California for All: Towards a Strategic Plan for Immigrant Integration in the Golden State
On April 26, 2022, USC’s Equity Research Institute hosted a panel of community leaders, policymakers, and academics to envision the short- and long-term policies needed to move California toward an immigrant-inclusive state. The panel was moderated by USC Equity Research Institute’s Dr. Manuel Pastor. The panel was also preceded by a presentation on ERI’s recent data analyses on California’s immigrant communities done by USC Equity Research Institute’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Civil Society and Social Change, Dr. Thai V. Le.
At its most fundamental level, inclusion for immigrants means reimagining what it means to belong socially, civically, and economically in California regardless of legal status. Although the state has come a long way since its xenophobic past–, culminating most recently with the Prop-187 era–, the state of immigrants in the region is still far away from where it needs to be. The California for All event showed that California is the place where the future is unfolding. Discussions of the state often evoke sentiments of green technologies, the “future of work,”, and leading the world towards a better tomorrow with a long-term strategic plan for tackling climate change. However, even though California is home to the largest share of immigrants and refugees in the United States, no such plan for broader immigrant inclusion exists.
Even though Californian’s attitudes are overwhelmingly favorable to immigrants, the on-the-ground lived, day-to-day experiences of immigrants remain precarious. As panelist Cynthia Buiza, Executive Director of the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC), stated, “human needs do not differ between an immigrant and a native Californian.” Despite this being the case, the data show that immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are suffering the most from income inequality. Both immigrant men’s ($20.20) and women’s ($19.09) median earnings are lower than their U.S.-born peers ($28.17 and $24.28, respectively); the median hourly wage of undocumented workers is a mere $13.11. This is far beneath the recommended wages by MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.
When looking at working poverty among full-time workers, the largest disparity across nativity and immigration status is for undocumented full-time workers, nearly 44 percent of whom have household incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. For lawful permanent residents the share is 20.4 percent; 11.9 percent for naturalized citizens; 9.0 percent for U.S.-born workers; and 13.7 percent for all Californians. Similar patterns of disadvantage and exclusion are reflected in rent burden, linguistic isolation, the digital divide, and the lack of health insurance coverage among these groups.
Like those “traditionally” thought of as immigrants, refugee communities continue to face many socioeconomic barriers. For instance, as Ramla Sahid, Executive Director of Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA), underscored, even though refugees have legal status, that does not mean they have access to quality schooling, housing, or jobs. Since the fiscal year 2002, California has resettled the most refugees of any other state. Yet in recent years, Texas and Washington have surpassed California’s numbers. Furthermore, in a 2021 list of 19 cities “deemed suitable” by the State Department, none were in California. This nods to the fact that living in the state of California is increasingly out of reach for refugees as well.
It is common to generalize the experiences of immigrants yet as the panelists vocalized, the experience of immigrants intersects with other social markers and this is what “Two Californias” conveys. For instance, California is the state with the highest share of H1-B visa holders at 22.4 percent, many of whom are concentrated in the high-tech sector, and also has the highest share of undocumented immigrants. All immigrants make a significant contribution to California’s growth and success, yet the state of immigrants highlights not only a telling story of the experiences of immigrants but also the especially precarious economic and legal context of undocumented immigrants. Second, and as our Director pointed out, it is telling that people including immigrants are willing to move to Texas and other states despite overtly harmful and racist rhetoric pointed at immigrants and Black and Brown people.
Similar to California’s population overall, the state’s immigrant share has slowed and declined from over a decade ago. The Public Policy Institute of California finds that lower-income and middle-income adults drive these numbers while higher-income adults are moving to the Golden State. Where are Californians moving to? The data suggest that they are moving to neighboring states, places like Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, and Oregon. Taken together, what does this mean for California and immigrants generally? First, our data shows that immigrants generally have lower median wages ($19.43), especially undocumented workers than do U.S.-born individuals or the population overall. They are overrepresented in essential and high COVID-19 risk occupations, are concentrated in physically intensive labor, and are in lower-earning industries and occupations.
For far too long, California’s future-making has left out the voice and agency of its immigrant residents. In the most glaring case of electoral politics, the state has quite simply denied the right of representation to thousands of immigrants because of legal status. When more than two-thirds of undocumented Californians have been here for longer than a decade, not providing them opportunities to voice themselves in the political process makes them invisible in planning for the future. Although immigrants in the state have been politically involved through grass-roots organizing and advocacy, centering immigrant voices also means needing to think of ways to incorporate folks who are currently denied the right to vote–among other things.
California must first come together through improved collaborations and frequent conversations that center the diversity of voices and experiences of immigrant communities. Logistically, moving immigrant inclusion work forward must span public and private partnerships, multiple institutions, and places. As Masih Fouladi, Deputy Executive Director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA), emphasized, collaborations and conversations including government officials, community organizers, academics, and philanthropy are needed to create a narrative and systems change.
The reality is that California has always been an immigrant state, and immigration will always be part of our future. To build a California for All, there is a need to reimagine how to deploy political power and discover new ways to incorporate everyone into that planning regardless of immigration status. Building towards the future also includes anticipating the fight it will take to get there, and strategizing against regressing backward to the state’s xenophobic past. Policymakers need to show real support to the immigrant community by adopting an immigration lens on all legislation and policies to ensure that access to opportunity is not dependent on where one is born.
Read the full report and watch the event video on YouTube!
About the authors:
Post by Carolina Otero, PhD Student, USC Sociology and Fernando Moreno, PhD Student, USC Sociology
© 2023. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.