February 2009 Archives

Mexicans have too many babies. They're overpopulating California. They never bother to learn English. They're all poor, and they steal American jobs.

Such are a few of the myths Dowell Myers debunks handily in Immigrants and Boomers, a scholarly work that skirts political advocacy but backs it with mounds of data.

It could have been a dry read, and in fact Myers tends to repeat himself frequently, but he does it as any good orator or teacher might: "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, and then tell them what you told them." More importantly, he serves as a conscientious guide for those not accustomed to poring over reams of facts, graphs and figures. The numbers don't mean anything anyway, he tells us, unless you turn them into a story. And so he does.

It's story writ large, an epic bridging three generations from 1970 to 2030. In the first 20 years of that epoch, California experienced the greatest tide of Hispanic immigration in our nation's history, and as it levels off, the rest of the U.S. is experiencing something very similar. The implications are huge, and the story runs something like this.

The initial wave followed the Immigration Act of 1965 and really exploded between 1970 and about 1990, as Hispanic immigrants came across in record numbers, authorized or unauthorized (he picks the latter term over illegal alien or illegal immigrant or entrant because the referents are not breaking any state or local law by being in the country, he says). Between about 1990 or 1995 and 2010, the rate of immigration leveled off, and by 2030 we'll have a kind of lump of aging foreign-borns and their children, those of the second generation.

For a variety of reasons, including short-sighted politics and media coverage and simple ignorance on the part of voters, people tend to hold onto old news and perceptions and are instead slow to update their beliefs according to new facts. They operate on assumptions they developed from past experiences and old data, and from these potentially erroneous beliefs they extrapolate their future, which they will see as either pessimistic or hopeful.

Myers comes on strongest even when his interpretation seems hoaky, as when he describes the power we have to essentially write our own destinies. You just have to keep chugging forward, though, because as you read you learn more about the flexibility of demographic studies. Myers is part philosopher, part psychologist, part historian, part demographer, but because the story is as important to our understanding (exaggerated as he acknowledges it can be) as the numbers themselves, his apparently unorthodox approach to social sciences prevails. In order to really make sense of these numbers, these demographic shifts, he relies on the expertise of people from other disciplines. Much of the doom and gloom projected on immigrantion by middle-aged baby boomers can be attributed to a series of coincidental tragedies, he argues. Just as Californians had about reached their tolerance for the seemingly unstoppable influx of foreign and racially divergent people and were ready to pass Proposition 187, there came a series of calamaties that could easily be blamed upon the scapegoat immigrants, thus entrenching this association between immigration and all that's wrong with society.

But Myers debunks such notions. The latest data, he argues, suggest that the huge wave is is beginning to ebb and level off. Not only that, but the economic turnaround after 1995 and the upward mobility of immigrants in fact promise a brighter future than we might have imagined. In this future, as our densest population segment, the boomers, ages, they will need someone to take care of them. But their own fertility rates have declined, in part because of changing social habits and greater independence for women, and since they haven't been replacing themselves, they will need to rely more heavily on the success of immigrants to take over their jobs and fund their social security benefits.

A new kind of social contract is called for, Dyers argues, not one defined by big government or of small government, but of inter-generational dependence. The two groups, the immigrants and the boomers, must recognize their mutual dependence and learn to serve each other. The boomers must invest now in order to ensure their new neighbors and their neighbors' children receive solid educations, and the immigrants must become assimilated and become active, voting, home-buying citizens.

We can't predict the future, but we can extrapolate based on the most recent data, and here is where storytelling becomes most important.

Samuel Huntington has argued that the influx of Mexicans threatens the fabric of society in California and the rest of the country. The newcomers simply won't learn the language, so we will soon have our own version of Quebec, where in this case Spanish is the primary language. Huntington looks at the data his way and sees a terrible future (though Myers says Huntington's predicted outcome would not necessarily be bad). But Myers looks at the data and sees an underlying truth that he says has been concealed because of the sheer numbers and growth of the immigrant population.

The numbers are indeed profound. Non-Hispanic whites in California now make up only about 45 percent of the population, and 27 percent of Californians are foreign-born, Myers writes. If you count their children, the second generation, that group of "immigrants" makes up more than half the population. "As a result, California is now a state composed entirely of minorities."

Read that last one again. California is composed entirely of minorities. How can that be? No one group amounts to more than 50 percent of the population. No one controls a majority stake in our future.

And the data suggest, though the tidal wave of immigration has subsided, or at least calmed, the effects will be felt at least to 2030. If people like Huntington are right, then we have a serious problem dealing with a huge group of people who are likely not to vote, are likely not going to learn English, are likely to remain below the poverty line.

In this view, immigrants in which they essentially remain for the rest of their lives exactly the way they were when they arrived. Myers calls it the Peter Pan fallacy, that people are somehow not going to age or change but stay exactly the same for the rest of their lives.

The facts say otherwise. Historical data suggest immigrants DO improve their lots. They become homeowners. They learn English. They escape poverty. Some become educated, though many have come to this country after they would normally have gone to high school, so they work to support their families and their children go to college instead.

As far as learning English, 90 percent of immigrants say they want their kids to learn English, and we're only seeing so many Spanish-speakers now bc we just caught the largest wave of Hispanic immigrants in our history...it has subsided a bit, but will take time to assimilate)

Another interesting tidbit: the average fertility rate in Mexico has dropped from about 6 down to just over 2, just above replacement rate. That means there will soon be less people come across the border in future.

There are two views we can take on all this: hope or pessimism, and these beliefs shape our reality, at least to the extent that we can now act on them.

If Myers can employ Peter Pan references, then I don't feel bad using The Matrix. When a character called the Oracle tells Neo, the story's hero, to watch out, he's not sure what she means. In the next breath, he accidentally knocks over a vase and it breaks. He's surprised she seemed to have predicted the event and asks her how she did it. She says instead that "what's really going to bake your noodle" is whether it would have happened at all if she hadn't mentioned it in the first place.

Fortunately, you can take or leave this philosophical conundrum. The data more or less stand on their own, and Myers' accompanying story is convincing enough you feel a bit more enlightened having read his book. Still, there doesn't seem to be a clear reconciliation between Myers' chosen optimism and, say, the Chuck Bowden article about a mass exodus. Myers shies away from calling immigration some kind of force of nature.

Regardless, whether immigration is on the rise or not, it's an intriguing yet common sensical notion to operate on in the meantime, that what you believe you more or less do. Given the choice between believing in and acting upon a negative or a positive future, and knowing that believing one or the other could force it to come about, it seems like a no-brainer that we ought to frame the data in the hopeful version of the story.

In "Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of Amerca," Dowell Myers attempts in bold fashion to do in an academic setting what the likes of "The Devil's Highway" and "Enrique's Journey" attempt through more poetic means: shed light on the depths of the immigration issue that are otherwise untouched by the TV pundits and their polemics.

In his introduction, he makes no less a claim than to "treat both versions of the future seriously" by using hard data to extrapolate potential positive and negative outcomes by 2030 of America's current trajectory toward a Caucasian minority.

Make no mistake, however, in that Myers' tone is decidedly optimistic. He simply wishes to give the air of objectivity, but his premise is clear.

Rather than analyzing the issue of immigration in a vacuum as most tend to do, Dowell's boldest assertion on the Utopian side of his projection comes from his linkage of immigrants to the aging, 78 million-strong baby boomer generation as a symbiotic solution to the problems each pose to society independent of each other.

Using California, where whites are a minority population but still a majority voting bloc, as a bellweather state that provides vast amounts of empirical insight into what the country might look like 20 years from now, Myers takes census data, voting records, and anything else at his disposal to explain current perceptions and then debunk them.

Though his prose comes off as dense and often muddles under his mostly unsuccessful, hamfisted attempts at poetic lyricism (first line of the book: "The debate over immigration has generated more political heat than light."), Myers does an admirable job of distilling White America's unfounded fears about the burden immigrants place on the economic and social infrastructure.

The bottom line, according to Myers, is that most older Whites and young conservatives vote overwhelmingly against providing social services for immigrants, illegal or otherwise. This is extremely short-sighted, especially on the part of the Baby Boomer generation. Once they retire, Boomers will drastically reduce the educated workforce, slashing the income tax dollars necessary to fund the massive infrastructure needed to support themselves in old age.

Myers calls the perception gap White American has about immigrants (especially Latinos as they comprise the bulk of those illegally crossing the border) the "Peter Pan fallacy," or the "assumption that immigrants never grow older or advance in any way." Myers asserts that this "naive view" fuels fear of supporting any immigrants because to do so would allow "our nation to be dominated by growing numbers of people who perpetually resemble newcomers."

In reality, "newcomers" represent only a small number of the total immigrant population of America. In California, the "middle phase of the transition has been reached" where around half of those who have been in the country 20 years or more are homeowners, speak English, and are constributing tax dollars to infrastructure just like anyone else.

It is this capacity for social progress that leaves Myers optimistic that a social contract between immigrants and boomers is nothing short of essential to the survival of this country. If Boomers and other members of White America would simply look at the evidence instead of allowing misconceptions to dominate and inform the legislative process locally and nationally, the roadblocks toward equipping this newfound, able-bodied immigrant workforce with the education and infrastructure support it needs to flourish and fill the gap will be removed.

The next five to 10 people I will speak with are academics, reporters and union leaders in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Oakland. I will speak to them over the next 3-4 weeks, and hopefully travel to Oakland and/or Las Vegas. Each source will add valuable perspective and confirm what I'm learning every day. Furthermore, each will also illuminate future outcomes of ongoing conflicts within Change to Win and comment on SEIU's and Here's models for recruiting new membership.

The story is going to be how chaos inside SEIU and Here threatens to derail everything organized labor has achieved since 1995. The working class usually makes gains in crises of capitalism and, as labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein said, there's a chance unions might be left behind this time. There remains strong and unified opposition to workplace reform right now, and discord among union leadership will certainly buoy pro-business legitimacy.

Ruth Milkman and Kent Wong- both are labor academics and I believe are more allied with Andy Stern than Steve Early or Nelson Lichtenstein. That means, they will SEIU's top-down model to union building, which comes with many consequences (as Early is eager to point out). They'll likely defend consolidation on the grounds that it's been most successful and organizing shop-by-shop is a failed strategy. I expect both will downplay whether Change to Win has lived up to the hype in favor of touting its dynamism instead. They will acknowledge but mitigate corruption scandals and megalocals that have come to define SEIU and Here national leadership. After all, both unions have been successful in organizing industry while most other unions have not.

John Laslett is a labor historian at UCLA who has written extensively on the subject. I don't know which side of the divde he'll represent. I have already spoken to Steve Early and Nelson Lichtenstein, both labor authors and observers who tend to favor union democracy and view  SEIU's parts as greater than the whole.

Greg Akili is a senior official with SEIU 1000. I got his contact info from another academic at Cal State LA. Akili could be a valuable off-the-record source of anti-SEIU stuff, or a on-the-record booster for Stern. I will want to ask him about the SEIU recruitment model, as well as how the economy is impacting SEIU's collective bargaining efforts. I will want to ask him why SEIU prefers restructuring locals into megalocals and how that's affected (or diluted) the power of locals to have a better working conditions. I will want to see SEIU's handbook on recruiting as well as learn more about the national's school for members who want to learn better research, organizing or recruitment skills.

The most outstanding questions I need answered are, how does the recession affect labor's legislative/social agenda and recruiting efforts, and will the top down, organizing-by-industry model sustain union growth, or are we beginning to see the fissures of such a strategy in the form of divorce (Unite Here) and succession (NUHW).

In the next 3-4 weeks, I want to go to either Las Vegas or Oakland to speak to Here or former UHW officials. Hopefully, I'll be able to tag along in a recruiting effort. The Vegas trip is more likely. There, I plan on speaking to a variety of journalists to get of sense of the most dynamic elements on the ground. I also hope to speak to some leaders in Here leadership...hopefully they will have time to see me on March 6.

In the multi-media arena, I expect to use a lot of slideshows and text. I will want to shoot a little video for a package. There will be graphs to illustrate the historic trends of labor (ie, decline generally in the last 30 years, and growth in SEIU and Here in the same time period). I do not know other elements to include at this point in time, but I am eager to brainstorm more ideas. Viterbi's Ashish Soni said at the News21 conference last semester that technology allows us to do "different things, and things differently." How else can I tell these stories more differently?

 
 

Welcoming Asian tourists by the busload every day, Las Vegas Chinatown has grown from three blocks to 4 miles over the last decade. Chinese New Year is now the second-largest draw for Vegas casinos, many of which have made efforts to target the Asian market.

The Las Vegas-Paradise metropolitan area is home to approximately 132,000 Asians (2007 data), the fastest growing ethnic group in the area. Since 2000, the Asian population has increased by 79% in Las Vegas.

"Half of the Asian people in Las Vegas are from Southern California," said Terry Chen of the Las Vegas Chinese American Chamber of Commerce. As Los Angeles' Asian population increased slightly by 4% since 2000, the area's total population has decreased by 21%.

Most Asians come to Vegas casinos to work as dealers and in the restaurants, according to Chen. At the Learn2Deal Casino Gaming School, more than 40% of students are Asian, according to owner Nick Kallos.

The influx of Asian residents to Las Vegas is part of a larger wave of Asian migration to the mountain west. In the last 10 years, the Asian population has grown at a faster rate than that of the Hispanic population in 14 states, including Nevada. In fact, since 1990, Nevada has had the most rapid growth of any state in the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders seeking a cheaper and better lifestyle. [USA Today]

Today, the largest Asian population in Las Vegas is Filipino. Chinese and Taiwanese make up approximately 14% of the total Asian population.





More than half of the Asian population is Filipino. Chinese and Taiwanese make up approximately 14% of the total Asian population. By comparison, they make up a quarter of the total Asian population in the Los Angeles metropolitan area

  What follows: A transcript of the visit Bill Celis paid the News 21 class on February 12, 2009.

Bill Celis: How do you cover a story in which "place" figures prominently? Well the South Los Angeles Reporting Project's site is up. A lot of journalists don't know how to navigate demographics. Thus, SLARP hopes to bring people understanding on how to cover communities.On the site we discuss the covering of communities.

[Description of the site in PDF form: http://www.annenbergradio.org/pdfs/intersections.pdf]

Mije.org is an Oakland based site worth visiting. How do you report what you're reporting on the fault lines of religion, gender, race, age, class or as the site says 'race, class, gender, age, geography.' You could say 'It's all about covering the coloreds with sophistication.'

Marc Cooper: In the middle of the Web site is a tab that says "fault lines."

Bill: That's a resource that will help you. These are stories that are fraught with these fault lines. Some of the problems we can anticipate: a lot of it is nuance--not understanding where you are, or what the community is about, what it even look[s] like. Take, for example, Jeremiah Wright's comments and Time magazine's foray into South Chicago. The community was up in arms even based on the description of south Chicago.

Pat Dean: It wasn't written by anybody who knew Chicago.

Bill: The area was described in very stereotypical terms. Time really messed up and heard all about that. It's something as basic as how you describe a neighborhood. For example, Geography; how do you frame a community in your coverage?

Marc: I know this from experience. You make an honest attempt to sum a place up for yourself and your readers (and you don't know the place), but you have to be careful. I've caught 'hard as gravel' and 'gritty neighborhood' [many times].

Pat: Or you read about it and use the same language others have used.

Bill: If you're covering Appalachia, for example, read the bulletin boards. The digital divide is very much alive. If the community is poor, and the way they may communicate is through bulletin boards (court bulletin boards, grocery store, pharmacy, barbershop, church, city hall), you look at that, and you can get a very good idea of who lives there. This happens in South LA as well. From those boards, you can get a sense of socioeconomic class. You can get a sense of crime by seeing what's being stolen. There's a lot of crime in rural America. But it's different. For example, you'll read something like 'Reward for stolen antlers. Please call X. What is the world coming to?' This is true of the states we're covering. If you're moving out of the urban areas--Phoenix, Denver, LA, Las Vegas--look at the local paper (it's not usually very good, but gives the visitor a sense of the place) and the bulletin boards (yield a real sense of community).

Marc: There are two things important about what Bill just said, and I will make one additional suggestion. That 'simple' task the NYT provided (manila folder with clippings on the area you're about to visit) [is so important]. Now you can do that with Google or Nexis.

[Cuba and 1993 Internet Anecdote]

It's so basic, but you have to do this. You HAVE to already have created that two or three inch file on the place. You're going to find two things in that file with everything written:

1. A lot of info you didn't know. You'll get a sense of the place and key names and sources because reporters talk to the same sources.
2. You will get a lot of stereotypes. People build on what other people have written, and it will inevitably inform and or influence how they approach and write about the place.

Regarding the bulleting board: I'm old fashioned and keep reporters' notebooks. I have little codes I write to myself in the upper left hand corner of the book, notes to me that are recurrent. [For example, I'll write] "Tour"/Eastside or whatever. When I have found somebody in X place, I say to them, 'you know what, will you just take me around for a day? Will you just show me around?' Sometimes I'll know where to go, and sometimes I won't. You get to see the rich areas, the suburbs, plants, where people live and where they work. I just love it.

Bill: I would do the same. I try to schedule the arrival early enough that I can drive around the new city or town. I had time to think about what I was doing and what the story should say. I always went to social services agencies. Especially if they're rural and remote, and people don't know who you are, you should visit them. Nobody talks to them, so they're pretty helpful.

[Dalmer Milwaukee Victim Profile Anecdote]

The bottom line is that they're neglected and helpful. They're a wonderful resource that is not tapped very often. I found out there are lots of Cambodian communities in Milwaukee and Minneapolis, for example.

Pat: Catholic charities are a good example and resource as well. Some communities won't talk to the authorities, but they will talk to the church. If you ask the people from these places to tell me about where they live, you may be surprised. A lot of them would never describe the neighborhood as impoverished. They will talk about the cultural aspects. A lot of us didn't know what neighborhood we grew up in until we left. I grew up in a baseball culture. I would talk about it very differently from someone coming in and having it stereotyped.

Emily Henry: How do you break the cycle of talking to authorities? How do you talk to the real people?

Marc: For example, you're going to a community where you're completely different from everyone else, and you don't know anything about it. Part of it is being very smart about it, and part of it is being very expedient. It's basic game theory.

For example, Greeley, Colorado. Meat packing. Christmas 2006, the INS came in and took away 1200 workers. They raided the meat packing plant. They did it in five cities on the same day. I listen to NPR, hears about Maria x, who was a "community activist." This is how I did it: Warren's a producer I know. I asked for her phone number, and they [NPR] gave me her phone number. Nobody ever goes to Greeley; there was almost nothing written about it. And I called her. 'If I come there next week, can you show me around?' Your job is to 'squeeze people for information.' Iook an early morning flight. I set up a lunch with her. I paid for her. I asked if I could talk to one person working with the church, one person with the family and a lawyer. She set it up for me.

This was all one day. It was just like a classroom. I asked them to tell me about it. I was there for three or four days. Then I did a one-on-one after that with each one, but that was the super briefing. For example, the Father Bernard story. Father Bernard's community meeting Thursday night. You ask the people to bring the town to you.

Bill: Load up on the front end. Church people are nice and that's how they're wired, and they're more likely to help you than not and have their fingers in the different parts of the community in different ways.

Marc: Don't load up your stories with the government officials. You can anticipate what they're going to say. They are pro forma. They're there because we have to have them. You load up on the front end with the research, so that you're ready to go. Start everything now.

Bill: Load up now--on everything. Take the WSJ, for example. In the old days, they would take two to three months for page one stories.

Marc: But the front-end portion is so vastly different with the addition of the web. I mean the NYT had a morgue, but I was at a magazine.

Bill: Creating that place with narrative. At the NYT, a premium was placed on giving the readers a sense of place--the geography, the physical lay of the land.

Read Willa Cather's Death comes for the Archbishop. In it, you have to navigate through the place.

The same thing goes for:

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and
Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.

Marc: I suggest some popular pulp fiction. James Lee Burke is easy reading, but it's "literature." I don't know anybody who evokes a sense of place better than he does. These are crime fiction books that can makes you cry in a lyrical way. They are moving. You are moved by the humanity. You can feel his sense of understanding of the richness of the place. Very complex characters...former slaves running from clansmen and racists...

Also Chuck Bowden's  Down by the River is about mayhem and murder at the El Paso borde, but it's also an evocation of place. He's a 60-year-old, craggy, looks-like-a-desert-rat guy. He lives for months with drug dealers and narco traffickers. His ability to penetrate that is amazing.

Brooke-Sydney Gavins: But when you're covering the community, the language is colloquial. Do you write it that way?

Bill: Errors or regionalisms don't travel beyond that area. NYT had a strict rule for quotes: you can't correct their grammar. You had to call them back. You had to re-get the quote that wouldn't be partial and didn't need doctoring.

Marc: First, there's a trick. Guess what, this is a multimedia class. You don't have to just rely on the text. Protocol of magazines and newspapers robs us of nuance. Eventually, it gets cleaned up. For example, I'm goin[g] to school. What I've learned, is that print media will use it when they feel it better illustrates the story, but it's very dangerous. It tends to, well not discriminate, but, segregate along racial and geographic lines. Ted Rohrlich and Gary Cohn said that in their times, the issue was carefully avoided because everyone did it.

But for example the Janet Malcolm case. She says 'make it up as long as it 'honestly reflects conversation.'' But that's dangerous, and I don't want you to do that. For the moment, I don't do that, and I don't think you should (as a rule). Quote people as they speak. You will inevitably smudge a transition or a gerund. It's a rule of integrity. If you change the nature of the way they speak or the context, then you've violated things. But I edit out ums and er. But what about changing the chronological order or an interview? Edit questions and answers. If you put quotes in chronological order, would never be able to write a lede sentence.

Pat: If you present things in a different order, it should not change the meaning. Can intersperse it with VO, but CAN'T change the SOT (clean up when paraphrasing, though. We don't want to sound like we're mocking people) by editing a chunk into another, for example.
Sometimes we will not use the SOT because they've butchered the language so much that it will look like we're mocking them. So we won't use it. But who are you to come in and do that? You can do it if you use the context. Be true to what was meant and said, and show respect.

Bill: The West. Some of these places are so remote they didn't have churches, etc. The same people fill different roles in that place. Everything is on tires; they're all in trailers. Distances are large, and people are happy to let you ride along.

Marc:

 Load up early.
 Build your stories from the bottom up (not just to be political correct or goo-goo, but it's the way to go). And that's not the instinct of young reporters.

Marc: You don't want people to do the research for you, and you don't want them to know you're ignorant. Stories need a point of tension. Officials should be the last people you speak to. You need to work out the outer rungs of a tree before you can see the center with your clipboard, putting it on the spot to get what you need to get. You've got to do the profile before you speak to the top, and if they don't get back to you, it's their loss.

Also, xenophobia rises during an economic recession.

Before Native Americans owned casinos with electronic slot machines and high-stakes poker games, they were in the bingo business.  In the early 1980s, tribes in Florida and California were challenged by those states' governments for operating bingo games with prizes that exceeded the monetary amount allowed under state law.  This conflict led to two federal cases where the state's ability to regulate Indian gaming was challenged, Seminole Tribe vs. Butterworth (1979) and California vs. Cabazon Band (1987).

The court ruled in both cases that tribes within a state cannot engage in any form of gambling that is explicitly prohibited under state law, but that if a state chooses to regulate a certain form of gambling, then tribes within that state can engage in that gaming free of state control.

In 1988, Congress officially regulated Indian-run gambling operations with the Indian Gaming Reservation Act.  The act requires gaming tribes to have compacts with their respective state governments to determine which types of gaming are allowed on reservations.

The IGRA did not end the Indian gaming dispute in California.  At the time, slot machines were prohibited by the California constitution.  By 1998, Governor Pete Wilson began to negotiate the allowance of slot machines on reservations, but the number permitted was considered too low by gaming tribes.  Hoping to amend the provisions set out by Governor Wilson, California tribes got Proposition 5 on the ballot, titled "Tribal Government Gaming and Economic Self-Sufficiency Act," so that voters could decide on the fate of Indian gaming.

Proposition 5 passed in November 1998.  It required the governor to approve all tribal casino proposals, prohibited the state government from limiting the number of Indian casinos statewide and the number of slot machines and tables within each casino, and lowered the legal gambling age at these casinos to 18.  Further, there was to be no state or local government involvement in these operations, and two percent of each gaming tribes' net profit was delegated to non-gaming tribes.

The campaign to get Prop 5 on the ballot and approved by voters speaks volumes to the economic strength and political clout of gaming tribes.  The cost of sponsoring the measure was $70 million - at the time, one of the most expensive ballot initiative campaigns in U.S. history.  Further, another $5 million was spent to back political candidates who supported Indian gaming, namely Governor Gray Davis, who proved to be an important tribal gaming ally when the California Supreme Court struck down Prop 5 nearly a year after is was passed.  The court ruled that it violated the 1984 Lottery Act, which prohibited casino-style gambling in California.

By the time Prop 5 was struck down, Wilson was out and Davis was in.  Elected in 1999, Governor Davis ushered in a new era of Indian gaming in the state.  He negotiated for California tribes to conduct Las Vegas-style gaming, the allowance of video slot machines, and reached an agreement with gaming tribes so the latter would make payments to the state based on the number of slot machines they owned.  Those payments were to reimburse local government for the impact that tribal casinos had on the respective jurisdiction within which it operated, and also to reimburse the state for gambling addiction programs.  Known as Proposition 1A, the initiative was a constitutional amendment on the March 2000 ballot.  Tribes spent $30 million on the measure, which passed with a 65 percent margin.  Attempts to challenge the legality of the act were struck down in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Today Indian gaming generates over $5 billion a year in the state of California.  Tribes are not required to revel the exact amount of their revenue, but are still obligated to make payments to the state to assist with certain gaming-related programs (i.e. programs for gambling addiction).  California has more gaming tribes than any other state in the country, with 43 conducting some form of gambling.
 
Sources:
http://igs.berkeley.edu/library/htIndianGaming.htm
Interview with Professor Joan Weibel-Orlando, USC Dept. of Anthropology
Interview with Professor Randall Lake, USC Annenberg School for Communication

Next Time: Native Americans and Sovereignty: What does gaming have to do with it all?

The Central Valley's Fresno County is not only growing rapidly, but its Latino population is catching up to the majority White population.

            And the growth in Latinos may cause a shift in local government--like it did in the neighboring Madera County.

            Madera recently underwent a change in its electoral system to rectify "racially polarized voting," according to a Los Angeles Times article. The county restructured the voting system so that it divides districts into separate areas to allow for a more representative pool of candidates--specifically for minorities.

            And Fresno is soon to follow since it is switching 28 out of 32 school board elections to the new district voting. The change comes to accommodate its growing ethnic population.

"Virtually all of the growth in the next few years will be Hispanic," said David Hosley, president of a non-profit group called the Great Valley Center.

He said right now Whites make up about half of the population, and Hispanics about a third.

            "Latinos are the largest ethnic group in the South San Joaquin Valley," according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

But Hosley also said in the next few years Whites will lose their majority status.

Fresno County's Hispanic population was expected to have reached 47.6 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005-2007 estimate. Comparatively, the state's Hispanic population was expected to have reached only 35.7 percent. 

Hosley said the growing percentage of Hispanics will create tension because, "almost all of the power structure in the San Joaquin Valley is White." To compound this, a great number of the baby boomers stand to retire soon. So unless there is a way to solve the political division caused by population shifts in the near future, you have "a bunch of really old white people dying off that had power--with almost no relationship with the emerging population," said Hosley.

Hosley said that Fresno, the sixth largest county in the state, is unique because it's part of a rapidly expanding area.

And according to 2005-2007 census estimates, Fresno County's population has increased nearly 10 percent since 2000. 

California is growing twice as fast, and the Central Valley is growing three times as fast, as the rest of the country, he said.

            "During the past 10 years, the Central Valley has gained more than one million new residents. The California Department of Finance projects that by 2040 the Valley will be home to almost 12 million people," according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

And the generational make-up of the area will present more issues in terms of education and employment.

"In general the population of the San Joaquin Valley is young," said Hosley. "The reason it is young is the Hispanic population having families."

 

Coming Attractions:

 • Central Valley Seniors

Failing health, poverty and a big population

Of the 65 and older population in the San Joaquin Valley, "more of them are living in poverty than in other California counties." (Central California Institute for Healthy Aging)

 

• Hmong Community Health

"In the Central Valley alone, there are an estimated 80,000 Hmong," according the California Endowment in 2006. However, "there are very few health care providers who have a cultural and linguistic understanding of these communities. There is only one Hmong physician who is still in residency training and one dentist in the Central Valley," said the Central California Institute for Healthy Aging.

 

• Clovis

Doubled its population since 1990 to nearly 95,000.

Non-Hispanic Whites make up 67 percent of the population.

 

• Poverty Rates

"About one in five valley residents lives in poverty, compared to 13 percent in the rest of the state." (PPIC)

 

• Unemployment

Fresno Metropolitan Area hit 13.2 percent in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California reached 9.3.

 

 

 

The story of roughly 25,000 Somalis who resettled in San Diego has moved past the tale of the refugees who fled the fighting of warlords and Ethiopian regimes.  The story has progressed now to the next chapter, that of the second generation as they start graduating high school and conforming to the "American way of life."  

Abdishakur Osman is a recent high school graduate and who works at Somali Family Services as the head of its youth group. He was born in Mogadishu and his family came to San Diego when he was 3 years old.  In his opinion, the largest conflict in the community is between the children and their parents.  Osman's parents, like most refugees, do not speak English and still dress in traditional Muslim clothes, including the full coverage of women.  As for how the younger generation dresses, Osman said, "It is a toss up.  Girls may come to school one day really dressed up and then the next day they will come in jeans."

Osman and his family, like many Somalis, live in the diverse neighborhood of City Heights in San Diego.  He attended school at Crawford High School.  In 2007, Crawford had a 28 percent African American population, 49 percent Hispanic and only 5 percent white. 

"Different groups stayed pretty separated," said Osman.  There was not much direct conflict during his high school years, but he said that there have been fights and even riots between different groups.  

Since 1994, more than 46,000 Somali refugees have resettled in the United States, according to the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration.  San Diego is the second largest concentration of Somalians, behind Minneapolis.  

A drive through City Heights on University Avenue shows the cultural diversity of the neighborhood.  There are plenty of Mexican food restaurants, a ton of Vietnamese and tucked in the middle is a small grouping of stores that is affectionately referred to as "Little Mogadishu."

Though despite its nickname, it would not be accurate to picture a bustling area of town full, overflowing with Somalians.  "They have all moved to the suburbs, Skyline Hills," said Osman.  "Not everyone is located in the same place anymore."

Areas like Little Mogadishu and a shopping complex called Safari Market are completely packed on Fridays and Saturdays after Mosque, according to Osman.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of ten nonprofits that work with the State Department to resettle those refugees that are permitted entrance into the U.S.  The IRC is primarily Federally funded and works to find new arrivals apartments, jobs and finances to start a life in the United States.

Even though some of the IRC's funding comes from the state and city level, Development Manager Sharon Darrough says there should be no community resentment toward the services and job placement of new refugees in the worsening economy.  She did acknowledge how hard it is to sustain all the services the IRC offers.

"Jobs are tough and it is going to get tougher," Darrough said.

All incoming refugees are placed on welfare upon their arrival.  While a majority (some have quoted up to 90 percent of the Somali population), still receive welfare benefits.

The organization is divided into different programs that provide services for refugees in the area.  One such program is Students Plus where IRC volunteers go to Crawford High School daily and tutor the new students.

Darrough says that most of the communities are isolated and that many in San Diego would not ever notice the Somalian community.  

"Generally people don't come to Little Mogadishu.  They would probably would take a cab and notice that their driver is from Somalia," said Darrough.

The battle for water is heating up in the America Southwest as Las Vegas is steadily running out of water. And to meet its unquenchable water needs, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) has filed a bid with the state to pump as much as 16 billion gallons of water a year from the rural lands of Snake Valley. SNWA's contested application for the Snake Valley water is a key element in its plans for a 200-mile-long pipeline to Las Vegas by 2015. Its goal is the use of more than 50,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough when stretched through reuse to supply more than 170,000 homes, according to The Ely Times.

There are only a couple of hurdles that stand in its way. Several environmental and  conservation groups as well as White Pine County (NV) are opposed due to the water pump and pipeline's predicted effect on the environment and water table.  Rural ranchers and farmers are concerned about maintaining their livelihood and having enough water to sustain crops and livestock. The state of Utah is protesting the use of their state's water to meet Nevada's needs. And the all-but-forgotten, local Native American tribes are opposed to the project because they stand to lose their water, way of life, homes and even their lives if the SNWA has their way.

Although mostly disregarded in the battle over water rights, the Ely Shoshone Tribe, Wells Band Council of the Wells Band of Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone (Wells Band), and the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation (CTGR) are staunchly opposed to the Snake Valley groundwater application and pipeline project. In addition to the petition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the tribes filed protests separately between June and July of 2008 to be included as "interested persons" in the SNWA hearing related to the proposed groundwater development in Snake Valley.

The Ely Shoshone tribe has more than 500 members, and nearly half live on the reservation or near the City of Ely, Nevada. According to its opposition filing, the tribe is protesting the SNWA's water claim based on the its own water rights, Tribal members' historic and current use of water, potentially affected cultural resources (such as springs and groundwater-fed sites), and related hydrologic information. In addition, they are protesting on the grounds of tribal water use on the Tribe's aborginal lands, which include basins adjacent and hydrologically connected to Snake Valley.

The Wells Band is a poverty-stricken tribe of almost 200 members with about 30-40 people residing on the reservation. Similar to the Ely Shoshone tribe, these Indians are contesting the SNWA's water rights claims because it will jeopardize their water rights, Tribal members' historic and current use of water, potentially affected cultural resources, and related hydrologic information, according to their legal filing.

And The Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation (CTGR) reservation covers approximately 112,870 acres in White Pine County, Nevada as well as Juab and Tooele counties in Utah. Its 500 members have also filed a protest against SNWA's Snake Valley water bid for the same reasons as the Wells Band and Ely Shoshone tribes. In addition, the Goshute tribal leaders believe the Southern Nevada Water Authority has violated the Federal Clean Water Act by contaminating a fish breeding ground area. They plan to fight this Snake Valley bid and will also file a lawsuit.

Christene Steele of the Goshute Tribe told Las Vegas Now that the tribe won't be asked to sell their water. "We're pretty sure it will be taken, just as so much has been taken from the tribe over the last 200 years."

About 100 Goshute members actually live and work as farmers and ranchers on the reservation that spans approximately 112,870 acres in Nevada and Utah. These members depend on the limited water supply needed to live off the harsh desert land.

And after being excluded from earlier hearings in opposition to other SNWA water claims (Spring Valley, and Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys), the Goshute reservation will be a part of another pumping system that takes billions of groundwater out of the rural valleys. 

All of the tribes are in agreement with the environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Advocates for Community and Environment that are protesting the SNWA's pumping plan's negative effects on the dwindling water table. 

In addition to the obvious effects on the water, the tribes and environmental organizations have also filed opposition motions related to the impacts on air quality. For example, the Ely Shoshone Tribe's motion states that the tribes' evidence will prove that "air quality impacts from SNWA's proposed use of Snake Valley groundwater threatens to lower the water table throughout Snake Valley enough to deplete its fragile phreatophytic plant community, destabilize the valley soils and create a perpetual Owens Valley style erosive dust bowl condition detrimental to the public interest."

In a hearing currently scheduled for September 28, 2009, Nevada State Engineer Tracy Taylor will determine the amount of groundwater, if any, the SNWA can pump from Snake Valley to Southern Nevada.

In the meantime, the tribes are preparing for a legal fight against the SNWA to protect their water rights, heritage and their lives on the reservation.

Snake Valley Facts

This watershed is located on the Nevada-Utah border and includes Nevada's only national park and one of the area's major tourist attractions, Great Basin National Park. Encompassing more than 500 square miles in the Great Basin desert, Snake Valley is over 100 miles long and contains huge mountains, deep canyons, rolling foothills, flat playas, spectacular caves, and even marshes in the middle of the Great Basin desert. Snake Valley straddles the Utah-Nevada border, with US Highways 6 & 50 bisecting it.

The SNWA seeks the approval of nine groundwater applications for the use of more than 50,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough when stretched through reuse to supply more than 170,000 homes, according to The Ely Times.

SNWA's big goal is for a $3 billion, 250-mile-long pipeline from the high desert to Las Vegas that includes the Snake Valley pump along with the Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valley projects.

White Pine County's Snake Valley is located more than 250 miles north of Las Vegas.

Demographics/Population Growth & Nevada

Nevada is the fastest growing state in the U.S. with a population of nearly 2 million says Dr. Loretta Singletary of the University of Nevada Cooperative Education, an expert on Nevada's water issues. And the majority of Nevadans live in urban areas including Las Vegas, Reno and Carson City.

Las Vegas main water sources are dwindling. The Colorado River, which provides 90 percent of Las Vegas' water, is experiencing a severe drought. Las Vegas' other main water supply, Lake Mead, is also experiencing a 9-year drought and has dropped more than 100 feet in the past several years according to Pat Mulroy, the General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.



MAP OF SNAKE VALLEY: Use the + and - signs to zoom in or out; switch to a map view by clicking on the Map button or to a satellite view by clicking on the Sat button; or navigate in different directions by using the clicking the arrows.

In winter, the fields of Delano look like forgotten graveyards. Wooden crosses span miles of farmland under an apocalyptically dark sky. The cracked, dry earth paints the world brown. All that remains of the fruitful, summer season are a few stray bunches of shriveled black grapes among the tangled vines. Roots reach upward like fields of disfigured limbs. Once in a while a car passes, and breaks the silence of the peopleless streets.

But turn a corner at the right time on a Delano afternoon, and the scene changes. Children and teenagers pour from the doors of the 17 schools in the city. The soaring youth population, growing up in 2009 as the second generation of farm-working immigrants, is busting the seams of the city's school district. A few years ago, these teenagers were filling the 13 elementary and middle schools in the area. Now, new high schools seem to be being built on every corner to accommodate their coming of age.


The effort is a reactionary one. As clustered children scatter and disappear into a wintry Delano afternoon, it seems clear. The world inside the school walls may be bright, but the world outside is still barren.

Although Delano has been the capital of the immigrant farm working industry since the United Farm Workers union was established here in the 60s, the city experienced a population boom, along with the rest of California, in the immigrant-heavy decade of the 90s. According to statistics from the federal census bureau, it was within this decade that Delano added more than 15,000 residents to its populace, swelling by almost 70 percent. Since, the city has continued to race ahead of the state average in its population growth, experiencing expansion of 36 percent since 2000.

But despite the influx and expansion of its residency, Delano seems to have barely changed since Cesar Chavez was marching for farm worker's rights across its sparse plains. There are very few signs of redevelopment. There are no corporate skyscrapers, no shopping malls, no fine dining or cinemas or bowling allies. Nothing rises above the irrigation pipes crisscrossing the fields like a giant Tinkertoy construction set.

It is a wondrous inconsistency, the disparity between the growing populace and the barren streets. Delano is both full, and empty.


The winters are hard for Delano's families. The lack of corporate redevelopment in the city, coupled with a low level of education among residents, has perpetuated a lifestyle of seasonal migration. With no grapes to pluck or box, farm-working parents must move away to find their sustenance. Some take their families with them; some send money home. Others rely on welfare and charity to get them through the colder months. "That is why these people are very poor," explained Philomena Hall, co-coordinator for the Migrant Education program in Kern County. "There isn't a whole lot of work this time of year."

Almost 30 percent of Delano families have a household income below the federal poverty threshold. On Garces Highway, low-rise, temporary housing provides a service to the migrant community. According to public health nurse John --, these cheap apartments are often overcrowded, with "multiple families, who don't know each other, living together just to save cost." A slumping economy has only worsened the situation. Fewer families are able to find seasonal work in the traditional "cycle," which requires moving with the seasons from the San Joaquin Valley to Imperial Valley to Arizona, Texas and back again.  "The migrant lifestyle is very difficult life to live," said Hall.


Trying to break the cycle of poverty in a city like Delano is even harder. There are few opportunities for Delano youth to step outside the traditions of their parents. Job opportunities are bleak; 80 percent of the population is dependent on seasonal farm working, a career that requires no high school diploma or further education. In 2000, less than half of the population in Delano had a high school diploma. Just 5 percent held a Bachelor's degree or higher.

 For the children of farm workers, frequent migration has meant a tumultuous and stunted education. The Migrant Education Program instigated in 1994 under the Clinton administration hoped to stabilize the education level of migrant children by allotting government funds to education and health programs. "The intent is to help migrant children overcome some of the barriers they encounter," Hall explained. "It's for academic purposes - reading, language - but not limited to that. We hold several dental clinics throughout the year in Delano because we know that migrant children typically don't have very good oral hygiene, and children don't learn well if they have a toothache."


More than 1500 children in the Delano school district are currently registered as "migrants," meaning that 20 percent of Delano's students have moved schools, and homes, within the last three years. According to Hall, migrant students who are involved with the Migrant Education Program have a better chance of completing high school, but the headway is minimal compared to the seemingly impenetrable barriers of the agricultural lifestyle. "Many of the kids drop out because families are poor and need all the help they can get," said Hall. "Sometimes they drop out as early as 8th grade. They find themselves continuing to do fieldwork because that's what their families know and where they have their connections."

In a culture of seasonal labor, especially in impoverished areas like Delano, children are a better asset to their families being out of school than in, working in the fields and adding to the household income. The city is dependent on a single industry, rendering education almost irrelevant. Hall says that is takes a "concerted effort" to recruit students into the Migrant Education Program. "Has it been enough to tilt the scales yet?" said Hall. "No. It hasn't." According to the Federal Census Bureau, education levels in Delano have been declining since 2000.

 The problems with education are mirrored by the problems with public health in the city. Along with a constant influx of immigrants from Mexico and South America, poverty and the migrant lifestyle in Delano have become a public safety issue. Tuberculosis, carried through the Delano corridor by immigrant and migrant workers, is breeding between members of the populace, especially those living in close-quarters or with multiple families. "If one family member has it, the whole family will get it," said public health nurse John.

In an effort to break the cycle of the disease, public health officials are focusing on the younger generation. Visiting schools and building awareness about a range of health issues that walk hand in hand with poverty and migration, from TB to obesity, is the goal of the Public Health Division in Delano. But breaking cycles, whether cultural or physical, is a difficult task. "We have to be tactful about the way we deal with the public, being sensitive to cultural differences and just being respectful," said Russell Hasting, a public health nurse in Delano. "It's hard to change people's lifestyles overnight."

Despite recent strife within the Change to Win Coalition, journalist, author and lawyer Steve Early said a new umbrella organization combining parts of AFL-CIO and its breakaway unions could be born this spring.

"Maybe by April there'll be an announcement of the reconfiguration," Early said. But he cautioned, "We're in a period where it's hard to make confident predictions. We know in the next few years that more bottom-up breakaways are coming in the rapidly changing and ever grimmer economic situation."

The key for future organizing is separating unions by industry, he said. The Employee Free Choice Act would change the way workers organize in the workplace, primarily through diluting employers' power to run anti-union campaigns. Making the bill law is labor's top priority, labor observers agree. Its already been endorsed by President Barack Obama and labor leaders. And its passage would virtually assure that unions could separate by industry.  
But recent strife within Change to Win may undermine organized labor's agenda, observers said.

Change To Win's problem, Early said, was that it paradoxically employed top-down methods to rebuild member unions from the bottom-up. While many authors have credited Change to Win as putting labor back on the map, some have seen the methods lead to levels of corruption not seen since the 70s. The movement towards reconciliation with AFL-CIO is evidence that Change to Win "did not live up to the hype," Early said.



Change to Win's inception in 2004 and 2005 was marked by a growth in awkward marriages and questionable takeovers through a process called trusteeship.

Unite-Here, a union of garment workers and hotel employees and one of the more powerful pistons of Change to Win, is a great example, Early said. The two unions became one in 2004, but on Feb. 6, Unite sued Here. From the start, many labor observers said the marriage was doomed to fail. Now, some experts characterized the dispute as a battle between up and coming forces in the Southwest (Here) and the moneyed and stable interests in the Northeast (Unite).




But Here, unlike most other unions, has been successful recruiting new members in one industry, Early said. Its membership drives in Las Vegas, for example, have made hospitality workers there among the top political forces in Southern Nevada.

"Hotel workers have become a model of union organizing to the extent it involves building strong communities and digging into the workplace," Early said. "But the East-versus-West is an artificial label. While California has been where some of the liveliest action has gone on, a lot has gone off the rails."

Trusteeship and other top-down tactics in Change to Win have yielded embarrassing and criminal corruption scandals. SEIU, perhaps the biggest player in Change to Win, has been blemished with corruption charges across the countries. In many cases, it's the local head, handpicked by Stern, who embezzles union dues or misappropriates funds, like the case of Tyrone Freeman, for example. Freeman was installed as head of SEIU's largest California local and was a favorite of Andy Stern, the union's national president. Freeman embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in union dues last year and resigned in disgrace.



More recently, Stern put SEIU's third largest local under trusteeship to essentially push workers, against their will, into another megalocal, Early said. It was the same strategy that initially filled the ranks of Freeman's local.
 
The strategy, trusteeship, "was applauded early on because it was taking over local that weren't great," Early said. "Eighty trusteeships later, this is now a powerful tool against people who disagree with you. It's all about control and who's in charge. It eliminates obstacles for the strategy of why unions can add value and not insist on higher contract standards that won't get in the way of organizing new members."

The breakaway local, United Health Care Workers West, responded by creating a new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers on Jan. 28 and is actively trying to recruit SEIU members and forge a partnership with California Nurses Association.



Both the Unite-Here and SEIU struggles have received some exposure in the mainstream media. But a lot of coverage overlooks "the content of the discussion of building a new union" particularly regarding the schism within SEIU, Early said. "How journalism covers this stuff was hook line and sinker. I call it 'Change to Spin.'"

Early described the struggles within SEIU as a tragedy.

"It's a worker driven backlash against a certain kind of unionism," he said. "It's tragic SEIU has become a union where differences and disagreements cannot be resolved within itself."
These distractions and scandals sap labor of political capital in one of the most important times in labor history, he said.
 
"We shouldn't be gloating now that the chickens are coming home to roost," he said. "It's what are the lessons, and where are there still positive models?"

Early is a well respected Boston-based journalist and lawyer. He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, due in April, which covers his experience on the labor beat as well as his participation in unions since 1972.

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." - David Hume

My copy of Dowell Myers' Immigrants and Boomers is marked-up with three shades of highlighter pens, pencil scrawlings (saying things like: "Are declining birth rates in Europe anything to do with white culture?", "Do diversified cultures bring society to a higher level of being, as the Hegelian dialectic would suggest, through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis?" or simply, "?") and post-its. By the time I reached the last page, I had successfully turned this brand-new, immaculate hard cover into a worn-out high school text book.

This is a good sign.

The more "interactive" I become with a book, the more challenged or awed I have been. In this case, I wasn't particularly "awed," other than perhaps quietly, since the reading experience was more hard work than pleasure, but I was certainly challenged. Challenged to the point that my perceptions and knowledge have been greatly enhanced, and my ignorance about the topic of immigration made clear. But Myers is by no means attempting to brainwash his audience. Yes, his tone leans a little more toward the side of inclusive rather than exclusive immigration policy, but even that perspective is easily forgiven.

Myers is an optimist.

It's no wonder that, as Myers explains in the May 2008 afterword, the book has received "little attention" from "advocates at either extreme." Open-minded, fact-establishing works that find stability in a "neutral zone" aren't exactly spine-tinglers. They evoke little emotion, have no plot, no mystery, no drama and no surprise ending. They don't make you angry. They don't evoke a visceral sense of injustice, like metal on the tongue. But if you want to understand the world from a deeper, more intelligent level, then this type of informative work is essential, and rare.

Rather than being driven by a persistent narrator, the only thing tilting the balance in Immigrants and Boomers is attitude. Do you believe that people are essentially good, or essentially bad? Does man strive to better himself, or does he leave himself to ruin?

If you believe the former then you can anticipate a not-too-distant world where second and third generation immigrants have climbed the ladder of social mobility and established themselves as educated, middle-class taxpayers, who are both socially and politically aware of their role in the bigger picture.

However, you might choose to be pessimistic. Immigrants don't want to better themselves. They don't want to contribute to society. They don't want to work hard or escape the poverty cycle. To you, the world of the future is plagued by the parasitical movement of people from one place to another.

As Myers shows, neither perspective is wrong. They are both rooted in some form of reality. The trick is figuring out which reality contains the most truth. Myers does this by way of lots, and lots, of statistical information. Pouring out numbers and pasting graphs into every other page makes the book a cumbersome read, but a weighty topic doesn't deserve anything less.

The level of understanding that Myers provides, in exchange for some intensive work on the reader's part, is exceptional. So many of the nation's prejudices could be expelled, or at least calmed, by studying the contents of Immigrants and Boomers. It ignites questions and encourages philosophizing. It explains, and in doing so simplifies, a complicated issue. No matter how open-minded we believe ourselves to be, we have all been party to the immigration debate, whether directly or indirectly, and we all have an opinion, whether consciously or subconsciously. But as Myers explains, just as readers crave drama, citizens have a tendency to "extrapolate." This is partially due to the nature of the media industry: audiences are fed by "alarming" statistics. Crime rates, the number of sexually transmitted diseases, stock values, high school drop-out rates... as soon as the numbers start to slope, upwards or downwards, it's a story. And as Myers explains, "once our expectations have been set and they are entrenched in our common knowledge, they can be sustained by a relatively small amount of information." (P. 25)

[A recent example: gas prices. During the summer months of 2008, every media outlet screamed with stories about rising gas prices. But as soon as the prices started to fall, the stories disappeared. Even after gas prices had returned to a level of relative normalcy, advertisers continued to pitch their products to an audience afraid of pump prices ("High gas prices getting you down?"). Only when gas prices fell to some sort of "newsworthy" low did the stories begin to emerge once again.]

I'm not sure I buy the idea that the public "extrapolate" to the extent Myers seems to think they do, but I certainly agree that public opinion is like a tsunami: once on course, it's very difficult to re-route. Immigration seems to a particularly uncompromising topic. The assumption that America is continually being invaded by an increasing number of illegal immigrants is ingrained into the public mindset, making the issue seem much more black and white than it actually is. Myers successfully illuminates the grey areas, expanding the idea of cross-country movement into a complicated, and yet somewhat organic, philosophy. The concepts of "upward mobility", of "assimilation", of "political lag", are all extremely complex ideas that branch out from what many mistakenly perceive to be a single, self-contained point. Myers succeeds in emphasizing the connectedness of it all, thanks to the book's tight organization and transitions, as well as impeccable research.

There is something very fulfilling about accessing such clean information. Being able to sit back and think, without being pressured by a narrator persistent with opinion, is an illuminating experience. But there is no entertainment here. No drama in the pages. No dizzying twist. The reader must be willing to be a scholar.

I paid my dues, sharpened my pencils and spent my post-its, and by the end I couldn't help feeling optimistic.

In August 2002, The Denver Post threw some more fuel into the fire of the immigration debate. They printed an article about Jesus Apodaca, a high school graduate with a nearly perfect GPA who couldn't get financial aid for college because he and his family were illegal immigrants.

The story of Apodaca sparked a rampant debate about the kind of immigrant we "should" be encouraging, not blocking, from succeeding in America.

The story attracted a lot of attention at the time, but readers of Dowell Myers book, or anyone who lives in a heavily diverse area, know that this type of story is not nearly as rare as one might think.

Critics of immigration like former Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, who campaigned to have Apodaca's family deported, would probably do well to read "Immigrants and Boomers".

Myers demonstrates that the immigrant population, especially in California, is much more successful than they are given credit for. Almost three quarters of immigrants speak English proficiently and half of California's Hispanic immigrants own homes after 20 years. An even higher number, 82 percent, of third-generation Latinos graduate from high school. According to the US Census, that number is only 88 percent for all people native to the U.S.

Through the carefully researched data on immigrant populations and upward mobility, Myer's presents the two problems of immigration and economics as solutions for each other. He presents a future of symbiotic relationships between America's immigrant community and the huge population of ageing Americans.

Many of the biggest opponents to immigration are in the 'Baby Boomer' generation. They are the generation that saw the biggest rise in Latino immigrants, hitting 1.2 million per year in the early 1990s. By 1990, over 20 percent of California's population was foreign born.

As the Baby Boomer population ages, fears of running out of Social Security and the collapse of Medicare and Medicaid are very real. Reports from the U.S. government have indicated that social security may run out by 2040 and Medicare will be gone by 2018. Already, Myers notes that to sustain the massive ageing Baby Boom population, the younger generation will see and 80 percent increase in lifetime tax payments.

His solution to the crushing financial problem is to nurture and encourage the country's immigrant population. America does not have enough younger workers to pick up the slack from a retiring population. Myers suggests that immigrants who are working, paying taxes, buying homes, and getting higher education will keep the United States going economically into the next 20 years and beyond. Without them, the future is much less hopeful.

Myers could have represented his argument in a more interesting and compelling way, but then again, maybe not. Demographics have rarely made for exciting reading.

As it is, Myers summarizes his argument in nearly every chapter in almost identical words. He outlines the crux of his argument in the first twenty pages, and spends nearly every chapter restating and supporting the same argument with more data and analysis.

Myers looses his reader with long-winded explanations of each chart and graph instead of presenting the information in a clear and compelling way. He does little to engage the reader or bring a human element to the masses of numbers we are supposed to visualize as "our community".

He also brings up several points that seem out dates or antithetical to the life that surrounds us in California. When discussing political power, Myers writes that "long established populations," in this case, white, "have a seniority that allows them to wield disproportionate political influence."

That may be so in some places in the country, but California seems to have broken the trend. Myers grazes over the political influence of Latinos in local California government.  I disagree with his notion that whites retain political power in state and local governments. Many municipal governments in California are entirely Latino and reflect their current local population rather than the "long established" communities that no longer dominate the landscape.

He seems to give not as much credit to Latino populations for participating in the election process although throughout the last few national elections, Latinos made up a highly coveted, and growing, voting demographic. Though the immigrant community faces challenges, what Myers calls a three-step process of "naturalization, registration and turning out", they do not seem to be stopping the drive toward participation in politics.


Myers sales pitch for the support of immigrants is effective, yet the un-engaging style of writing is sure to drive away many potential readers who would benefit from his message. But many arguments have been made in favor of immigration, yet public sentiment doesn't seem to be changing very quickly in favor of it.

He points out that "the steady decline in prominence of the white population is deflating to many of the people who are accustomed to being in the majority." Those people who feel "deflated" may want to actually read Myers book and decide whether or not they would like to keep receiving those Social Security checks, be able to sell their home, and see the doctor on Medicare. If the answer is yes, we need to start treating our newer Americans much, much better.

Who would have thought that immigration could benefit our aging society?  That's the primary concept laid out by demographer Dowell Myers in his book Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, an opus of factoids, stats and charts that explains how immigration can help support our economically burdensome, population-heavy baby boomers (no offense, mom and dad).

America's 78 million baby boomers are getting older.  And like a fine wine, the older you are, the more you cost.  Myers reports that between 1980 and 2015, the share of the federal budget going towards the elderly is projected to increase from 31 percent to 48 percent as more people dip into Social Security and Medicare.  The increasing cost of this generation leaves many younger, tax-paying citizens fearful that government funding will be dried up by the time their golden years arrive.  As Myers writes, "For the first time in history, we will be asked to accommodate a large and abrupt increase in the ratio of retired to working adults."  

But Myers has found a way to get the much-needed taxes flowing so that our current workforce can enjoy federal funds when they decide to "clock-out" for good.  He argues that by investing in America's growing immigrant population - particularly Latinos, which comprise the nation's largest minority group - we can mobilize a vital economic force to cover the increasing expenditures from the boomers' retirement.  To do this, boomers must put in enough tax money now to ensure that immigrants are getting the education necessary to land high-paying jobs that will generate tax revenue to support the boomers.  It's cyclic, you see.

The challenge is to convince white voters, who make up the majority of the active electorate, to support policies that are beneficial to immigrants.  Immigration itself has much stigma attached to it, and Myers does well to dispel some long-standing immigrant myths.  He notes that those who claim Latino culture will eventually trump good ol' Americanism are mistaken - by the time the children of foreign-born immigrants have children themselves, any use of the family's native tongue will be minimal at best.  Further, the longer that foreign-born residents remain in the U.S., the more likely they are to vote and own homes - two forms of societal engagement that perpetuate their assimilation into American society.

To support his theory that immigration can be advantageous in America, Myers uses California as a case study to project the oncoming demographic transformation of the U.S.  With 50 percent of its population comprised of foreign-born individuals and their children (mostly Latinos and Asians), California exemplifies how an established immigrant population is able to achieve upward mobility; their integration into society through employment and home ownership - two factors that increase dramatically the longer an immigrant stays in-state - makes them important contributors to the California economy which, let's face it, needs all the help it can get (did someone say something about a $42 billion deficit?).

However, California is not the land of sugar canes and lollipops when it comes to immigration, as Myers explains:
Myers goes on to point out that the more you want from the government, the more you have to pay, and urges that older voters invest in the future by funding our youth, especially the immigrants and their descendants, who have the ability to be the strongest voting force in the state (currently the outnumbered white population accounts for about 71 percent of regular voters in California).

Demographic transition is a fact of life in California - and America.  Dowell Myers is keen enough to formulate a plan - a "social contract" - that can make the merger of multiple ethnicities mutually beneficial to all parties involved, whether they are old, young, white or brown.  It is somewhat humorous for Myers to declare that Immigrants and Boomers "is for the citizen-voter and taxpayers of the United States," considering that it was at times - most times - a dense and tedious read.  This book is clearly more on par with scholastic readers who can filter the onerous, extensively researched information the book yields.  Still, Myers is a master in his field, and his work is landmark in its ability to look past our immigration impasse and formulate solutions to which policymakers should take notice.

Reading Dowell Myers' succinct and yet informative masterpiece, Immigrants & Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, made me want to do the following things in this order: call my grandparents and inform them their lifestyle was killing my future children's chances at happiness and driving the nation into bankruptcy, call my boomer parents and forbid them to retire, have octuplets and make them geniuses to replenish the workforce and be sure to keep up with current events so my own "extrapolations" were not dictating the future. Whew. Once I did all those things I felt better.

             That said I do believe Myers had some great points to share. It's just a shame he buried it in really, really boring percentages and a repetitive writing style.

            What I found most helpful in the book was to read about the generational shift that will come when the boomers fall into retirement homes and the country will need a newer, larger and more educated workforce to pick up the slack. "Specifically, three million workers from the baby boom generation will exit California's workforce between 2010 and 2020," he said. WHOA.

            And Myers' solution is education, saying our united self-interest should be to invest in the future, since the baby boomers are highly educated and will be a hard act to follow. Myers said many studies confirm, "success in meeting the educational challenge of preparing the new generation is the single most important task for the future." But Myers says the education level in the workforce is declining. (Side note: This finally was a glimmer of validation in my choice to spend thousands of dollars to educate myself. I think Myers would be proud.)

The book made me think of society like a budget. Using his graph about how we spend money on different generations, on page 179, its clear we need more revenue from working-age people to fund the consumption of the old. It also seemed like our infatuation with credit is present in our intergenerational relationships-- Myers could have classified us as using our kids as credit cards when he said, "Lifestyles in the present are being financed by taxpayers of the future."

This impending debt he speaks of with generational shifts also relates to immigration. I think he does an acceptable job at showing how much this country needs the waves of newcomers to feed its habits. "The easiest remedy for an emerging shortage of workers is an increase in immigration," said Myers.

I thought his section about our perceptions of reality as poor means of predicting the future in the first 40 pages was completely useless. Myers scolds that our views of society don't ever catch up to what is really going on. He could have summed that up in a page, like many other points.

            Also, his time spent explaining essentially the assimilation process of immigrants from first generation to third generation--describing the growing number of English speakers, homeowners and individuals more invested in the community. Myers could have cut A LOT. He has a habit of over explaining his topics.

            On a style point, Myers really needs a writer's workshop. His idea of interweaving facts, percentages and years with their context is a big clunky Clydesdale trying to run the Kentucky Derby--too distracting and slow. If he had made the Appendix much larger, and concentrated on making a readable story, the book would read less like a term paper.

            However, despite my qualms with the style, Myers obviously has collected a wealth of information about the guts of our society and how it has evolved through immigration. But the title is deceiving; this is not a book suitable for adults. It is a collection of data and thoughts that is beneficial for someone of a younger persuasion, such as our 20s age group. These are the people who will be pivotal in this transition of workforce and the growth in immigrant populations as fixtures in politics.

It's a book that says to me, as a product of white suburbia, to throw out all these assumptions about how a surge in immigration drains our resources. Myers in fact wants us to know that the structure of our America is such that we need this influx of people to come here, grow up and participate in the new "social contract." His book says to me, 'look, our societal make-up is changing, so be realistic and adapt.' 

 

 

My feelings about the book Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America can best be described by 1980's recording superstar Whitney Houston:

I believe the children are our future.  Teach them well and let them lead the way.  Show them all the beauty they possess inside.  Give them a sense of pride to make it easier.  Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.

Often overwhelming and exceedingly detailed, Myers uses statistics to prove his point that the growing immigrant population is crucial for the future of America, especially as Baby Boomers reach the age of retirement.  He focuses on the need for younger generations to replenish the work force and housing markets made bare from the aging boomers.  Though, according to Myers, current conditions do not promote the education needed to match the skill and economic class obtained by the older generation.

He weaves in between the nation as a whole and California statistics and examples, no doubt capitalizing on his access to studies conducted at University of Southern California where he works.  The switching between the two can be confusing and convoluted as he often sites multiple sets of data in one sentence.

The first part of the book is focused on stripping the generations, mostly the older ones, of their misconceptions about immigration based on "extrapolations" from the past.  Myers dwells on this notion, repeating it over and over throughout the first 100 pages.  

He explains why there are such negative impressions of the immigrant population, both in California and in the U.S, and then reasons why those impressions do not hold up.  He uses intricate graphs and charts to illustrate the basic points that immigrants do eventually learn English, buy homes, vote and become active members of society.

Much of what Myers says is frustrating as he repeats himself and gives long-winded explanations for very simple concepts.  At the end of each chapter he provides a conclusion where most everything he just said over the span of 15 or 20 pages is reduced to a simple 3 paragraphs.  The better part of the first half of the book boils down to older whites do not think about the needs of generations to come, many of whom are either immigrants or children of immigrants.  As he makes clear, the voting electorate does not always match the population majority.

"Long-established populations have a seniority that allows them to wield disproportionate political influence."

Unfortunately for immigrants, whites hold the voter majority and will for some time and as Myers points out, because of lingering negative opinions toward immigration, do not vote favorably for minorities.

The second half of the book then focuses on the dangers of these not-so-disparate groups.  As the Baby Boomers age there will be a growing intergenerational dependence on the immigrant population.  However, without proper education and involvement now, the minority groups will not be in position to "fill the shoes" of the retiring and aging baby boomers.

Myers proposes a new social contract be formed in order to bridge the gap between them.  The new relationships will be formed, he advises, once people realize that though there may be different races and ethnicities, everyone goes through the same process of aging.  And the cyclical nature of aging means that the young and old are dependent on each other.

Myers undoubtedly knows what he is talking about.  He has every statistic in the world to prove his point.  However, his work may be better served as a textbook with supplemental flash cards and power points to handle all the data.  

Dowell Myers might have done well to heed the advice of my old history teacher: A book should be like a girls skirt, long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep things interesting.

When Barack Obama moved to Chicago to become a community organizer, his boss had this piece of advice: "You have to understand a person's self-interest."

For it is self-interest, rather than lofty concepts of generosity, equality and justice, that drive people to act together.

Addressing the voting majority on immigration, then, demands an understanding of who they are and what they want. And actually, writes USC demographer Dowell Myers in Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America,  the needs and desires of the older generation of Americans -- the baby boomers -- and the youngest generation -- our newest immigrants -- are complementary.

Myers gets in the head of the average citizen-voter, who is between 40 and 55 and white. He acknowledges that witnessing the massive inflow of immigrants to America over the past 30 years and the steady decline of their own kind is unnerving and has contributed to the climate of fear and apprehension towards immigrants. Will admitting so many economically disadvantaged newcomers put us in danger of losing our country as we know it?

These third-generation or higher Americans sense that foreign cultures are taking over and react in fear by shutting our borders. Myers seeks to counter these negative attitudes towards immigrants by highlighting issues where there is mutual interest.

Take the real estate market. Today nearly 70% of whites own homes, compared to 44% of immigrant Latino families. But a decade from now, as the baby boomers hit retirement, they will be looking to younger buyers who can occupy their home at its current price.

The ratio of seniors to working-age residents, 25 to 64 years old,  will grow from 25% in 2010 to 41% in 2030.

By 2020, Myers projects, about half of these home buyers will be Latinos. And, as he points out, if these buyers will be able to pay the high prices asked, they need to be working secure jobs that pay a sufficient outcome. To find a good job, buyers should be well-educated.

Only the steady influx of immigrants could release some of the pressure of this graying population.

A point for which the book is well-known is that immigrants are not "Peter Pans, forever frozen in the life stage at which they arrived in America." There is a process of immigrant advancement and integration, and its intersection with the needs of the boomers can benefit all of America.

Thus, from selfish-interested reasons comes a perfectly rational course of action that benefits many parties and highlights our common humanity and interdependence of different groups.

Between 1990 and 2005, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 80% of all population growth in the U.S., and almost all of the population growth in the 45-and younger category. But, contrary to popular belief, the immigration process has slowed down and could either stabilize or decline.

For a book intent on educating and inspiring the masses, Myers's presentation is so pedantic that it would thwart most casually curious readers. Chock-full of statistics, tables and charts and absent of an engaging narrative, Immigrants and Boomers seems more useful as a reference book than an electrifying call to arms.

Thus, it's up to journalists to disseminate the wealth of information gathered here. In doing so, we may do well to take a page from Obama's book: speak to the self-interest of our readers.

The current state of America's priorities and challenges can be summed up by looking at one place: the negotiations surrounding the 2009 Obama Economic Stimulus package. This plan, totaling nearly $790 Billion, aims to help revive the struggling economy, while laying a heavy financial burden on future generations to pay for. Democrats and Republicans continue to battle over which financial expenditures in the areas of education, technology, health care, energy and infrastructure, will likely yield the greatest number of jobs, fix the economy and secure America's future.

These competing priorities are at the heart of the Dowell Myers's book, Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America. In this treatise, Myers argues that a new intergenerational contract needs to be created between retiring Baby Boomers and newly arrived immigrants to solve our economic and demographic challenges. Myers describes it as a "social contract of intergenerational support," which is "based in intergenerational transfers of resources through the mediums of taxation and social expenditure."

Quite simply, Myers proposes a more enlightened view of immigrant arrivals and the challenges that it presents to America. Instead of thinking of immigrants in what he describes as a "Peter Pan" way, whereby they remain stuck in an infancy stage of assimilation, he challenges the voting public to consider a picture of immigrants who have evolved, developed and contribute greatly to society. It is these immigrants (in addition to the native born) that will become the taxpayers of the future who will provide the financial support to the elderly Baby Boomers. In essence, the immigrants of today will pay for the Social Security, pensions and health care of aging Boomers.  Subsequently, it is in our shared best interest to invest in education and assist in the integration and assimilation of our foreign born entrants.

For those of us looking for a more hopeful and broader understanding of the immigration challenges especially in light of the current economic situation and concurrent demographic shifts, Immigrants and Boomers is a vital read. Myers challenges the current and most prevalent conversation surrounding immigration, or the "outlook of despair" which proposes raising taxes and the retirement age, and decreasing the amount of entitlement benefits like Social Security for seniors as the solution. Or even worse, simplifying the problem to merely building more borders, hiring more enforcement agents and implementing deportation quotas.

He rightly counters this dismal outlook rooted in past thinking with a much-needed "outlook of hope" anchored in the future. Myers offers a cogent argument for supporting the assimilation of immigrants into America for our greater good. His discussion of the life stages of individuals from childhood to retirement and its implications on public support were very compelling. It's easy to see how our perspective on the immigration discussion depends greatly on our place in this life cycle as well as our view of immigrant assimilation. U.S. citizens with immigrant parents or family members who have obtained the "American Dream" may have a much easier time understanding Myers' argument against the "Peter Pan" syndrome. Apparently, the data shows that more immigrants are successful than commonly believed.

The Immigrants and Boomers argument about expanding the middle class through continuous investment in education and strengthening our homegrown workforce was quite persuasive. Over the past eight years, America has seen the dangers of a dramatically shrinking middle class and the increase of America's wealth retained by the top 1 percent. Shoring up the middle class and creating workers that can buy and retain homes benefits the older generations who need to sell their properties as well as the entire U.S. economy. This argument is easily reinforced by the present day financial crisis brought upon by a large number of Americans unable to pay their mortgages.

Myers wrote the book mainly to inform the everyday citizen. Therefore, we, as the voting public, have to make a choice. Do we choose self-interest for its own sake or seek a mutual self-concern? Do we leave the hard choices about immigrants and demographics up to politicians who are overly near-sighted? Or do we vote for enlightened social policy that weighs future budgetary issues? Likewise, do we consider the present moment only when making financial and policy decisions? Or do we challenge ourselves to look beyond our current paradigms and towards a better future for all Americans. Ultimately, do we choose to view immigration (illegal or not) as a means for despair or as a challenge full of hope to course correct our path towards a multiethnic American dream that suits everyone not just the white majority.

Myers asks us to consider both perspectives and choose hope.

This week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called for public and private funds to buy toxic assets that have been wiping out American financial institutions. Critics from right to left pitied the 47-year-old, but showed no mercy finding fault with his remarks on Tuesday. "Mr. Geithner's proposal "raised more questions than it answered," according to the New York Times.

So forgive me for not being more enthusiastic about the case Dowell Myers makes in Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America. It's not that Myers is without credibility or his ideas lack merit. It's that the financial self-immolation laid waste the agendas of urban planners--and sincere town criers--like Myers.

Myers writes that immigrants and young people must partner with aging Baby Boomers to rediscover everyone's overlapping interests. In the process, the intergenerational coalition can rewrite social contracts to make a more perfect union. Immigrants, and immigrants alone, have the power to complement a rising generation. An Indian journalist put it to Thomas Friedman recently, "All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans. We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them... And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans."

Myers' work is rich with pragmatism, which I worry will be overlooked while efforts are spent unfreezing credit markets. But Myers' book is detached from topical debate so much so he does not explicitly comment on the immigration imbroglio in 2006. From his empirical observations, there is no controversy about providing citizenship to immigrants, so of course he does not mention the Kennedy-McCain bill because such a thing obfuscates the conversation urban planners and civil servants are having.
 
Much of Myer's book is pure wonk. The writing is stale. There's no narrative. This book ought to be the subject of social studies classes everywhere because it diagnosed a fundamental problem of the voting public: the Peter Pan Fallacy. The concept is shorthand for a large portion of white voters who view immigrants as frozen in time and who's welfare is unchanging, when in fact, "The interests of different groups change as they pass through the different life stages... [and that] can be mutually serviced by intergenerational partnerships," Myers wrote.

Correcting the Peter Pan Fallacy brings voters closer into a partnership with everyone else in society. Such deal making is essential if we want people to participate in a free market again. Even though his thesis is firmly rooted in demographic change, Myers makes no conclusions about generational leadership. Ever the empiricist, he won't go there.

But Morely Winograd and Michael Hais do. The authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics argued in 2007 that the  presidential election would be a turning point in America. The authors argued technological advancement and demographic change are the driving forces of realignment elections. While Winograd and Hais do not limit themselves to sampling the 20th Century to make their case, the last 100 years are full of examples: FDR in 1930 and the rise of the radio, the power of television in the 60s, and now the Internet in 2008. Each technological advancement has brought about a dominant consensus, or what Myers would see as a social contract.

Realignment elections come every 40-60 years and originate when a "civic" or "idealist" generation dominates consensus, Winograd and Hais wrote. Civic generations are very pragmatic, believe strongly in teamwork, and build institutions. Millennial's intellectual antecedents are the GI Generation. Another civic group, the sometimes-called "Greatest Generation" survived economic disaster, contained totalitarianism, and cemented international order, which until 2001 was pretty stable. Civic realignments focus on resolving long-standing economic issues and rebuilding or expanding of political governmental institutions. Every civic generation is filled with immigrants, Winograd and Hais wrote. This civic generation is the protagonist of Myers book though they are rarely mentioned outside of a partnership with Boomers.

Boomers are idealists and are marked by brutal value-driven battles, Winograd and Hais wrote. Boomers attempted to implement their own personal morality and causes through the political process but have always handicapped themselves by being equally divided in presidential elections. In periods of idealist consensus, people do not like the government.
Idealist generations usually lay waste to the institutions of civic generations. That's not to say that idealists are bad people necessarily. They've spawned what some Boomer writers are calling the "Joshua Generation." The Bible-reference recalls and frames the millennial generation as Joshua, Moses's brother, who brought fleeing Israelites inside the promised land. But idealists are the ones who say illegal immigrants "don't have a right to be here," and see immigration as a conversation about them and not us, or as a threat instead of opportunity.

Winograd and Hais work effectively provides the human condition necessary for Myers to comprehensively make the case for a new social contract. Demographic transition is hard to argue with, and the fact is "after 40 years of stability, the ratio of seniors to working-age residents is poised to soar dramatically," Myers writes. So when confronted with a choice of being threatened or being pragmatic, how will voters choose?

Two thousand and eight was when the aging generation handed the baton off to the pragmatists. But with the economy dropping 400 points after Geithner's speech Tuesday, I wonder if the baton wasn't dropped a few years ago.

There were many more waiting to take his place. There were so many more of him that he didn't even exist. Mendez and the walkers didn't know they were invisible: on the Devil's Highway, you had to almost die for anybody to notice your face.

In his book The Devil's Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea writes with the comically cynical tone of someone who has delved so deep into the dark underbelly of immigration's tragic humanity that he has to laugh to keep from sobbing. This astounding account of 26 illegal immigrants traversing toward their demise through the scorching Arizona desert is laced with tongue-in-cheek black humor.

Cojones killed the Yuma 14. But so did the sun, and so did U.S. border policy, and the coyotes, their guides. Does it even matter? Luis Alberto Urrea certainly takes a position in The Devil's Highway, but the politics of the border take a back seat to this horror story that unfolded in 2001, when 26 men attempted to cross the desert in southern Arizona to find new fortunes in the United States, and 14 died.

Urrea's book is at once investigative journalism and modern epic. Like a journalist, Urrea hordes facts until he has a tremendous trove of them, and like a novelist, he weaves them into a story with plot twists and an emotional climax. It's film noir in the negative, with shadows conspicuously absent and death in broad daylight--in fact, death by broad daylight. Under the villainous heat of the sun, we all reduce to meat and bones, and Urrea riffs hard on that theme throughout the book, turning out line after line of carnal poetry, a kind of death waltz for the desert.

 

The book opens with a description of the blackened, bloodied survivors being discovered by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The sun has literally cooked them, and Urrea's descriptions are graphic and grotesque. He strips away their dignity, focusing on their physical condition, the blackened skin and swollen lips, the drool oozing from their mouths and their drunkenness "from having their brains baked in the pan." At one point he delivers a clinical analysis of urine, detailing all its ingredients, and later all its colors as a person passes from heat stress to heat stroke. But he doesn't stop there. He makes us consider what it might be like to thirst after your own urine. "If you're really lucky," he writes, "someone might piss in your mouth."

 

With that sardonic tone and a critical eye informed by the irreducible logic of death, Urrea places everyone on the same level--the victim immigrants and their coyote guides, the crooks and the cops, the politicians and the Minute Men. He makes fun of the uneducated immigrants who are driven to foolish extremes by their need to appear masculine, to have cojones. But he also calls out the border agents for racist-toned comments, even as he reminds readers these same agents are responsible for rescuing countless illegal immigrants lost in the desert. In fact, cultural and racial sensitivity becomes a kind of macabre joke. Urrea notes that when alive, Mexicans' skin blends into the dusty terrain, concealing them from the searching Border Patrol aircraft overhead, but in death their whitewashed bones look the same as those of any other race and give them away.

 

In a similar feat of reductive writing, Urrea shows how absurd civilized society can appear on both sides of the border after the trials of the desert. The hospital in Yuma becomes a kind of sterile circus replete with clowns in scrubs, where the survivors slurp pudding and smile for the cameras, while down in Mexico the corpses of the Yuma 14 arrive to a parade-like reception with banners, media-savvy officials, and crowds that bust barriers and almost trample a consul to death in a sign of wild nationalistic solidarity. This absurdity features prominently in the only argument Urrea seems to be making with his book: that immigration is unstoppable, and people on both sides of the border ought to be more humane about it.

 

Urrea does find and report a lot of telling statistics and big-picture reporting, all of which is very powerful, but the main strength of his book is its narrative. By tucking most of that dry-yet-still-fascinating information at both ends, Urrea is free to construct an uninterrupted retelling of what happened in the desert, and the result is a kind of modern epic. It is a tribute to Urrea's talents as a reporter and a storyteller that he manages to work so few facts into a coherent story. As Homer fancied the long lists of warriors fighting for each captain, and all the weapons and armor they carried, and the names of the ships, so Urrea somehow manages to conjure rich characters and events from plain facts. His ingredients: a dash of Border Patrol lingo, a stylized belt buckle, the favorite black pants that cooked their owner's legs, the coordinates like tombstones where each traveler fell and died, the colorful nicknames of the bad guys, even local folklore to lend character to a town or a place. Indeed, myth has a special place in this book, and Urrea shows that such details are as valid a part of the reportage as any quote or statistic recorded in his notebook.

 

By structuring his book the way he does, Urrea takes the reader from revulsion at the sight of the sun-baked survivors to a gradual understanding of their characters to the heartbreak of watching many of them perish like deranged animals on the desert floor.

 

With grim irony, Urrea finally gives the dead their dignity back by personifying them while they ride in body bags from Yuma to the lab in Tucson where their corpses can be analyzed before being shipped home. The dead reflect on what will be one of their last rides, noting the relative comfort inside the black rubber bags as they bump and slide around in the back of a truck. Such is the character of Urrea's approach, however. The book is not straight journalism. Rather, Urrea takes all the facts at his disposal to construct a verisimilitude worthy of the actual events, one that can grab the reader by the shoulders and shake her until she opens her eyes to acknowledge what has really happened here--a tragedy of epic proportions.