Manuel Pastor

manuel Pastor-how California got it right and what America can learn from it

by Azra Isakovic

The award winning sociologist Manuel Pastor says "California is America fast forward", which in this current national political climate should give us hope. In his latest book STATE OF RESISTANCE- What California's Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America's Future,  Manuel Pastor gives us a detailed and insightful look into California's history since the 1950's; its rise, fall, and recent resurgence. Currently California is the sixth largest economy in the world and very inclusive of its diverse immigrant population. But it wasn't always that way. After WWII, the golden state's success was largely attributed to public-private partnerships that agreed upon a social compact which took care of the state's constituents. However in the early 1990's California's economy was hit hard largely due to deindustrialization. On top of that there was a rapidly changing demographic within the state. The racial generation gap, "the difference between an older population that is mostly white and a youth population that is mostly kids of color" became the core of policies being shaped including Proposition 187 in '94 which stripped away educational and healthcare rights from undocumented immigrants.  Since then California has significantly turned around economically and politically. Pastor demonstrates how a renewed commitment between public-private partnerships willing to invest into the new demographic and community organizing which gave a voice and power to minorities was at the core of the state's current success. Aside from tremendous data and insight, Pastor offers us hope in his book and guidelines on how to get the rest of the nation on the right track. The conversation though has to begin with an honest look at racial anxiety. If we follow California's footsteps in its resurgence path, we have a chance to catch the rest of the nation up with where California currently is- although not perfect, it's at a flourishing state of economic and cultural wealth. 

In addition to being a successful author, Manuel Pastor is a professor at USC and the Director of USC's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity as well as the Director of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. His work has been very impactful in Los Angeles and is driven by personal reasons. His father was an immigrant from Cuba and shortly after Pastor was born, the family moved to California where Pastor grew up and witnessed first hand the changing political climate. He has always actively fought on behalf of communities and continues to empower them in order to drive progressive change. 

I sat down with Professor Manuel Pastor and spoke with him about his father's story, his latest book, and his insights around the current immigration issues. 

What is your father's immigrant story and how has it impacted your own identity?

My dad came to the United States in the 1930's. He came from Cuba on a tourist visa and overstayed. I was thinking about what the conditions must have been like in Cuba to look at the United States and go, "only a quarter of the people are out of work out there. Maybe I can find a job." He got citizenship during World War II when he was offered the choice between being deported or joining the US army. The story is that he literally couldn't figure out what to do so he gave a penny to my cousin Carlitos and flipped it. That's how the decision was made. Many benefits then flowed from him being able to find a legal path to citizenship. A GI bill for returning veterans had made it possible for him to go to LA Trade Tech, acquire some technical skills and go from being a janitor to being an air conditioner repairman.

The family went from being poor to being working class. His immigration story weighs always in the back of my mind both to realize how important that history is and also the following thing. In my view, my dad was one of the smartest guys I ever met and he had only a sixth grade education. He never advanced very far because when he would get into situations where he had to speak English in a work setting he'd get nervous and not speak it well even though he could speak it perfectly fine. It gives me insight into how many people's talents and intelligence we overlook and how we often underrate the intellectual capacity of community. It's part of the reason why my work is so community oriented. That sense of giving back but also this sense that there's real intelligence out there, real intellect and I should listen.

What are the current myths in the national narrative about immigrants and undocumented immigrants?

The myths are plenty. That they are job takers. They're welfare takers. It's pretty hard to do both of those things at the same time. The myth that it's an uncontrolled flow, that they're associated with crime. If you look at the data instead, immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants tend to add jobs. Interestingly, when economists think about it, there's both what are called complimentary impacts and substitute effects. More janitors, more software engineers, more people working in a garment factory, more truck drivers and designers. The substitute effects is "did you displace anybody who were within those jobs before?" And for the most part, the group that the displacement impacts are minimal. The group that gets the most displaced by new immigrants is older immigrants who work in exactly the same professions. In particular skilled white people benefit mightily from immigrants because they're complimentary labor and they also tend to lower the prices of certain kinds of goods. Interestingly, that's the group that's the most nervous about immigrants. When you think about the last election and the disgruntled Trump voters who say that their concern is economic uncertainty and then they blame it on immigrants. There are not a lot of Mexicans rushing to West Virginia to work in the coal mines.  To the extent that there are immigrants in the Midwest, they're being lured there by cities that want them, for example in Dayton to be able to revitalize tired central cities.

The second myth is about taking benefits. The kids of immigrants are eligible for benefits. But for the most part immigrants, particularly undocumented are eligible for nothing.  Lawful permanent residents are eligible for very little since the welfare reform of the 1990's. 

The idea of crime, immigrants tend to be associated with much safer cities. The big thing for us to realize is that these myths are really playing on something other than data and they're playing on something other than immigrants. The other myth- there is this huge flow of immigrants. The era of mass illegal immigration is more or less over. Even this caravan that people got so excited about in recent weeks, those are people coming through the border legally asking for asylum. They weren't trying to cross the border illegally. Migration from Mexico has certainly slowed down and is now negative. More Mexicans are returning to Mexico. What's going on, of course, is that the demographic change in the United States is creating a sense of cultural displacement that is not really matched by economic displacement. But it all gets wrapped up into a set of anxieties. These are things deeply held almost like religion in a way that makes them very hard to knock down with facts, frustrating for somebody who's a social scientist.

I feel even as someone who is crazy happy when I see a data point that we need to be telling stories because we need to get people to see themselves in the immigrant experience. We need to get people to see themselves in the generation that's growing up. Data isn't going to break through with just knocking down people's myths. Because the fact that they're holding on to myths says that there's something much deeper going on spiritually, emotionally, value wise, and so that's where the discussion needs to go.

In your book, you talk about the racial generation gap. How has  California managed to bridge that since '94?

The racial generation gap is the percent of people above the age of 65 who are white relative to the percent of people below the age of 18 who are people of color. That racial generation gap demographic distance between these age bans peaked in California between 1994 in 1998, which is the era of prop 187 banning of affirmative action, elimination of bilingual education, passages of the three strikes laws. Interestingly the racial generation gap according to projections peaks in the United States in 2016, the election of Donald Trump. So big parallels here. What happened for California to get past it? I think a couple of things. One is that the process of demographic change settled down. It became much more the case that the person next to you mowing their lawn is your neighbor who's an immigrant and all of a sudden that kind of personal, close experience, I think it makes a difference. As well as understanding that the migration to California didn't destroy it,  it enriched it in many different ways culturally, food wise, daily life. Second thing was economic. We in California moved more rapidly than the rest of the country to high tech, high end service, entertainment, etc. There's a value in all of those industries on diversity and inclusion. Is it perfect? No. Hollywood is a pretty good representative example that it's not.

It's also the case that we've got so much more to do in that inclusion. It should also include economic inclusion. But if you're running a company in Silicon Valley, you need immigrants and not just engineers, but also the low skilled folks who are going to be the janitors, the daycare folks for the software engineers' children.  They're also in other industries in Southern California.  We did a focus group for businesses on immigrant integration and one gentleman much older raised his hand and said "why can't we make these workers legal? This is my workforce. They're great people and I have to be worried every day that they're not going to be able to show back up." Part of what happened on the business side was that people realize this is really an essential part of the economy, new markets, new workers, etc.

Finally, I think there was a lot of really good organizing by immigrant rights groups to recognize that they needed to make immigrant integration everyone's business and needed to do the kind of one on one and community to community organizing that brings people into contact, reduces fear, and that gets people to focus in on the stuff that's important.

If you want to deal with the economic uncertainty and your mind is clouded by blaming it all on immigrants, you're not going to get at where are the jobs are going, how has technology and trade effected it, what's the retraining programs we need to have in place, what do we need to do around the minimum wage, how much should we be taxing businesses to be able to not scare them away but on the other hand get the resources we need, what do we need to be doIng about education. If you're constantly thinking it's immigrants that are to blame or that you don't want to be funding brown and black children in school, you're not goIng to solve the economic problems that are plaguing you and your family. So until we can get rid of that racialized and racist thinking, we're not really dealing with our problems.

Based on California's example on immigrant integration efforts and successes, what needs to be done on a national level to achieve the same kind of success?
Nationally we are at the intersection of three phenomena. One is demographic anxiety. The idea that the United States becomes majority people of color to some of us, particularly if you're in Los Angeles, feels "welcome to the party". You're going to be able to get Korean taco trucks and you'll be able to have a Bosnian immigrant sit with the son of Cuban immigrants and learn from each other. Our lives are so enriched. For others it's a fearful sense of loss that's coupled with economic uncertainty, particularly with the growing inequality in the country.

Then it's coupled with something that I think is really problematic, which is profiteering of political polarization. You hear people in the news and in society say a lot that we're a divided country.  We're a country being actively divided. We've got folks deciding that they can make a political profit either in votes or in revenues for news channels from actively separating us from one another. And I think those are really big strains that impact us.
If we're really going to deal with this, we're going to have to figure out how we weave together into some common sense of understanding. Dealing with the polarization, we need to reduce the demographic anxiety and you can't do that by putting the genie back in the bottle because immigrants are no longer driving change. It's the children of immigrants that are driving the demographic change. Once we can get some clarity around those things, we can get much more of a handle on the economic problems that are really common concerns.
 

Does Hollywood have some responsibility to change the narrative of immigrants?

That's a responsibility I would hope they would take on. When you think about what Will and Grace did for reducing the fear of LGBTQ people. There's a good friend of mine, Ali Noorani, one of the things he says is the Juan and Mohammed you don't know are a lot scarier than the Juan and Mohammed you do know. There's a media message and then there's an immediate community message. So I think the media has a role to play, but there's a lot of community organizing and community connections that need to happen as well.

What are some of the things that California has gotten right in regards to the narrative and where can it improve?
There are a couple of things that I think are right with regards to the narrative. Some years ago we wrote a piece about comprehensive immigration reform, What's at Stake for the State: Undocumented Californians, Immigration Reform, and Our Future Together, and we chose the second part of that title very consciously. When you look at the data, almost two thirds of the undocumented in California have been here for longer than ten years. Fifteen percent of the state's children have at least one undocumented parent. Those undocumented folks, they're not going anywhere. They're Californians. The narrative has caught on that immigration, diversity and inclusion are good for the economy.

The narrative that we have a responsibility to provide health assistance and health insurance to all Californians for as many as we can get, that's caught on. That's very posItive.

One of the things that I think has turned around in California is that when you feel like you're a minority, you react to stuff other people propose. When you feel like you're part of a majority, you propose things. So one of the things I think that's shifted fundamentally in California is there's a lot of African-American, Latino and Asian leadership that's actually proposing things and not just reacting to bad negative cycle. That's another important part of the narrative that has changed. 

Where do we come up short? We're the fourth most unequal state in the United States. While we bemoan it, we're not really doing that much about it. We've raised the minimum wage but we haven't thought about better jobs than that. We haven't really had a main education be something that's excelling and really tries people. This is a state where community college ought to be absolutely free for everyone. I feel like there's more to be done on the economic narrative. I have a friend who's an economist, who particularly 10 years ago kept talking about why it was so important that the state be welcoming to immigrants and be LGBTQ friendly. It was key for economic profit to be able to bring together as much talent as possible. That message I think is really deeply embedded in California. 

I have spoken with some black immigrants about their experience and there is this common theme that their journey goes from being black to being African American. What link do you draw between mass incarceration and mass deportation, racial justice rights and immigrant rights?

We actually got a paper coming out soon on black immigrants in California. Immigrants who are black come to the United States and get racialized. They're treated by the system in ways that make it evident that it's a racist society and that you're being allocated to the bottom in terms of police treatment.  When you look at the data, for example, on deportations, the share of black immigrants being deported is higher than the share of all immigrants being deported. The same racial dynamics that happen in domestic policing are happening in immigration enforcement as well. When the president called African countries shithole countries, I used to always ask audiences which continent sends us the most educated immigrants and everyone would say Asia. In fact it's Africa. It's kind of hard to leave Africa so you've got to have education and skills to be able to navigate the systems to even get into a lottery to come. There's a lot of undervaluation of the skills that black immigrants bring.

At the same time they feel different than African Americans and African Americans have some challenges with black immigrants in particular because they often benefit from affirmative action, which African Americans feel should be reserved as a way of a remedy for slavery, Jim Crow and consistent discrimination. But one thing that we at the Center have always done is to try to not separate immigrant integration from racial justice.
From our first report back in 2008 on immigrant integration in Los Angeles we made three big sets of recommendations around economic mobility, civic participation, receiving society, openness to immigrants. But in each one of those we talked about the need to pay attention to advancing the interest of African Americans. You want immigrants to do well but not in a way that's hopscotching over African Americans and not dealing with that legacy of economic disadvantage, political participation of immigrants. How do you instead work on building ties between African Americans and immigrants. And if you're talking about how do you create a welcoming society, the image that most people have in their mind is, how do we go to a town in the South that's all white and make them understand immigrants. Well, in fact, most of those towns in the South have a lot of black people and a long history of racial tension.

Even in Los Angeles, in South LA, which was eighty percent African American in 1970 is now two-thirds Latino.  If you're talking about welcoming, you got to talk about how you are building ties between African Americans, black immigrants and other immigrants. What I was saying before about how it blurs a sober discussion around immigration, how should we control our borders, what should we do about legalization, what should we do to better the economy, what blurs all that is racism. So unless we have a racial justice lens, we can't have a good conversation around immigrant integration. So to me those two things are deeply linked. 

Lastly, let's talk about climate change. It's going to be the leading cause of refugees. What advice do you have for people, something they can do on a daily basis to help combat climate change?

Get out of your car and try the mass transit systems. They work better than people think. My son who's a vegan would add to that to drop meat because of its footprint. Plant trees in places that don't have trees. We've got a lot of low income communities, communities of color that have a lot of impervious surface, not a lot of tree canopy. That won't stop the planet from warming, but it will help people. There's a responsibility for those of us with resources to lead economically on this and then to think about how you extend those opportunities to others. There's a lot of work being done for low income communities on distributed solar. And then get organized with other people to actually change policy.