far larger than any other national count besides the
every-10-years census.

In addition to the foreign-born breakdowns, the survey adds to evidence
showing California's waning attraction for people from other states,
and migration by Californians out of state.

The number of Californians born in other states dropped by almost 2
million while the state's population grew 13.8 percent overall, driven
both by immigration and a high birth rate.

In 2000, for the first time in at least 100 years, the number of
Californians born in other states dropped below the number of residents
born in other countries, according to an analysis by demographer William
Frey of the Milken Institute in Santa Monica.

For several decades in the mid-20th century, more than half of
Californians were from other states; in 2000, less than a quarter were.

"For most of the century, California had a certain glamour that
attracted entrepreneurial people from other parts of the country who
sought to strike it rich," Frey said. "That flipped in last decade. We
are now serving that role for people from around the world."

A BENEFIT AND A CHALLENGE

That serves California well, as the economy is increasingly global,
Frey said. Becoming accustomed to different cultures and languages will
equip Californians better to communicate with people around the world,
he said.

The other side of the coin, Frey added, is that many new immigrants,
especially those from Mexico, tend to arrive poor and undereducated.

"There needs to be much more effort made by state, local and federal
governments to do as much as they can to make sure new immigrants are
as prepared as they can be to join the economy," Frey said. "That's a
real challenge."

Immigrants dispersing more around the country means the nation can no
longer keep looking at the challenges of educating and integrating them
into society as California's problem alone, USC's Myers added.

"When it's just (Californians) seeking change, the rest of Congress and
the Senate doesn't give a damn, and we've had to deal with it alone,"
Myers said. "Now there will be more senators and representatives who
care."
The 13.3 million immigrants who landed in the United States in the '90s
is an all-time high, busting the previous record of 8.6 million who
arrived in the 1980s, said Jeffrey Passel, demographer at the Urban
Institute research and policy organization in Washington, D.C.

In the '90s, the average was 1.3 million per year, "a huge number,"
Passel said.

In California, the rate of immigrant growth slowed in the '90s, to
about a 32 percent rise, after doubling in the '70s and '80s. Still,
the sheer number of new arrivals -- 3.3 million -- leaves the state
facing major challenges, especially in educating the youngsters, both
immigrants and those born here into immigrant families.

The survey didn't show where they have settled, but most are known to
be surging into the Central Valley and Southern California.

The number of Mexicans in California grew from 2.5 million in 1990 to
about 3.7 million in 2000, a 52 percent leap, according to an analysis
by Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California in San
Francisco.

"They solidified their dominance during the 1990s," Johnson said. "We
see the results of that in many different ways, in both policy and
politics."

As examples, he pointed to recent meetings by both President Bush and
Gov. Gray Davis with Mexican President Vicente Fox, and federal
attention being given to strategies to grant legal status to many who
don't have it, either through an amnesty or guest worker program.

"California and Mexico are bound together in increasingly substantial
ways, " Johnson said.

© Copyright 2001 San Francisco Chronicle

Is overimmigration in the U.S. morally defensible?

Ben Zuckerman and Stuart H. Hurlbert
San Diego Union-Tribune
August 3, 2001

President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox are now at the poker
table deciding how many persons from Mexico currently residing illegally
in the United States will be given amnesty this year, a first step in
Fox's plan for an open border between the two countries. Not to be left
behind, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle has raised the stakes and
proposed amnesty for all illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, we read the latest Census Bureau figures showing a U.S.
population increase of 33 million during the 1990s, which exceeded the
bureau's projections by 6 million persons and is the largest decadal
jump in U.S. history. The Census Bureau now projects that, by the end of
the century, U.S. population might exceed 1 billion, even in the absence
of an open border with Mexico. Most of these 1 billion will be
immigrants yet to arrive and their descendants.

President Fox is one of numerous powerful persons and groups lobbying
for continued and even increased high levels of immigration to the
United States. Two such groups are (1) the Democratic Party which
believes, probably correctly, that a majority of immigrants will vote
Democratic and (2) some Republican business interests who understand
that massive immigration depresses wages and provides additional
consumers of products and services.

Today, we would like to speak on behalf of three multitudinous, but
"voiceless" groups in America who are harmed by massive immigration.

The first group is the poorest segment of the U.S. population.
Independent studies by the Rand Corporation, the National Academy of
Sciences, and the Center for Immigration Studies all show that today's
policy of overimmigration negatively impacts the economic well-being of
the poorest Americans. A summary discussion by James Goldsborough
appears in the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. Needless
to say, poor Americans are not the people who set our immigration
policies.

In addition to the strictly economic considerations, overimmigration has
had disastrous consequences for the quality of education available to
poor inner-city Americans. No wonder that poll after poll shows that a
strong majority of poor Americans want to see immigration levels
reduced.

The second voiceless group consists of indigenous non-human species. The
Nature Conservancy's comprehensive new book "Precious Heritage" --
foreword by Harvard conservation biologist E. O. Wilson -- depicts the
high correlation between U.S. endangered species and areas with rapid,
immigration-driven, population growth, including California, the
Southwest and Florida. It is not hard to see exploding human populations
eating up land that indigenous species have lived on for countless
millennia.

This is quantified in a recent analysis by environmental/resource
planner Leon Kolankiewicz and public policy analyst Roy Beck, titled
"Weighing Sprawl Factors in Large U.S. Cities." This report, and two
others devoted specifically to California and to Florida, show
dramatically that massive human sprawl in the Southwest and Florida is
due not to poor urban planning, but rather almost entirely to rapid
population growth.

The connection to immigration? Here in California, for example, analysis
of our state government and U.S. Census Bureau statistics indicates that
about 90 percent of California's population growth during the 1990s was
due to immigrants and their children.

The third voiceless group is people and other creatures not yet born who
have no control over decisions being made today. An excellent analogy is
China. In the 1950s and 1960s the Chinese government encouraged high
fertility which peaked at 6.5 children per woman in the mid-1960s. This
irresponsible policy caused China's population to surpass 1 billion by
1980.

One consequence is the Draconian one-child-per-woman policy instituted
around 1980. Thus, presen

Subject	Article Headline	Date
Environment	California Wildlife Losing Habitat	8/28/01
Education	Record Numbers of Licenseless Teachers	8/21/01
Immigration	Praise for Illegal Immigration Curbs	8/21/01
Environment	Development Threatens CA Wildlife	8/20/01
Growth	Affluenza Epidemic: Bigger is Badder	8/12/01
Fertility	2nd Generation Imm's Having Smaller Families	8/12/01
Schools	Schools Learn Growing is a Pain	8/12/01
Fertility	Latino Baby Boom Propels Growth in CA	8/11/01
Environment	Developent Threatens CA Wildlife	8/07/01
Immigration	INS Enforcement Falls Down On Job	8/06/01
Growth	Rapid Growth Could Cause Job Shortage	8/06/01
Immigration	100-Year High in CA's Foreign-born	8/06/01
Immigration	Is Overimmigration Morally Defensible	8/03/01