The Economist: California v. Texas

The Economist has an editorial comparing California and Texas combining its usual unthinking prejudices with some actual insights (likely drawn from my stuff).

It's not surprising that a lot of the politicians most responsible for the Minority Mortgage Meltdown in California -- such as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Clinton's HUD Secretary (and later Countrywide director and frontman on its trillion dollar pledge of lending to the "underserved") Henry Cisneros -- are Texans. Their policies weren't incredibly harmful in Texas, which they understood fairly well, but were in California, which they didn't.

Do keep in mind that California was much more impacted by immigration over the last generation than Texas: in the 2000 Census, 26% of California's residents were foreign-born versus only 14% of Texas's.

AMERICA’S recent history has been a relentless tilt to the West—of people, ideas, commerce and even political power. California and Texas, the nation’s two biggest states, are the twin poles of the West, but very different ones. For most of the 20th century the home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood has been the brainier, sexier, trendier of the two: its suburbs and freeways, its fads and foibles, its marvellous miscegenation have spread around the world. Texas, once a part of the Confederacy, has trailed behind: its cliché has been a conservative Christian in cowboy boots, much like a certain recent president. But twins can change places. Is that happening now?

It is easy to find evidence that California is in a funk (see article). At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors, including those owed tax refunds, business suppliers and students expecting grants, in IOUs. ...

Plenty of American states have budget crises; but California’s illustrate two more structural worries about the state. Back in its golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, it offered middle-class people, not just techy high-fliers, a shot at the American dream—complete with superb schools and universities, and an enviable physical infrastructure. These days California’s unemployment rate is running at 11.5%, two points ahead of the national average. In such Californian cities as Fresno, Merced and El Centro, jobless rates are higher than in Detroit. Its roads and schools are crumbling. Every year, over 100,000 more Americans leave the state than enter it.

... Not that Californian government comes cheap: it has the second-highest top level of state income tax in America (after Hawaii, of all places).

Why is it surprising that the state with the nicest climate and the state with the second nicest climate have the highest and second highest state income taxes? California's income taxes are intended to exploit people willing to pay heavily to live in California. For example, golfer Freddie Couples lives in Santa Barbara because he can afford to live anywhere. In contrast, a skinflint like Tiger Woods officially moved from his native California to income-tax free Florida on the day he turned pro in 1996 to evade the California income tax.

Indeed, high taxes, coupled with intrusive regulation of business and greenery taken to silly extremes, have gradually strangled what was once America’s most dynamic state economy. Chief Executive magazine, to take just one example, has ranked California the very worst state to do business in for each of the past four years.

By contrast, Texas was the best state in that poll. It has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude.

... And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA ...

That's connection between topography, home prices, and politics is straight out of my stuff.

Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does.

Let's unpack that "immigrant-tolerant" idea a bit. California is clearly more liberal than Texas, so ideologically Californians are supposed to be more "pro-diversity," but that works out as true mostly in theory and in public pronouncements. As I've long pointed out, elite Californians feel very little cultural connection to their Latino servitors. California's elites find nothing more boring than Mexicans. In contrast, Texas has a more rough-hewn culture, including at the elite level, so Texans tend to feel more in common culturally with immigrants from culturally-backward Mexico.

Also, there are some old elite Mexican-American families in San Antonio who fled the Mexican Revolution of a century ago who are part of the Texas Establishment. In California, there aren't any elite old money Mexican-American families that I can think of. (There are WASP families in Pasadena who have one or two land grant Californio grandees in their family trees -- enterprising Bostonians and New Yorkers were already taking over California by marrying the daughters of rich landowners before the U.S. military made it official -- but that's about it.)

And, it's not uncommon for rich Mexicans from Monterrey to visit Houston for shopping and surgery, although they are most likely to move to Miami. In contrast, rich Mexicans avoid Los Angeles like a plaguespot -- too many poor Mexicans here, I guess.

In general, Texas and northeastern Mexico, the most advanced part of Mexico, aren't particularly divided by topography, so there are more business contacts, whereas California is separated from the bulk of the Mexican population by an unpopulated desert in northwestern Mexico.

So, the political dynasties of Mexico and Texas, such as the Salinases and the Bushes, are quite friendly with each other, while Mexican political corruption in California is largely home-brewed.

American conservatives have seized on this reversal of fortune: Arthur Laffer, a Reaganite economist, hails the Texan model over the Gipper’s now hopelessly leftish home. Despite all this, it still seems too early to cede America’s future to the Lone Star state. To begin with, that lean Texan model has its own problems. It has not invested enough in education, and many experts rightly worry about a “lost generation” of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient skills for the demands of the knowledge economy.

Actually, Hispanic Texans do much better on the National Assessment of Educational Proficiency exams than California Hispanics: 26% of Texas Hispanics score Proficient or Advanced on 8th Grade Math versus 11% of California Hispanics.

In general, Mexican-Americans appear to thrive more in a cultural and economically conservative Republican state. Liberal policies, in contrast, works best in a high IQ / highly cooperative state with few NAMs, such as Minnesota.

Now immigration is likely to reconvert Texas from Republican red to Democratic blue; Latinos may justly demand a bigger, more “Californian” state to educate them and provide them with decent health care. But Texas could then end up with the same over-empowered public-sector unions who have helped wreck government in California.

The problem is that, as traditional tax-and-spend voters, Mexicans subvert conservative politics in a state, both adding Democratic voters and driving out Republican voters. Thus, California, which voted GOP in 9 of 10 Presidential elections from 1952 through 1988 has voted Democratic five elections in a row. Over 90% of Hispanic elected officials are Democrats.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

California

The most sophisticated thinker about the pre-Tiger Mother social and material egalitarianism of the lost California is Benjamin Schwarz, culture editor for The Atlantic Monthly. In the July-August 2009 Atlantic, Schwarz reviewed the latest volume of Kevin Starr’s history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963.  Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:

It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country’s dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. … In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states. 

It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and — thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine — were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost. … 

Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific — and prosaic. California, as he’s argued in earlier volumes, promised “the highest possible life for the middle classes.” It wasn’t a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered “a better place for ordinary people.” That place always meant “an improved and more affordable domestic life”: a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space … and a lush backyard — the stage, that is, for “family life in a sunny climate.” It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles “common man” who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933, "addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile." 

Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class — the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners … But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination … and how the Golden State — fleetingly, as it turns out — accomodated Americans’ “conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life.” … 

This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all — as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico’s Bidwell, the East Bay’s Tilden, and San Diego’s Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized — some would say homogenized — a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA — times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, “there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions.” 

To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a “typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.”) Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had — by those Starr calls the “fiercely competitive.” That’s just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream …

So, if you want to understand where I'm coming from, read Starr and Schwarz.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

IDS: Immigration Derangement Syndrome

sure affects a lot of economists. For example, Bryan Caplan greets Harvard economist George Borjas's new blog with this classic:

Borjas: What's His Problem?

Well, Bryan, I guess his problem from your point of view that is that, when it comes to immigration, Dr. Borjas has worked very hard to know what the hell's he's talking about. But who needs painstaking empiricism when Ayn Rand has shown us the true way?

What's striking is the constant reminder of what a large proportion of economists are fervent ideologues who, armed with a selective handful of bumper sticker slogans (e.g., Comparative Advantage! but not externalities), want to preach morality to the unenlightened far more than they want to try to understand reality.

Economists tend to be complete suckers for the most implausible studies supporting their preconceptions about immigration. Simple reality checks are never performed on agreeable-sounding assertions. For example, one of the most celebrated is Giovanni Peri's recent effort, which Caplan's friend Tyler Cowen approvingly summed up: "... if lots of Mexican carpenters move to California, we don't see the non-Mexican carpenters leaving in droves, due to lower wages."

Great point! Except of course that we have seen droves of native-born blue-collar workers leave California. And we sure don't see many American blue collar workers from the other 49 states moving to California. That's an opportunity cost to Americans -- one of those Econ 101 phrases that gets forgotten when economists start burbling about immigration. As I wrote in VDARE.com last year, using Las Vegas as a more up-to-date example of a booming example, but you could use California in the period studied by Peri:

What [many economists don't] grasp is that illegal immigration is denying Americans the traditional wage premium for undergoing the pain of moving to a boomtown.

Imagine you are an American blue-collar worker in Cleveland, making $10 per hour. You know the local economy is stagnant, so you're thinking about relocating to fast-growing Las Vegas. But your mom would miss you; and you're not a teenager anymore so you don't make new friends as fast as you once did; and you really like the wooded Ohio countryside you grew up around and the fall colors and the deer hunting; and there's this girl that maybe you could get serious about, but her whole family is in Cleveland and she'd never leave.

So, you decide, you'll leave home behind if you can make 50 percent more in Las Vegas, adjusted for cost of living. That seems fair.

But, then you look through the Las Vegas want ads and discover you'd be lucky to make 10 or 20 percent more because the town is full of illegal aliens. They're moving from another country, so it's not much skin off their nose to move to Las Vegas rather than some place slower-growing.

Well, forget that, you say. I'll stay in Cleveland.

Unfortunately, too many economists forget that too. They can’t—or won’t—put themselves in other people's shoes and see how the world really works.

That doesn't seem to hurt them professionally. But it can hurt America.

In the comments on Borjas's blog, businessman Peter Schaeffer writes:

I have looked at the immigration work of Peri for some time now. Recently, Peri has published a new paper, Immigrants’ Complementarieties and Native Wages:Evidence from California (http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gperi/Papers/california_wp_dec06.pdf). This paper attempts to show that immigration has raised the real wages of workers in California, even high school dropouts. A few notes:

1. The empirical data (Figure 3, Change in Real Wage of U.S. natives, by Education group 1990-2004) actually shows large declines for high school dropouts. -17.6% in California versus -15.1% nationwide. Peri does not attempt to explain the large decline in wages of low skill workers (as best I can tell) or why wages fell faster in California.

2. As best I can tell, Peri uses a aggregate production function that would make it very difficult for immigration to ever adversely impact the incomes of natives in general, although that might not be true for specific groups. For reasons stated below, this does not appear to be realistic for California and perhaps not the nation.

3. Peri assumes that immigrants are almost entirely complementary to natives, even at the low end (but less so). He is quite aware that this is a contentious point and attempts to defend his methodology and conclusions. I can neither support nor refute his assertions.

4. Peri appears to be aware that his work is deeply contra factual, although this is never explicitly stated. Natives have been net leaving California in vast numbers (millions) for quite some time now. If immigrants were complementary, this should either not be happening or immigrants should be net leaving as well. Obviously this is not true. Peri attempts to refute this critique via a regression of some type. He offers no other explanation as to why natives would be fleeing California.

5. Peri rather explicitly does not even consider the possibility that immigration has impacted prices (mainly but not exclusively housing) in California. Peri deflates California wages using a national CPI, not a state one. This is highly contrafactual in my opinion. California’s population would be much lower (30% of California’s population is foreign born) without immigration and housing correspondingly more affordable. I cannot quantify the impact of immigration on housing costs in California, however it is certainly large. Note that the Census (but not the BLS) shows California housing to be roughly twice as expensive as the national average.

6. If one takes into account housing costs, Calfornia is considerably more expensive than the US as a whole and real wages corresponding lower. Indeed, California emerges as one of the poorer states (43rd) in the nation, if the local cost of living is taken into account. Given the linkage between immigration and prices, it would appear that immigration has markedly reduced real wages in California. Of course, this would account for the native outflux contra Peri.

Thank you,
Peter Schaeffer

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Benjamin Schwarz's laments the end of California's modest dream"

In the new July-August Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest volume of Kevin Starr's history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963. It makes me nostalgic for what once was. Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:

It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country's dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. ... In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles's working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.

It was a sweet, vivacious time: California's children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and -- thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine -- were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it's a time irretrievably lost. ...

Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific -- and prosaic. California, as he's argued in earlier volumes, promised "the highest possible life for the middle classes." It wasn't a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered "a better place for ordinary people." That place always meant "an improved and more affordable domestic life": a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space ... and a lush backyard -- the stage, that is, for "family life in a sunny climate." It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles "common man" who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933," addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile."

Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class -- the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners ... But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination ... and how the Golden State -- fleetingly, as it turns out -- accomodated Americans' "conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life." ...

This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all -- as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico's Bidwell, the East Bay's Tilden, and San Diego's Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized -- some would say homogenized -- a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA -- times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, "there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions."

To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a "typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.") Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had -- by those Starr calls the "fiercely competitive." That's just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That's a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California's dream ...

Basically, that was my quite lovely childhood in the San Fernando Valley 1958-1980: ping-pong on the screened-in porch, swimming, backyard barbecues at my relatives' houses, Yosemite, long hours at the library two blocks away, tennis at the park three blocks away, golf on municipal courses, and UCLA (for my MBA). The only minor differences from the picture Starr and Schwarz paint are that I went to Catholic grade school and high school, and away to Rice for college.

If you want to understand where I'm coming from politically, this is a good start.

That reminds me: Bill James once wrote a book about the politics of getting elected to baseball's Hall of Fame. He wound up focusing on two statistically marginal members of the HoF: shortstop Phil Rizzuto of the New York Yankees and pitcher Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers. James concluded that Rizzuto is in the Hall of Fame because New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s was seen as a magical place, the newly undisputed capital of the world.

I think the same argument could be made about Drysdale. LA in the early 1960s was something special, and the huge fame of Drysdale, a 6'6" blond surfer born in the San Fernando Valley in 1936, was because he was the exemplar of this national notion that life in Los Angeles was better. (One of Drysdale's teammates at Van Nuy High School in the 1950s was Robert Redford.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The California Disconnection

- Gov. Schwarzenegger is asking the federal government for a $7 billion emergency loan so he can meet payroll.

- Roughly half the dollar value of foreclosed-upon mortgages is in California, which has 12% of the population.

- California Scheming -- the leader of a real estate fraud ring in Beverly Hills is sentenced to 14 years in jail for buying the lousiest homes on Beverly Hills blocks, then having them appraised like their neighbors. Lehmann Bros., who lost $42 million in the scam, hired a private detective to check up on these guys and found they were inflating appraisals and spending the loans on private jets. This kind of thing was imitated all over Southern California on half-million dollar homes in dumpy neighborhoods with nobody being caught because the losses from fraud were too spread out for anybody to bother burning any shoe leather to check them out. (It makes you wonder how much money would have been saved if Wall Street firms had employed a few hundred Philip Marlowes to gumshoe around California's subdivisions checking up on mortgage applicants?)

As a native Californian, something that I've noticed is an increasing intellectual disconnection between the power centers of the East and the reality on the ground in California. At bottom, this financial crisis is California's fault. But Wall Street and Washington seemed to have no clue what California was like in this decade. Observe, for instance, all the incredulity when I've pointed out the role of Latinos in the housing fiasco.

In the 1960s, it was a cliche that California was where America's future was being test-driven. That has certainly panned out, and yet New York and Washington D.C. strike me as having lost interest in California, and thus have become increasingly oblivious to the future of the country.

A generation ago, New York and DC interest in California was motivated by envy, along with fear that California would someday displace them at the top of the totem pole. That fear has faded as California's future has faded.

Yet, California's fraction of the nation's population has grown since the 1960s, making the state even more important than when it was closely observed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

From my article "New Republican Majority?"

in the May 8th American Conservative (subscribe here):

As veteran truth-teller Thomas Sowell pointed out recently, "Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy." And no myth has become more entrenched in the media than that California demonstrates that cracking down on illegal immigration would be political suicide for Republicans.

For example, reporter Dan Balz proclaimed in the Washington Post following the Senate's April 6th immigration "compromise" (i.e., surrender), "GOP officials … point to California as the example they hope to avoid. Twelve years ago, then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) pushed an anti-immigration ballot measure that sought to deny state assistance to undocumented immigrants. The initiative passed and helped Wilson win reelection, but it triggered a surge of new Democratic Latino voters in subsequent elections that have left Republicans deep in the minority in the state."

This conventional wisdom is actually a bizarrely demonological distortion of the history of America's largest, most visible state. Instead of one man somehow permanently warping the political destiny of 37 million people, California's shift from the Republican to the Democratic column reflects tectonic demographic shifts, largely driven by immigration, that are spreading nationwide, and thus demand honest study.

The truth is close to the opposite. California voted for Republican Presidential candidates in nine of the ten elections from 1952 through 1988. The collapse of the California GOP first became evident in 1992, two years before Prop. 187, when Republicans got skunked in California in the Presidential election and two U.S. Senate races. In the last dozen major contests for President, governor, or senator there, Republicans have won only the two times they appealed to voter anger over illegal immigration. The ten times they meekly avoided the topic, they quietly went down to defeat...

It's often said that angry Latinos made subsequent Republican candidates pay for Wilson's sins, but where are the numbers? According to the Census Bureau, California Hispanics cast 11.4 percent of the vote in 1994 and 13.9 percent in 1998. In both elections, the Republican gubernatorial candidate won 23 percent of the Hispanic vote, so the celebrated "Latino tidal wave of anger" accounted for less than a tenth of the Republicans' plummet from Wilson's 55 percent in 1994 to Dan Lungren's 38 percent in 1998.

The often-trumpeted Hispanic political ascendancy hasn't quite gone through the formality of taking place yet (for example, Latinos comprised only 6.0 percent of voters nationally in 2004), even in California.

The Achilles' heel of Hispanic electoral clout has always been turnout. According to a 2002 study by demographers Jack Citrin and Benjamin Highton of the Public Policy Institute of California, although non-Hispanic whites made up only 47 percent of California's population in 2000, they will still cast a majority of the votes in California more than a third of a century from now. The PPIC forecasts that in 2040 whites will comprise 53 percent of California's electorate, twice the Hispanic share. (Of course, changes in immigration policy, such as the Senate's decision to put millions of illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship, could change this.)

In truth, Lungren lost because whites didn't show up and vote for him. While the number of Hispanic voters increased by 160,000 from 1994 to 1998 (out of 8.4 million votes cast), the non-Hispanic vote total dropped by 975,000. Without Prop. 187 to bring them to the polls, the percentage of non-Latinos voting fell from 41.4 percent to 35.9 percent.

Yet, what truly doomed him in 1998 was that, while Wilson had won 61 percent of the white vote in 1994, Lungren took just 45 percent. When a Republican doesn't win the white vote, he doesn't win the election. Period.

Indeed, out of the last dozen major races in California, the GOP has only won a majority of the white vote twice: Wilson in 1994, and in the 2003 recall, when Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock garnered 67 percent.

All the GOP candidates in California avoided Wilson's winning anti-multiculturalist theme until the 2003 gubernatorial recall election in which the Democratic leadership foolishly handed the GOP its trump card by giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does Illegal Immigration Lower Wages?

The Uselessness of Economists on Immigration:

Economic View

Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye
By Eduardo Porter

CALIFORNIA may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal immigration on the prospects of American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004.

But before concluding that immigrants are undercutting the wages of the least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent.

As Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, several economists and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that illegal immigrants are causing harm to Americans in the competition for jobs.

Yet a more careful examination of the economic data suggests that the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.

An accompanying graphic shows that a high school dropout in California, where supposedly 6.9% of the population are illegal immigrants, averages $8.71 per hour in wages versus merely $8.37 in Ohio, where only 1.0% are illegal immigrants.

Case closed!

Well, no, not exactly. What about the cost of living difference between California and Ohio? Don't they tell you in Econ 101 and in Journalism 101 to always adjust for the cost of living?

According to the data gathered by the nonprofit organization ACCRA, which measures cost of living so corporations can fairly adjust the salaries of employees they relocate, California has the highest cost of living in the country with an index of 150.8 (where 100 is the national norm). Ohio is below average at 95.4. So, relative to the national average cost of living, high school dropouts in Ohio average $8.77 versus $5.78 for the equivalent in California. That means they are 52% better off in Ohio.

So, the Law of Supply and Demand hasn't been repealed after all...

One obvious cause of this huge difference in the cost of living is that during the same 1980 to 2004 period, housing inflation in California was 315% versus 155% in Ohio, according to the Laboratory of the States.

Even failing to adjust for the striking disparities in the inflation rate between Ohio and California, one obvious differences is that high school dropouts used to be paid a lot more in Ohio, probably due to greater unionization. In contrast, Southern California was traditionally anti-union. The 1980 wage in Ohio was $12.13 versus $10.49 in California. Obviously, the decline in unionized heavy industry jobs hit rust belt Ohio harder than growing California, which had fewer unionized heavy industry jobs to lose.

Here's the data from the NYT's graphic, in which 9 states were cherry-picked to make it look like the higher the percentage of illegal immigrants in a state's population, the better off high school dropouts are. I've added the two right hand columns to adjust for the big cost of living differences. We then find a negative correlation of r = -0.46 between the percentage of illegal immigrants and the cost-of-living-adjusted median wage for high school dropouts:

	Illegal Immigrants	Dropout's Wage	Cost of Living Index	Adjusted Wage
Nevada	7.5%	$ 10.05	111.8	$ 8.99
California	6.9%	$ 8.71	150.8	$ 5.78
Florida	5.2%	$ 8.99	100.3	$ 8.96
Maryland	4.5%	$ 9.84	125.8	$ 7.82
New Jersey	4.1%	$ 9.03	134.2	$ 6.73
New York	3.3%	$ 9.02	123.5	$ 7.30
Nebraska	2.3%	$ 9.08	93.3	$ 9.73
Ohio	1.0%	$ 8.37	95.4	$ 8.77
Kentucky	0.9%	$ 8.73	91.2	$ 9.57

The point that is constantly overlooked is that American citizens ought to be compensated with higher wages for moving from their native state to fast growing states to meet the demand for labor. But, instead, illegal immigrants are beating them to the boomtowns, driving down wages.

You might expect that economists will write in to the New York Times en masse to protest this fiasco of an "Economic View" article. But you would be wrong, because professional standards mean nothing when the topic is immigration.

Interpreting these numbers sensibly doesn't require a mastery of quantum mechanics. It's all just Econ 101, but the American upper middle class so despises the American working class today that self-evidently shoddy thinking deleterious to the welfare of the American working man is routinely trumpeted in both conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and liberal newspapers like the New York Times.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

SAT scores in California

With all the interest (264 comments and counting) generated by the huge number of Chinese and Korean names among the national merit semifinalists (top 0.5%) on the PSAT in California, here are the latest SAT scores from California. Interestingly, in California, whites average slightly higher than Asians / Pacific Islanders, both on the traditional M+V and the new three part total including Writing: whites 1641 to Asians 1614. (Nationally, however, Asians outscore whites 1636 to 1580.)

However, Asians / Pacific Islanders have higher standard deviations. (To view this tiny type more easily, you can hit "CTRL +")

California 2010 SAT			Total	Crit Read		Math		Writing
College Bound seniors	#	Share	Mean	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Total	210,926	100%	1517	501	113	516	119	500	113
White	69,969	33%	1641	546	100	553	102	542	100
Asian, As-Am, or Pac Isl	44,932	21%	1614	518	116	571	121	525	122
Black or Af Am	14,476	7%	1320	444	101	436	102	440	97
Mex or MA	42,380	20%	1355	449	95	458	96	448	90
Other Hispanic	20,735	10%	1325	440	102	444	102	441	95
Puerto Rican	699	0%	1489	501	101	495	105	493	100
American Indian	1,256	1%	1488	499	102	504	101	485	98
Other	8,498	4%	1561	517	113	525	118	519	115
No Response	7,981	4%	1566	523	121	526	123	517	121

Commenter Mitch, a Bay Area testing tutor, has argued that because the PSAT is a low stakes test, which whites tend to treat as the beginning of thinking about studying for the SAT, while Asian parents tend to treat it as an important milestone in the years-long process of boning up for the SAT, the high number of Asian semifinalists in California on the PSAT is exaggerated relative to the high stakes SAT.

Being lazy, I'll leave it up to interested readers to do the work to evaluate this hypothesis and post their findings in the comments.

For example, questions to consider are: What exactly are the racial percentages of National Merit semifinalists in California? Do a higher percentage of Asian 17-year-olds take the SAT in California than do white 17-year-olds? (One thing not to worry about much in California is the SAT v. ACT divide that confuses things when thinking about SAT scores in, say, Iowa: California is traditionally an SAT state.) What is the nationality makeup of Asian / Pacific Islander 17-year-olds in California? What about taking the SAT multiple times -- how does that affect the numbers? (Okay, I found the answer to this last question: "Students are counted only once, no matter how often they tested, and only their latest scores and most recent SAT Questionnaire responses are summarized.) And so forth and so on.

Good luck!

By the way, this is the first bit of quantitative evidence I can recall to support the common-sense notion that California has smarter than the national average white people. Considering how damnably expensive it is and all the high end industries and all the Nobel Prizes, you would think it would have smart white people. But on the NAEP, California non-Hispanic whites always lag badly behind, say, Texan whites. And that was true way back on the big 1960 federal Project Talent test of 15-year-olds, where Texans beat Californians. So, numbers like that got me assuming that most white Californians are less Hewletts and Packards and more Bodines and Spicolis. But, maybe, white people in California just can't be bothered with trying on low stakes tests?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The "Prop. 187 Destroyed the California GOP" Myth

One of the most malign myths in American politics is that Governor Pete Wilson destroyed the California GOP by endorsing the anti-illegal immigration Proposition 187 in 1994. As I wrote in 2002:

Running against multiculturalism worked well for Ward Connerly's mentor, Pete Wilson, who was governor from 1991-1999. Connerly, said, "In my opinion, Pete Wilson would trounce [Gray] Davis [in the 2002 gubernatorial race -- Davis ended up winning by 5 points over novice candidate Bill Simon, then was famously recalled the next year], notwithstanding the conventional wisdom in California that Wilson is 'divisive' and 'anti-Latino.'" This is an unfashionable assessment -- Wilson might be the most demonized man in recent Republican history -- so it's worth reviewing the history.

A severe recession struck California shortly after Wilson took office, making him "the most unpopular governor in the history of modern polling," according to a 1994 California Journal article. His disapproval ratings were greater than his approval ratings throughout his first term. Thus, Wilson entered his 1994 re-election bid trailing his Democratic opponent by 20 percentage points. Yet, in part by making Prop. 187 one of the centerpieces of his re-election campaign. Wilson came from behind and won by 15 points. Prop. 187 itself passed by 18 points.

Wilson is now widely derided as the man who destroyed the Republican Party in California by his support for the three anti-multiculturalist initiatives. Yet, the subsequent record shows less evidence of that than is generally assumed. In 1996, Wilson backed Prop. 209 [against racial quotas], which passed by nine points. In 1998, he endorsed Prop. 227 [against bilingual education], which passed by 22 points. He left office in 1998 (due to term limits), with his approval rating at its highest level ever -- 55 percent to 37 percent among registered voters in the Sept. 1998 L.A. Times Poll.

Clearly, the booming economy of 1998 contributed to Wilson's late blooming popularity, just as the recession hurt his approval ratings in earlier years. But it's hard to see much evidence that his perceived swing over the years from moderate to conservative made him less popular with the voters as a whole.

In contrast, 1998 Republican candidate Dan Lungren came out against the anti-bilingual education Prop. 227. He lost to Davis by 20 points. Similarly, in the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush -- who supports amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants, bilingual education, and what he calls "affirmative access" -- outspent Al Gore $20 million to nothing in California, and still lost by 11 points.

The poor performances by Lungren and Bush are frequently blamed on Wilson, who is said to have unleashed a tidal wave of Hispanic electoral power by backing the anti-illegal immigration Prop. 187. Latinos, who traditionally didn't much register or vote, are widely assumed today to have entered into politics en masse to fight against Prop. 187 and its sponsor, Pete Wilson...

According to Census Bureau figures, Hispanics cast 11.4 percent of the vote in 1994 when the Republican Wilson won by 15 percentage points. By 1998, when the Republican Lungren lost by 20 points, Hispanics comprised 13.9 percent of the voters. (Their share remained level at 13.9 percent in 2000. In the rest of America, by the way, Hispanics only accounted for 4.4 percent of the vote in 2000.) That Hispanic growth of 2.5 points is, of course, impressive, but it can hardly account for the Republicans' 17 point collapse from Wilson's 55 percent in 1994 to Lungren's 38 percent in 1998. [More]

The bigger story was that between 1994 and 1998 there was an enormous outflow of conservative whites from California, in part due to changes in the state caused by illegal immigration and the huge Hispanic baby boom in California that followed the 1986 amnesty.

As I wrote in 2000:

Demographer [William] Frey points out, "Another cause of the rise of the California Democrats is selective out-migration of the more rock-ribbed Republicans. The folks who have been leaving California's suburbs for other states have the white, middle-class demographic profiles of Republican voters. California's middle class families are being squeezed out by real estate prices. And Republicans are heading for whiter states where they won't have to pay taxes for so many social programs for the poor."

Finally, while white high school graduates have been leaving, California's booming New Economy is attracting an influx of well-educated whites from the other 49 states. Traditionally, Frey notes, "Californians of high socio-economic status have been more likely to be classic liberals than similarly well-off residents of other states." Frey expects that newcomers who move to California to make their fortunes in Hollywood or Silicon Valley will also tend to vote Democratic more often than their wealth would suggest.

Between 1990 and 2000 in California, the Total Fertility Rate for non-Hispanic whites, which correlates closely with GOP share of the vote across the country, dropped by 14%. The white voters who were left were a lot more socially liberal. And the GOP gave them no reason to turn out in 1998 or 2002.

The recall election of 2003, however, turned out famously different, as the Democrats' blunders on immigration gave white voters a reason to show up and vote Republican. The two GOP gubernatorial candidates, Schwarzenegger and McClintock, pulled a stunning 62% of the vote. I wrote in VDARE:

Cruz Bustamante: The Man who Believed Karl Rove

Ten million words have been written about Arnold Schwarzenegger, so let's pause to remember the forgotten man of the California recall: Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante.

During the first half of the campaign, the polls frequently showed Bustamante with a small lead over Schwarzenegger. Yet, come judgment day, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 5 to 4, Arnold spotted Bustamante the 13.4% share of the vote won by conservative Republican Tom McClintock, and still won by a remarkable 17 percent (48.7 to 31.7 percent).

In other words, the combined Republican vote beat Bustamante by over 31 points.

That’s Cruz’n for some bruis’n! How did Bustamante blow it?

When Bustamante became the only Democrat in the race to replace Gray Davis, his strategy seemed obvious. He just had to run as a pragmatic Democratic centrist and win the numerous Californians who just don't much like Republicans. If at least one other Republican stayed in the race with Schwarzenegger (as McClintock ultimately did), then Bustamante would have only needed to win, say, the same proportion of voters as there are registered Democrats (43.7 percent) or as would vote against the recall (44.7 percent).

There was nothing outlandish about Bustamante positioning himself like this. He really was, by California standards, a centrist - a career politician from the unhip Central Valley who had devoted himself to servicing big agribusiness. In 1993, for example, he voted to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining drivers' licenses.

Yet, rather than run for Governor of all California, Bustamante campaigned as if the race was for El Gobernador de Mexifornia. Instead of competing with Schwarzenegger for the middle-of-the-road vote, he devoted much of his energy to battling Green Party candidate Peter Camejo (2.8 percent) for the stick-it-to-the-gringo vote.

Every time I turned on the TV, Bustamante was paying tribute to "undocumented workers" and their moral right to drivers' licenses, free college tuition, and welfare.

He turned the recall into a referendum on the wonderfulness of illegal immigration.

It lost.

Why did Bustamante decide to run as if he was the spiritual descendent of Pancho Villa raiding Columbus, New Mexico?

Bustamante's big mistake was that he actually believed all the hype he'd been reading about the Hispanic vote, what I call "Karl Rove's smoke screen." You've seen these assertions a hundred times in recent years:...

• It's political suicide for Republicans to appeal to the interests of the ethnic majority of voters - but it's smart politics for the Democrats to Hispander to the Latino minority because that would never cause a backlash among the majority.

In reality, of course, a month before the election, Davis sealed his fate by foolishly signing the legislature's bill giving drivers' licenses to illegal aliens without the criminal background checks Davis had previously demanded. And Bustamante tried to ride the issue into the Governor's Mansion. Both Schwarzenegger and McClintock ran against it. And 70 percent of the voters on Election Day told the LA Times exit pollsters that they opposed the bill. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Dept. of Better Late than Never

Veteran progressive John Judis experiences an epiphany in The New Republic (10/20/2009) in "End State: Is California Finished?"

But the heart of the problem lies in California's K-12 education: According to the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, California eighth-graders came in forty-eighth in 2007 among the 50 states and District of Columbia in reading and forty-fifth in math.

At the conference at Stanford, members of Hoover's Task Force on K-12 Education tried to explain why schools in California and elsewhere were performing poorly. The experts generally blamed bad teaching and the refusal of the teachers' unions to do anything about it. They want to improve the teaching through evaluations that weed out bad teachers, through merit pay to reward good ones, and by paying extra to teachers willing to teach in problematic schools. They also want to use school choice and, in some cases, vouchers, and the establishment of charter schools to pressure poorly performing schools. (With support from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has advanced a set of proposals along these lines.) For many reformers, everything begins and ends with bad teachers and union obstinacy.

At the gathering, held in a plush conference room, one of the experts projected tables and graphs comparing various states. It was there that I had my own "AHA!" moment. The states with thriving educational systems were generally northern, predominately white, and with relatively few immigrants: the New England states, North Dakota, and Minnesota. That bore out the late Senator Patrick Moynihan's quip that the strongest factor in predicting SAT scores was proximity to the Canadian border. 

The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism and with a relative absence of new-economy jobs; states like West Virginia that have relatively few jobs for college grads; and states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii that have huge numbers of non-English-speaking, downscale immigrants whose children are entering the schools. 

Actually, New Mexico and Hawaii don't have that many immigrants. New Mexico started out Hispanic, so it doesn't have a good enough economy to attract Mexican immigrants. Hawaii just seems like Lotus Land. All the ambitious Hawaiians, like Barack Obama and Bette Midler, leave.

California clearly falls into the last group, suggesting that California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to the growth of the state's immigrant population after the 1965 federal legislation on immigration opened the gates.

In California, one in four students has to learn English in school, while the average in the United States is less than one in ten. Half of California students are eligible for free or reduced meals. Together, almost 60 percent of California's school population is made up of Hispanics, many of them low-income, and African Americans--groups that generally have a much lower rate of student achievement than whites, Asians, and upper-income students. (One in three Latinos fails to graduate from high school.) And that affects how well schools do in the Department of Education's measure of "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP). As the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) reports: "Fifty percent of elementary schools with the highest share of low-income students made AYP in 2007, whereas 98 percent of elementary schools with the lowest share of low-income students made AYP. This suggests that AYP reveals more about the type of students who attend a school than it does about the effectiveness of teachers and administrators at that school.”

This is not to say that exceptional teachers can't make a difference. It is also not to say that non-English-speaking immigrant kids are unteachable. But they are more difficult to teach, especially when their parents aren't high school graduates. And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources, as well as active and knowledgeable support from parents, their achievement levels are likely to bring down a state's bar graph.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

California

A few days ago, David Brooks wrote about the good old days in mid-20th Century California when Statal Greatness governors did Big Things. 

Yet, the actual politicians are of minor importance. Of course it was easier to be a leader of California in 1950 when the population of California was under 11 million than in 2010 when it's around 37 million.

As the state gets more crowded, the cost and slowness of infrastructure projects goes through the roof. For example, the only new University of California campus to open in a generation and a half, UC Merced, took from 1985 to 2002 to construct. The whole campus had to be moved when an endangered minnow was discovered on its site. And that’s way out in godforsaken Merced. If they’d tried to build the new UC campus where students would actually want to go, such as in the wine country, they’d still be in the permitting stage.

This kind of thing is inevitable as population density goes up.

It was totally obvious to everybody in 1950 that California was the best deal in the whole world, so people flooded in. That kind of deal can't go on forever, however, and now California isn't such a good deal. 

The big problem with California today is that an awful lot of the population of California can't afford to live in California.

The one big change that could have been made would have been to cut way down on immigration after 1965 so that American citizens, rather than random foreigners, got most of the subsequent benefit of populating California, as they had gotten most of the huge benefits from moving to California in 1848-1965, That would have slowed down overpopulation and fulfilled the Preamble to the Constitution that explains that the purpose of the federal government is to promote the general welfare of “ourselves and our posterity.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

California requires Algebra I for all 8th graders

I took Algebra I in 9th grade, when I was 13. I presume I could have done fine in it in 8th grade, but I was a lot more logical in 9th grade than in 8th grade, due to puberty. But nowadays, every 8th grader in California's public schools has to take Algebra I.

Why? Because nobody cares about federalism anymore: it's part of the No Child Left Behind act. The Department of Education has finally noticed that states were making their mandatory tests easy, so they are cracking down by requiring Algebra I questions in the 8th grade state test.

And because George "soft bigotry of low expectations" Bush is a liberal creationist.

Nanette Asimov (yes, she's Isaac Asimov's niece) writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

All California eighth-graders in public school will have to take Algebra 1 beginning in 2011 under a policy approved Wednesday by the state Board of Education in an 8-1 vote.

The board decided to make algebra testing mandatory in the eighth grade over the strong objections of Jack O'Connell, the state's elected schools chief….

O'Connell is a complete nimrod, but even he knows that lots of kids aren't bright enough at age 12-13 to get much out of Algebra I.

But board President Ted Mitchell said the move shows there is "unequivocally one set of standards for all kids, no matter their ZIP code, race or income level."

Ordered by the federal government to bring California's eighth-grade math testing into compliance with No Child Left Behind, the board endorsed the mandatory Algebra 1 testing over a more moderate approach urged by O'Connell, math instructors from around the state and the California School Boards Association.

But the board members sided with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appointed them, and in a rare move overruled the strong recommendations of the state superintendent. The governor had asked the board to make algebra mandatory and he expressed satisfaction with the result.

"California's children have already proven that when we set the bar high, they can do anything," Schwarzenegger said.

Sure. They're not mathematical girly men. All they need are some Brain 'Roids.

To be fair to the Governator, I suspect he's one of the few politicians who has used much algebra since getting out of school -- he was a successful building contractor in his spare time, starting off as a bricklayer.

The decision was also supported by business groups and the chancellor of the community college system, Diane Woodruff.

Algebra 1 has been a high-school graduation requirement in California since 2004. Students are encouraged to take it in eighth grade, but can take it any time before graduating.

There are nearly 500,000 eighth-graders in public schools. Currently, 52 percent take Algebra 1. Each spring, they take the California Standards Test for Algebra 1.

Eighth-graders who aren't enrolled in Algebra 1 take a different exam: the California Standards Test for general math.

This year the U.S. Department of Education found that the general math test was out of compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act because it measured only sixth- and seventh-grade material.

So California was given a choice: Pump up the general math test to include Algebra 1 items, or require everyone to take the Algebra 1 test - which in effect requires all eighth-graders to take Algebra 1.

Failure to comply - that is, if the board had done nothing by the end of this month - would have disqualified California from several federal programs and placed most middle schools on a list of failing campuses that could ultimately be restructured from the bottom up.

"I have strong reservations about requiring all eighth-grade students to take Algebra 1 within three years without also offering any additional changes, support or resources for our public school system," O'Connell told the state's school superintendents in a two-page letter Tuesday.

He said that most eighth-graders who take general math already struggle with the material and that requiring them to take an even tougher course without extra help - tutoring, for example - is "highly irresponsible."

Among the eighth-graders in general math, he said, 86 percent of black students and 84 percent of Latinos score below proficient on the state test.

What could be better for all concerned that to shove the bottom half in with the top half in 8th grade Algebra I classes? I'm sure the 8th graders who should be in Algebra I will learn even better with classrooms full of kids who shouldn't be in it.

One thing a state can do in response to this kind of federal meddling is to raise the minimum age for kindergarten. (I wrote about the spreading practice of "redshirting" little boys by having them spend two years in kindergarten back in 2002.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Deja vu all over again

As I wrote in VDARE.com right after the Southern California fires exactly four years ago:

Brushfires and mudslides used to seem more amusing because they afflicted Hollywood celebrities significantly more often than average citizens. This was not just a matter of God's good taste. Hoi polloi lived in the cheaper and safer flatlands. The rich poised precariously in the hills, where construction and maintenance costs are higher—especially if you want your home to survive what Mother Nature keeps up her sleeve.

But the plains of Southern California filled up long ago. So the ever-growing population has been spilling into the more treacherous wild areas.

This is regularly denounced as "sprawl," which implies that individuals are wastefully consuming more and more land per capita. But in California the driver has been population growth. According to a 2003 Center for Immigration Studies report by Roy Beck, Leon Kolankiewicz, and Steven A. Camarota, from 1982 to 1997 the total number of developed acres in California grew by 32 percent, but the per capita usage was up only two percent. Essentially all of California's population growth in the 1990s was due to new immigrants or births to foreign-born women. (Indeed, close to 1.5 million more American-born citizens moved out of California during the 1990s than moved in from other states.)

As low-income immigrants pour into Southern California's lowlands, crowding the freeways and overstressing the older cities' public schools, the middle class (at least the ones who don't leave the state) have responded by taking to the hills.

The hill country's environment is benign most of the year. But the local ecosystem evolved to require periodic blazes. Up through American Indian times, these brushfires were frequent and thus relatively mild.

Unfortunately, we modern people haven't really figured out how to manage the chaparral and pine forests yet—especially when the canyons and mountains are home to housing. The best-known remedy, controlled burns, is disliked by people who live in the backcountry because they pollute the air, and they can jump out of control. The 2000 Los Alamos fire set by the Forest Service ended up destroying hundreds of structures.

Thus the policy has been to try to suppress all fires. This, however, causes fuel in the form of dry brush and dead trees to build up each decade, inevitably leading to infernos like those of 1993 and 2003. …

It’s just California's problem? ‘fraid not! Taxpayers across the country always end up chipping in, through government disaster loans, new federal firefighting and forestry management programs, lower stock market prices for insurance companies, and other forms of burden-sharing.

And, in some ways, that's fair, because so much of California's current crisis traces back to the federal refusal to adequately enforce immigration laws.

California desperately needs a slower population growth rate until it learns how its current vast population can live with its lovely but sometime lethal landscape. And the state's burgeoning numbers are solely driven by immigration.

The logical solution: cut back on immigration.

Reality is literally lighting a fire under us.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer