I got an unexpected glimpse of that future during a late summer visit to Bend, a small city among the Cascades of east-central Oregon.

I spent much of my time in Bend at its newest public school on the city’s southeastern edge. Caldera High School, and its two pristine baseball fields, hosted the regional tournament for the best 14-years-and-under all-star baseball teams in the West.

My hometown team, from South Pasadena, had won the Southern California championship for the first time in the 72-year history of our Little League. In Bend, our children’s friends would compete against the champions of Northern California and of nine other states—Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi.

That might sound like a diverse Western gathering. But the families of the other teams included so many former Californians that the whole thing felt a little like a Golden State reunion.

That’s no surprise. In recent years, departures from California have accelerated—contributing to a historic decline in our population, and historic growth for neighboring states and their newer communities.

Bend itself is a remarkable example. The city has nearly doubled its population since 2000, topping 100,000 during a pandemic surge. And Bend has made plans, and built infrastructure, to accommodate even faster growth, with some projections suggesting 300,000 people could live there by the middle of this century.

Many of the new arrivals in Bend, a local restauranteur explained, come from two groups of pilgrims: Californians and Mormons. (Bend once ranked No. 4 on a Deseret News list of best places to raise an LDS family outside of Utah.) They are looking for cheaper and larger houses (the median house price is $462,000), good schools, and better quality of life. For the outdoors-minded, the place is a paradise of good weather, parks, trails through the Cascades and High Desert, kayaking on the Deschutes River, and skiing on Mt. Bachelor.

Caldera High, where the baseball tournament took place, is a $140 million demonstration of Bend’s ambition. It’s a self-proclaimed “school of the future” with a glassy, open-concept design. It has every kind of program (from health sciences and engineering to language immersion) for its rapidly growing enrollment; 60-some classrooms and nearly as many “collaboration spaces”; a special staircase designed for sitting and hanging out; and a stunning central library that ties the whole structure together.

This father of three schoolchildren wishes California communities could build campuses of such ambition. But such schools would be too expensive given our land and construction costs—and also unnecessary, given the drop in the numbers of school-age children and public school students around the state.

As we watched the baseball games, construction crews were building a large community of new homes beyond the outfield fences. I marveled openly at the growth.

Parents from other teams in the tournament seemed less impressed. Many had previously lived in California, but now live in fast-growing places in the West that are much like Bend. That makes sense, of course. Building a great local baseball program is easiest in places with more new families, more children, and more prosperity.

South Pasadena opened the tournament against the Nevada champion team from Summerlin, a prosperous master-planned community in Las Vegas that has been among the fastest-growing places in the United States over the past 30 years. Next up was the Idaho champion, from Coeur d’Alene, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the fastest-growing state in the nation, according to census data.

Other teams came from the Tucson metro region, which just surpassed 1 million in population, and Washington County, Utah, which has seen recent annual population increases of 5 percent. Our team suffered its first loss to Mercer Island, Washington, a highly prosperous community in metropolitan Seattle, the most common destination for people leaving California’s Bay Area.

Even the Northern California champion fit this growth pattern. That team was from Dublin—the East Bay exurb that was California’s fastest-growing city between 2010 and 2020. The Dublin squad—wearing uniforms of a very Irish green—eventually eliminated our team.

Leaving Caldera High to make the long drive home, we went south toward Crater Lake—a body of water that formed in a caldera, as the national park signs explained to us.

A caldera is the cauldron-like depression that forms when a volcano collapses after erupting powerfully and emptying out the magma chamber that had previously supported its weight.

It sounded much like California—a human volcano that is now spent, after spitting out people and their ambitions to neighboring states.

The post Bend It Like Oregon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The café closed just before the pandemic, a victim of Merced’s own success. Ever since, it has been a specter—a ghost of the Merced I had known and a reminder of progress’s voracious appetite.

I didn’t have any expectations the first time I visited the eatery, for a Saturday brunch, after I moved off campus in 2016. But as my friends and I walked up to it, I was instantly charmed. It was a light-green building with art-deco features, trimmed in rusty red and faded gold. Green letters on the marquee announced the headlining act: CINEMA CAFÉ. What served as the entrance when the movie theater first opened in the 1920s was now a cozy patio space, shadowed by the marquee itself. Orange Tropicanna lilies and lush banana trees lined the sidewalk, a little paradise in the concrete grays of downtown.

The first meal Anh had at the café. Courtesy of author.

I remember my first meal fondly: chicken-fried steak, eggs over easy, hash browns (extra crispy), and coffee. And a spoonful of that house-made salsa—so bright orange, and so redolent of savory garlic and chilis that I had to try it. You could just taste the care and effort that went into it.

Each meal at the café brought me closer to Merced’s history and community. The Cinema Café’s owner, Gerardo Olvera, was an immigrant and transplant like myself. He moved from Guanajuato, Mexico, to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and got his start as a dishwasher at the now-shuttered Butterfields on the Sunset Strip, working his way up to chef (he impressed the restaurant owners so much that they paid for his cooking school tuition). After living in L.A. for many years, Gerardo and his wife Joy moved to the Central Valley to be closer to her mother. As they passed through Merced, Olvera noticed the Mainzer building,and commented, Wouldn’t it be nice if it was for sale? Later that day, Joy made some calls and surprised her husband with the news that indeed, it was. The couple took the plunge and started their new business in Merced.

“It was scary at first because no one knew me in Merced,” Olvera said, regarding the early days of the café in the late 1990s, “but once I started cooking and people tasted the food, it soon became busy.”

At the time, Merced was a quiet town, and construction for UC Merced hadn’t even broken ground yet. Merced’s low cost of living offered more spending power for families to establish livelihoods and settle down, and its small community meant neighbors knew neighbors and businesses were owned by the same friendly, recognizable faces you’d bump into at the grocery store. The café reflected this community-centered approach, operating from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week. It became a watering hole for anyone looking for a filling meal, especially those who worked downtown or were passing through Merced, as no other eatery downtown was open as early or even all week, save for fast food. Once construction began on the newest campus in the University of California system, the development sparked excitement and concern among locals: some embraced the UC as a boost needed to rejuvenate the local economy after the Castle Air Force Base closed in 1995; others feared the presence of a UC would skyrocket housing and cost of living. One thing was certain: the Merced around the Cinema Café was changing. But the beloved eatery stayed the course, continuing to offer a space where all members of the community, including this new and growing university crowd, could gather over pancakes.

When I arrived in town as a student some 14 years after the Olveras, there was always a line to get in, and I was always happy to wait. Sitting down at the café felt like sitting down at someone’s kitchen table. The chefs razzed each other, and the waitstaff spoke to you with caring familiarity, with “here you go, mija” and “careful it’s hot, sweetie!” It felt like you could meet the whole town if you ate there. I dined next to university professors, office workers in slick suits, church ladies with fine pearls, construction workers in heavy boots, classmates in various stages of exam panic, and everyone in between. I met people’s families, friends, and pets. Specials were inspired by local landmarks (the El Capitan Omelet, for example, was filled with greens to fuel and nourish hikers on their way to Yosemite). A local artist who frequented the café even drew a tableau of the waitstaff and cooks; Gerardo loved it so much he made it the front of the menu.

To me, the Cinema Café was the very heart of downtown Merced. And then, one day, it was gone—on January 8th, 2019, the Olveras posted on Facebook that the café’s last date of service was just weeks away. A developer had plans to renovate the historic theater building, and the restaurant wasn’t part of the vision. With its growing population and newfound interest, investors were flocking to Merced, seeking to “improve” it and make it a “real” city.  The same appetite to grow and develop that had attracted me to Merced in the first place had now swallowed the café whole.

Initially there had been hope, Olvera told me, and he thought that the new owner might help the café relocate. But eventually he learned that “it wasn’t in their budget.” (I reached out to the current Mainzer business to learn more, but they declined to comment.)

“Nothing came of it,” Olvera said, when he contacted the city council for assistance. Today, a combination eatery/bar/theater taking the historic building’s name, Mainzer, stands in place of the café—a Hyatt Hotels venture. The building has been painted a crisp white, the banana trees have been replaced by manicured potted plants, and though there’s a Mainzer sauce on offering, it’s not the café’s salsa.

A popular slogan for Merced nowadays is “city on the rise.” Thinking about the Cinema Café makes me think about which communities are lifted with the growth and which are left behind. In a downtown where homey small-business establishments are increasingly replaced by trendy, upscale brands, what chance does a mom-and-pop joint like the Cinema Café really have? I worry about my other favorite local places that make Merced feel like home. Which will survive in the years to come?

It’s been more than three years since the Cinema Café closed its doors. I’ve referred to it as a specter, but maybe I’m the one who haunts it. I still return regularly to the café’s last post on its Facebook page to mourn, to remember, to hope for a sign it will come back to life. I know what I’m really hoping for is that the older, familiar Merced that grew out of its ethos will prevail.

These days, it’s always jarring when I find myself wandering downtown and end up at that familiar corner of N and Main. Looking up at the blinding marquee lights, I can still make out a glimpse of a young Gerardo and Joy Olvera, who saw an opportunity in an old movie theater. Then I’m jolted back to the present, and I can’t help but wonder—if they had driven through this changing city now, would they still choose to stop? And if they did, would they see a place to open the restaurant they dreamed of?

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This should be the summer when the population of California finally surpasses 40 million.

We should celebrate by reflecting on just how small we are.

Of course, we won’t. California, like an insecure male lover, is always bragging about how big it is. And so reaching the 40 million threshold—there is no red-letter date, though, by state figures, it’s likely to happen in late summer—will occasion another round of boasting about our size, not merely in population but in economic output and cultural impact. And this moment is likely to produce new predictions—offered either with pride or fear—about how soon we’ll get to 50 million or even 100 million people.

Such projections of massive growth may be fun, but they will likely prove to be exaggerated. To the contrary, this is the moment to consider the very real possibility that California’s rapid population growth is over—and that shrinkage may be in our future.

The very factors that have produced population declines in other places are now strong trends in California. Our birth rate has fallen to a record low—even lower than during the depths of the Great Depression. Also, we’re now three decades into a serious out-migration of California residents, with the Golden State losing about one million more people per decade than it takes in from the rest of the United States.

International immigration won’t save us—it’s at near-historic lows and is likely to fall further as the federal government continues its systematic harassment and mass deportation of immigrants. And the Trump administration’s destructive trade war is already hurting our globally oriented economy, eliminating jobs that draw and keep people here.

Worse still, our state’s own policy mistakes—underfunding schools and child care; failing to build adequate housing or infrastructure; letting runaway retirement costs for public employees undermine public services—all discourage family creation and add to the high cost of living that drives people out of California.

Which may be by design. The state’s ascendant environmental groups see population control as crucial to reducing pollution and fighting climate change. Indeed, such policies are self-reinforcing, creating a negative population spiral.

As the number of children declines and young people leave California, the state is aging rapidly. San Francisco now has the lowest proportion of children (13 percent) of any major U.S. city. Aging populations tend to be less supportive of the very things that boost population: immigration and taxes to pay for child development. And, economically, aging populations consume less and innovate less (most new things are invented by the young), making their economies smaller and reducing the number of jobs.

Unfortunately, population also could suffer via disasters that no longer seem so unlikely—from nuclear war to huge firestorms fueled by climate change.

If you’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405, you may be reading this skeptically, wondering, “Why am I stuck behind all these cars if the population growth is so low?”

My answer is, first, you should put down your phone while you’re driving—it’s not safe, and California can’t afford to lose you. Second, you should consider the numbers: California’s population growth is at record lows—less than 0.8 percent annually—and falling. During the heyday of immigration in the 1980s, annual population growth was 2.5 percent a year.

Indeed, with many other states growing faster than the Golden State, in 2022 California could lose a seat in the House of Representatives for the first time. The likelihood of such a loss increases if the Trump Administration succeeds in politicizing the census and undercounting California’s racial and ethnic minorities.

California would hardly be alone if its population started to decline. Illinois and Pennsylvania have seen their populations drop in some recent years. And the most recent population report from the United Nations says that 51 countries are expected to see population decreases between now and 2050, including European countries that inspire our state’s social policies, like Germany. In Asia, Japan’s population already is in decline; now at 127 million, its government has declared a goal of limiting losses so that the total doesn’t fall below 100 million. Even China, once a feared “population bomb,” and long a source of immigrants to California, is expected to see a 2.5 percent decline in its population by 2050.

Despite the warning signs, the prospect of population loss hasn’t penetrated the California mind. Instead, we remain devoted to the great California pastime of overestimating our own population growth. One big offender, Gov. Jerry Brown, talks about reaching 50 million as a fait accompli that could threaten the environment, urging Californians “to find a more elegant way of relating to material things.”

But, out of sight, number crunchers at the state’s think tanks and government bureaus have been ratcheting down California’s population estimates. As recently as the mid-1990s, the state and federal governments’ official predictions showed California reaching 50 million people by 2020, a year when our real population likely will be fewer than 41 million.

And if we never get much beyond 40 million, will it be a mortal wound to our pride? After all, the United States hasn’t had that low a population since 1872, which was when the newspaper man Horace Greeley, famous for the advice “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” ran for president, lost, and promptly dropped dead.

Today’s 40-million-person California, for all its delusions of grandeur, has less than one-eighth the population of the United States, less than one-third the population of Mexico, and not even 1/35th the population of China. If California were a country, we would rank just 35th. Ukraine, Uganda, Argentina, Colombia, Tanzania, and Myanmar all have millions more people than us. Our most populous city, Los Angeles, ranks just 71st on the planet.

This California, of 40 million, faces a choice. Either accept that, instead of the colossus of our boastful imaginings, we’re a small place that’s likely to become smaller—at least compared to a world that is growing faster than we are. Or think more seriously about how to attract more people here from other states and countries, and better nurture and retain the young people we have here now.

If we’re as big as we think we are, this is no time to think small.

The post Could California’s Population Actually Shrink? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By that measure, the United States has been in relative decline since at least the 1960s. Yes, the economic strength of America has grown, and continues to grow, in absolute terms. But its rivals and competitors—China, East Asia, Europe, Latin America—have grown at a stronger and more sustained rate.

This is the nature of relative decline: power in the world is a finite quantity (even if power is expanding), so the greater the power of others, the more the power of the United States decreases. Between 1940 and 2014, in terms of gross national product, the United States grew 12.5 times bigger. But the rest of the world has grown 26 times in gross product—more than double than that of the Americans.

Much of that gap in growth is from recent decades. In 1987, when Yale historian Paul Kennedy published his famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (which inaugurated the debate on American decline), the gap between U.S. and global growth was barely perceptible: Since 1940, U.S. GDP had grown six times in size, while the rest of the world’s GDP had grown seven and a half times. This slight difference did not prevent Kennedy from identifying the phenomenon with precision.

One can reasonably ask whether the growth differential of GDP can, by itself, give an account of the decline of a country, especially when it is only relative. Many other elements should be taken into account when comparing powers: variable economic factors, such as access to raw materials and their price; transport, research and development, productivity, finance, trade, investment; and then geography, military strength, demography, health conditions, education, the solidity of institutions, political stability. Finally, there are factors that are unmeasurable, but no less important: historical heritage, traditions, social psychology, ideologies, and religions.

Paul Kennedy wrote that, in examining the last five centuries of history, some “generally valid” conclusions can be drawn. The first is that there is a relationship between relative decline in economic power and shifts in the international political system.

The U.S. situation can be seen more clearly in this historical context. The country, said Kennedy, made “a vast array of strategic commitments” when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity, as well as its ability to influence world affairs, was more assured than it was in 1987. The United States thus faced what Kennedy called “imperial overstretch,” with its obligations and interests adding up to more than its capacity. That’s a characteristic of relative decline.

Kennedy is sometimes dismissed because his predictions of American decline were based on the rise of Japan, and Japan’s rise was later impeded by its decades of stagnation. Still, this doesn’t undermine Kennedy’s historical analysis of decline. In more recent years, other voices have echoed him. In 2008, in its four-year report on international trends, the U.S. National Intelligence Council wrote that “owing to the relative decline of its economic, and to the lesser extent, the military power, the United States will no longer have the same flexibility in choosing as many policy options” as it once had.

In writing about relative decline, Kennedy took up again a concept formulated by political scientist Robert Gilpin: that over time, different levels of growth in power within a system eventually cause a fundamental redistribution of power within the system itself. State Department official Richard Haass later used that very same conclusion in order to argue that the United States needed to be ahead of the game so that any “new” balance of power in the world can be balanced from the United States’ perspective.

That argument has in turn been used to justify—and to explain—the theory of “preventive war,” applied later in Iraq. In one 2011 study, Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent argued that there are only two possibilities to deal with “a decline in relative power”: retrenchment or preventive war. The authors defined retrenchment as “redistributing away from peripheral commitments and towards core commitments” for the purpose of “economizing expenditures, reducing risks, and shifting burdens.”

But in the history of the United States, there is also a third possibility for responding to decline, embodied today by Donald Trump: isolationism.

Isolationism is not retrenchment, since retrenchment distinguishes between “peripheral commitments” and “core commitments.” Retrenchment is not therefore a matter of abandoning the commitments, but of making choices, however painful, on the basis of a well-defined political strategy. In Henry Kissinger’s words, “to find a sustainable ground between abdication and overextension.” The difference between retrenchment and isolationism is the difference between ordered retreat and a catastrophic rout.

Isolationism in the United States today is fueled by fear of worsening conditions. A fundamental misunderstanding of the world has led many people to believe that the United States is being plotted against externally and betrayed internally. But such fears and such misunderstandings are not the product of Donald Trump and his ideologues. Indeed, these fears, particularly around globalization, were cooked up in the intellectual laboratories of the far left in the late 1990s and brought to the public square by the Seattle protestors against free trade in 1999. A matrix of isolationism and petit-bourgeois anti-capitalism has always been found in Jeffersonian democracy, passing through Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist movement, and the Catholic critics of the far right and far left during the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Trump’s isolationism predates Trump. It’s a product of the end of the Cold War, when many Americans believed the time had come to finally “return to normalcy” and retreat to their island to enjoy the dividends of victory. In the 1990s, the United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, to participate in the treaty to ban anti-personnel mines and nuclear experiments, or to vote for the creation of the International Criminal Court. Before September 11, George W. Bush was openly isolationist and unilateralist, proclaiming his intention to withdraw the United States from some of the institutions it had created and which had guaranteed the continuity of its world order.

September 11 and its aftermath suspended this isolationist tendency only temporarily. The anxieties from the 2008 economic crisis, multiplied by the harmful effects of reckless interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have restored it. During the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States adopted 317 protectionist measures on average each year—representing 20 percent of all trade restrictions adopted in the world, almost six times more than the second most protectionist country, India. And during the 2016 election campaign, both candidates called for the withdrawal of the United States from new strategic free trade treaties in the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The idea of “making America great again” is absurd. History does not walk backwards. When Americans talk of their greatness, they generally think of a bygone era in which their country dominated the economic, political, and military balances of the world, solitary and undisputed. It also was a time when unparalleled material superiority fueled their alleged moral superiority. Many of the most dramatic mistakes made by the United States during the Cold War derived from exactly this sense of moral superiority, and the corresponding conviction that Americans could shape reality without taking into account the annoying tangible and intangible constraints that exist in the real world. The absence of historical depth that characterizes the American ideology, combined with the rootlessness and the heterogeneity of the population, allows Americans to believe that the recipes that were successfully applied in the past—like deficit spending and protectionism—are reproducible under any circumstances.

Neo-Keynesians, for example, argue that they can overturn current trends by restoring the New Deal recipe of deficit spending, as though this were 1929. But public debt has changed with the times. Before the Great Depression began in 1929, the American public debt amounted to 16 percent of GDP. In 1941, it had reached 45 percent; in 2008, during the recession, the public debt was 68 percent of GDP; at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure, it was at 106.7 percent.

Today, the United States seeks to make itself great again on credit: In 2017, of the $20.245 billion of debt, almost one third ($6.349 billion) was in the hands of foreign governments—including Beijing ($1.189 billion) and Tokyo ($1.094 billion). In other words, in 2017 China and Japan funded more than 10 percent of U.S. public spending.

And yes, while the United States has been protectionist for most of its short history, and had great success under protectionism, that does not mean that today protectionism is a policy that could make the country great again. In a world of more shared power, where growth is based on the exchange of raw materials, financial products, ideas, and people, almost every type of production is linked by a thousand threads to the world market, and breaking one means breaking them all.

What gets left out of these protectionist discussions is that now, even the making of a hamburger—which involves cultivation, storage, transport, refining, production, packaging, and distribution—ties together 75 centers of activity from 15 different countries. According to a Boston Consulting Group report from 2017, an attack on NAFTA would be primarily an attack on the United States, given the country’s economic integration with its neighbors. Gordon Hanson of the University of California stated that if NAFTA had not existed, the entire American automotive industry would have already disappeared, swept away by competition from countries with lower wages, social protection, and public deficits.

In the future, Americans will no longer be able to afford to live as they have lived in the past. Such a reality has caused disquiet in all countries that once dominated world markets. But the anxiety has been much more intense in the United States, whose brief history has been marked by the promise, almost always maintained, of a constant improvement of the living conditions of most of its citizens.

Henry Kissinger wrote that the art of demagoguery consists of the “ability to distill emotion and frustration into a single moment.” But demagoguery cannot solve its problems; it only will aggravate them. In July 1971, when President Nixon took note that the United States was no longer in a position of complete pre-eminence, he was merely stating the obvious: that international relations are always multipolar. The question is the relative strength of the poles of power, and today, the relative strength of those poles is shifting at rapid pace. The distance between the United States and the rest of the world continues to shorten. According to the IMF World Economic Outlook of October 2017, the pace of growth of the so-called emerging countries (4.3 percent in 2016, 4.6 percent in 2017, and 4.9 percent in 2018) is more than double that of the United States (1.8, 2.1, and 2.3 percent). China’s growth is about three times higher (6.7, 6.8, and 6.5 percent).

There is no general law establishing how, when—and if—a country in relative decline enters a phase of absolute decline. And theoretically, at least, since decline is relative, it could reverse. Fareed Zakaria has argued that the world is becoming more “post-American” not because of the United States’ failures, but because of “the rise of everyone else.” If China or India or Germany were to enter a deep crisis, the United States could quickly be in a state of relative rise. But that presumes that the United States would not itself be infected by a deep crisis in the other powers. And such a prospect is very unlikely.

It is much more plausible that America will continue its relative decline, and will thus be obliged to surrender some of its global commitments and interests, creating imbalances in different places. Of course, things would be far worse if the United States were to withdraw from all commitments and interests in one fell swoop.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If America were to abandon the field, it would create a kind of black hole, into which all the world would be drawn. America’s insular illusions would soon be overwhelmed by the tsunami of disruption. Such an uproar would turn today’s relative decline into absolute decline; it would mean, in the words of Bismarck, a “suicide from fear of death.”

The post America’s Decline Is Relative but Real—and Potentially Dangerous appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether it’s crime, security or jobs—Trump has openly and repeatedly linked many of the supposed woes of the nation to immigrants, fanning the xenophobic flames that exist at some level in all societies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the strong anti-immigrant rhetoric has already slowed the pace of immigration into the United States, whether legal or illegal. And now Trump is working with two senators to slow immigration even more. The RAISE Act (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) would cut by more than half the number of immigrants legally allowed to enter the nation annually if it ever became law.

Slowing the pace of immigration into the United States, in and of itself, is an economic problem. According to the Census, almost half of population growth today comes from immigration into the United States. And immigrants, on average, have more children than those born here. Immigration decline, therefore, will have a significant impact on the pace of population and thus labor force growth—one important contributor to future economic growth. If this seems too abstract to worry about now, keep in mind that such projections will play a central role in the next big federal-government showdown on tax cuts and the budget deficit.

But what of immigrants who are already here? More than 13 percent of the U.S. population was born outside of its borders—43 million people. Here in California the share is 27 percent, the highest of any state. Less than half have become U.S. citizens. And the hostility that is making potential immigrants consider other options is also being directed against people already here. According to the Hate and Extremism Center at Cal State San Bernardino, hate crimes against immigrants in the United States have surged since the 2016 election began, and there is no shortage of video evidence on the Internet showing the verbal abuse of immigrants since the current administration came to power.

The current administration has been breaking records in terms of its unpopularity. Growing scandals, political inexperience, and the revolving door of administration appointees all suggest that anti-immigrant trends may quickly reverse themselves. But imagine the opposite. Let’s say the anti-immigrant message takes hold more deeply in the population, and the recent change in staff in the White House finally creates an effective administration. And let’s say that this success intensifies the anti-immigrant attitude of Americans even as Trump rolls into his second term as president. What might happen to these 40 million-plus people—and what might it mean ultimately for the economy?

While such a future is purely speculative, there is no shortage of historical evidence for effects on populations who are isolated within the borders of the nation they called home, and from this we can consider the broader implications for the economy. Consider history from the long-term persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe to African Americans in the Jim Crow South to Asian populations that moved to the West Coast to build railways and work on farms in the 19th century.

In the midst of a majority hostile to them, minority groups naturally tend to concentrate—geographically, socially and economically. Ghettoization is the ultimate symptom of such trends. This substantially slows the pace of economic and cultural integration. Lack of integration can have implications for the economy, particularly if minority groups start as disadvantaged populations. The poverty trap in poor communities is very real and has been linked to such isolation. This has implications in particular for the Latin American population, one of the lowest skilled groups of immigrants here in the United States. Such populations tend to remain very low-income relative to the broader population. The lack of physical and human capital investments within such communities as well as the associated social problems spill out, negatively, into the broader economy.

A hostile majority has serious effects, also, on minority populations that don’t start with disadvantages. Historically the Jewish populations of Europe were known for their cultural emphasis on education and skill acquisition—not unlike, for example, the South Asian diaspora here in the United States. Yet unlike South Asians in today’s America, the Jewish peoples in Europe remained relatively poor. This is because long-run wealth is also a function of being able to make physical investments in businesses.

Immigrants tend not to make such investments when hostility from the broader community suggests that their property rights may not be secure. The lessons of the Inquisition in Spain and the Pale of Settlement in Russia were clear—invest only in capital that cannot be taken away by the majority. The Japanese population of California learned a similar lesson when its people lost their farms, homes, businesses and other items after being imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

Could current populations of Asians in the United States—Asians now constitute the largest cohort of arriving immigrants—be similarly vulnerable? While these groups are known for their high levels of human capital, open hostility by the broader population could dissuade them from making investments in businesses and other physical capital. Immigrants have played a role in starting so many businesses in our economy today—this role would be substantially diminished in an increasingly anti-immigrant future.

The negative impact is not limited to the isolated populations. Economists understand that efficient and competitive markets are good for the broader economy—both in the short term, by allocating scarce resources to their best use, and in the long term, by driving innovation. Efficient markets are, in turn, created by having many sellers actively competing with each other to service the consumer base. When buyers and sellers are segmented into smaller populations because of cultural biases, this in turn reduces competition and overall efficiency and growth.

Ultimately the greatest threat to a healthy economy created by cultural isolation is when such isolation breaks into full-on hostility. Consider the collapse of Yugoslavia into civil war, or the horrific consequences of the Holocaust in Europe. But damage does not come only from a gun or in a gas chamber. The open hostility of the Trump administration to the immigrants in our midst can have lasting consequences to our economy, even if it never reaches such a horrible point.

The post The Economic Cost of Isolating Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She left us only recently, and already San Mateo has gotten way too leafy.

As I drove through that fine Peninsula city in the Bay Area on the way to my grandmother’s memorial service earlier this month, the plants had returned to their old arrogance. Bushes off Hillsdale Boulevard were growing far bushier than they once dared. The trees along Alameda de las Pulgas flaunted branches that hung much too low. All over the neighborhood, flowers breathed far too easily.

Frances Mathews, who passed away a few months short of her 100th birthday, was sweet, generous, and unthreatening—in almost every respect. She was a loving wife to my late grandfather, beloved mother to my father and uncle, popular public school teacher, devoted neighbor, proud alum of UCLA (where she was the only female member of the student fire brigade), leader of parenting classes, churchgoer, frequent wearer of the color purple, and such a klutz that her grandchildren called her Grandma Oops.

But, now that she is in a better place far outside the reach of the California authorities, I can speak frankly: there was a Hyde to this kindly Jekyll. Grandma Oops was a pruner, and not an ordinary one.

She was a harsh pruner, unrepentant about cutting back plants to the nub. If a bushy plant was ever so insolent as to appear in her line of vision, she would not let it go untrimmed. It never mattered if the plants were hers, or whether she had any invitation or legal right to prune. After all, property rights are an abstraction, while a branch leaning too low over a sidewalk is a clear and present danger. As a boy, I was brought along on pruning raids on Laurel Elementary and Abbott Middle schools, church gardens, street trees, and countless private homes.

“Grandma Oops.” Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The only other Bay Area figure who ever came close to matching her vigilante’s passion for mowing down living things—damn the niceties—was Harold Francis “Dirty Harry” Callahan, the fictional San Francisco cop brought to life by Clint Eastwood in the movies. You could say Grandma Oops and Dirty Harry shared a philosophy. Give an inch to overgrowth or punks, and in no time civilization will teeter.

At my grandmother’s memorial service, her friend, the Rev. Kibbie Ruth, observed that pruning was spiritual for my grandmother, a way to get to the core of life. Because, as Grandma Oops wrote in one birthday note to me, “If you don’t prune, you can never really grow like you should.” And she erred, relentlessly and controversially, on the side of pruning more rather than less. Relatives from Los Gatos to Long Beach cried that she had reduced beloved plants to their stubs.

She was unapologetic in the face of these critics—and for a reason that should resonate statewide.

In life, cutting back is so extremely difficult that one must be a pruning extremist if you’re ever going to overcome the human instinct for hewing to the status quo. That’s true whether you’re cutting a plant or a government program.

California could sure use more of that extremism. Hollywood, in the era of Netflix, is overgrown with too many TV shows and movies we never have time to watch. Silicon Valley is a jungle jammed with pointless startups. Old warehouses across our state have been repurposed as storage facilities, for all the things we Californians accumulate but can’t throw away.

In Sacramento, our state legislature adds hundreds of new laws a year that few citizens know about, much less understand. And lawmakers rarely if ever eliminate old ones. Our tax code and budget are incomprehensible thickets of formulas and carve-outs and exemptions.

What’s worse, our state constitution, with all its guarantees and mandates, makes thoughtful pruning essentially unconstitutional. One of this year’s most important California decisions could be an anticipated state Supreme Court ruling on a challenge to the so-called “California rule,” which guarantees that public employees’ pensions can never be reduced in any way.

Lack of pruning can have huge costs, and not just in dollars and cents. At the heart of our mounting shortage of housing is thick regulatory overgrowth that makes construction overly time-consuming and expensive.

And it may get even harder to prune properly as our state righteously fights the Trump Administration on multiple fronts. We’re so geared up to protect our people and programs that we may have little time or space to jettison those pieces of government we no longer need.

If Grandma Oops is reincarnated, I think she might come back as one of those consultants that rich people now hire to help them get rid of their stuff. As she approached the end, I marveled at how she meticulously disposed of almost everything in her small house, leaving only basic furniture and a few photo albums. I wish I had her pruning discipline. Maybe I could figure out how to work less, or to simplify our home life—currently a mad scramble of children’s classes, sports, and other commitments.

In her later years, Grandma Oops expressed frustration about one living thing that she couldn’t uproot—herself. She had lived too long, she often said, and was using too many of the earth’s resources as she hung on past her prime.

I respected her opinion, but I couldn’t agree. Sometimes in a family tree, you get one branch so special and enduring that you can hardly bear to see her go.

The post Goodbye to the Dirty Harry of Pruning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

South L.A. is both a remaining stronghold of African Americans in Los Angeles and a place where a new narrative of immigrant integration is unfolding. There, a process of building on the past—or ethnic sedimentation—has taken hold. As a result, South L.A. is now seeing the emergence of complex new identities rooted as much in a pride of place as they are in a sense of race. The area has become home to a new sort of Latino identity and a new sort of immigrant integration, both inflected by blackness.

Understanding these changes is important not just for South L.A. but for the country as a whole. Many other urban areas have been ravaged by unemployment, riven by immigration, and riddled by the rise of gangs and the hyper-criminalization of African Americans, especially, and Latinos. The kind of positive social innovation that’s happening in South L.A. as community organizations forge a Black-Latino unity could be instructive, with the lessons stretching beyond our majority-minority region and time, and touching on the future of the nation.

These conclusions come from research done by a team of colleagues and students at USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration in South L.A. over the past few years. We’ve observed public spaces, done detailed research in and on neighborhoods, and conducted interviews with 100 Latino residents and nearly 20 local civic leaders of all backgrounds. Our research team members are publishing the results in a new report, Roots|Raíces: Latino Engagement, Place Identities, and Shared Futures in South Los Angeles, combining our analysis with specific recommendations for South L.A.’s future.
 
 
Shifting Spaces: Demographic Change in South L.A.

If there is a constant in South L.A., it is change. Once farmland, the area became the paradigm for white industrial suburbs in the 1920s through the post-war period. Black L.A., always a presence, grew dramatically in the war years, particularly along Central Avenue. After racially restrictive housing covenants fell, the black community moved south and west. By 1970, South L.A.—stretching from Interstate 10 to the north, the Alameda Corridor to the east, Imperial Highway to the south, and Baldwin Hills to the west—was 80 percent African American.

But time—and demographics—didn’t stand still. In the 1980s, job loss from deindustrialization and a toxic combination of high crime and excess policing forced many African Americans to reconsider their futures in the area. The 1992 civil unrest gave another push and as the exodus stepped up, Latinos moved into the neighborhood. Many were immigrants driven from Latin America by economic crises and civil wars, lured to the U.S. by changing labor demands, and unable to secure housing in densely packed traditional entry neighborhoods like Pico-Union. With the immigration flow also becoming more female and family-based, the search was on for affordable housing, and the single-family homes of South L.A. made for a good fit.

Non-Hispanic Black population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

Latino population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

The ethnic inflows and outflows were not balanced: More Latinos moved in than blacks moved out, and South L.A. became more crowded. Single-family homes frequently became multi-generational affairs, and Latino homeownership rates rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 33 percent in 2009-2013, nearly closing the gap with black homeownership. Now the area that has long been the beating heart of Black Los Angeles—South L.A.—is nearly two-thirds Latino.

The uptick in home ownership—as well as a steady increase in the share of South L.A. immigrants with more than 20 years in the country—signals the process of sinking roots. By contrast, other measures of “integration” or rootedness have remained low, including English-language acquisition and civic engagement. Here is evidence of a rooted but disconnected population: In 2013, while 47 percent of immigrants in Los Angeles County were naturalized citizens, just 26 percent of immigrants in South L.A. had that status.
 
 
Latinos in South L.A.: Generational Experiences

The first generation of immigrants in the neighborhood has complex attitudes towards their neighbors. In our interviews, older Latinos sometimes spoke of racial suspicion or, more commonly, simply noted relationships with African Americans that were polite but not close. But the very same individuals would later wax poetic about the African-American neighbor who guided them through the homeownership process, the black cop who set their errant hijo on the right course, and co-workers with whom they have shared struggles and triumphs.

What is clearer is that younger Latinos who grew up in South L.A.—the children of the elders—had very different experiences. The second generation has shared their lives with African-American neighbors—as classmates, teammates, and first loves. Said one Latino interviewee about interaction with African Americans, “You know, we grew up in each other’s homes, and we grew up together. So to us, it’s a similarity. They’re our people.” Another interviewee put it this way: “You are more in tune with the African-American community, you’re more mixed in.”

Strikingly, both generations are especially proud of being from South L.A.; they celebrate the neighborhood’s resilience in the face of challenges and injustice. Both older and younger Latino residents express a high degree of satisfaction with their community, seeing it as a place where they can realize their own version of the American Dream. Residents do not ignore the difficulties of life in South L.A., including household incomes for both blacks and Latinos that are far below the overall county average, but the struggle to overcome creates a tie that binds.

While the younger generation may indeed be “mixed in,” that has not necessarily translated to the public square. Latinos are dramatically underrepresented in political, non-profit, and other civic leadership roles. This is partly a consequence of the ways in which a more immigrant and younger population limits voting power; while South L.A. is nearly two-thirds Latino, Latinos comprised only 28 percent of the area’s voters in during the 2014 general election.
 
 
Bridging Race: Interdependence and Institutions

Moving forward, our analysis suggests that South L.A. needs strategies of both independence and interdependence. Independence includes leadership training for Latinos and the encouragement of naturalization and voter registration to coincide with the fight for the broader immigration reform.
Interdependence means avoiding “Latino triumphalism,” in which changing demographics yields a sort of “winner takes all, it’s our turn” kind of politics. While it may be easier for Latinos in communities where nearly everyone is Latino to pay less heed to coalition politics, such an approach is problematic in mixed South L.A., where effectively challenging racism (and, in particular, pervasive anti-blackness) and economic disparities requires the support of the whole neighborhood.

Bringing together groups while navigating differences is hard work, but some civic institutions in South L.A. are succeeding. One common thread among those doing black-brown unity work is a commitment to community organizing that is intentionally multi-racial in spirit and approach.

Organizers and civic leaders alike are especially sensitive to the palpable sense that Black Los Angeles is slipping away. To counter this, some organizations deliberately structure themselves so that blacks and Latinos have equal weight (even though the underlying populations may be more one group than another); for example, parent groups tend to be overwhelmingly Latino unless organizers make deliberate efforts to involve black parents.

Understanding personal histories, sharing stories of migration, and celebrating the struggle for civil rights in South L.A. can be key first steps. Organizers believe that such patient work pays off; for example, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) started a successful campaign for green jobs by first hosting a frank and far-reaching discussion on the evolution of black and brown communities in South L.A. Many organizations also find it critical to point explicitly to how pervasive racism is in our nation—how it is woven into the ways our institutions and policies are expressed in everyday life, and how this helps explain the exclusion of communities like South L.A.

Fortunately, there is much on which to build: organizations like Community Coalition (CoCo), CADRE, SCOPE, Community Development Technologies (CD Tech), and other multi-racial organizing institutions are turning out leaders who are imbued in this type of transformational civic leadership. CoCo is a particularly interesting example of leadership development and promotion: It was founded by Karen Bass and Sylvia Castillo—black-brown from the start—and recently President and CEO Marqueece Harris-Dawson, an African American who is now councilmember for District 8, has been succeeded by longtime organizer, Alberto Retana.
 
 
Facing Forward: Toward a Shared Future

There is more to do. South L.A. needs to step up civic engagement in general and Latino civic engagement in particular. This will require creating on-ramps to civic life for people with little history of participation, through activities like beautifying parks and staging community concerts. It also will require an emphasis on leadership: deepening Latino leadership for multi-racial coalitions, while strengthening black-Latino alliances, and enhancing capacity for existing black-led and other South L.A. organizations.

The public narrative also needs to change. South L.A. may be an area with many needs, but it is also a place with tremendous assets. New transit lines are bringing both greater mobility and needed economic development. New organizations are building ties between communities and ethnic groups long portrayed as at odds. New and creative strategies to realize the promise of South L.A. are emerging, with the most recent example being the successful multi-year, multi-sector, and multi-racial effort to secure the Promise Zone designation that will bring more federal resources to a large swath of South L.A.

Civic engagement of Latinos as a share of the total population in South L.A. and L.A. County. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

There are threats ahead. Nearly all the civic leaders we spoke with are worried about gentrification, particularly as downtown development spills south. Fears of displacement are not just economic; Blacks and Latinos alike worry that the community and neighborhoods they have fought so hard to build will be erased. Resisting—or, more accurately, taking advantage of rather than being taken advantage by new economic investments—will be an opportunity for new cross-community engagement.

In the last few years, knocking around the Twittersphere has been an inspiring hashtag, #WeAreSouthLA. It is meant to evoke a sense of pride in a place of struggle; it is frequently connected to people fighting for living wages and better schools, and against police abuse and racial discrimination. And if you peruse the tag, you will notice a myriad of faces, ethnicities, and genders all sharing joy about being from an area others have written off.
It is this more nuanced and dynamic picture of South L.A.’s past, present, and future that we have sought to capture—one in which organizing and civic engagement allow residents to achieve not only their of their own piece of the American Dream, but also their shared goal of economically vibrant, socially inclusive, and environmentally healthy communities.

The post The South Los Angeles Future Will Be Shared appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

O Namibia. O octopus tree.
O dead things.

When the botanist came to our own tree

he prescribed infusions of iron.

It stayed sick that year, until its yellowing
turned. Or perhaps our hope saw it greening.

With one tree on an IV drip, someone

unlocked our gate, seeking a northwest tree

and finding none, approached the southeast yellow pine.
He savaged its boughs—its first tender arms

that swept the ground in winter when

the snow landed there, heavy and wet.

A hired hand picked the wrong house,
raised the wrong tree.

Only now I think of our second,
who would have been Pine.
Long with summer legs like

knotty branches with early bark,

an idea, living on fog and dew, like

that untiring welwitschia, who only looks bereft.

I keep returning to the trees that don’t grow
or don’t make it past the fall or

some other glacial period of hope—
winter, spring, asbestos, radon
Our fathers’ metaphors of cells, rings, and xylem.

When we moved away from all those trees,

I despised the sun, had hate for the palm,

hate for the living. I remember thinking this place is a splint.

But now it’s a fulcrum.
This was the year we surprised ourselves.
You reached your other hand up, touched the bark
just yesterday. We asked if the tree was dead and
they said yes. It is dead. Its long century over.

The post Raising the Pine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But many experts, from artists to economists, argue that attempts to limit the arts are shortsighted. Sustaining a robust class of innovators and creative-types, they contend, is essential for the health of a city—both its character and economy.

So what does it take to keep the arts alive in a city? In advance of the Zócalo event sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, “Is L.A. Really the Creative Capital of the World?”, we asked people who study and support the creative industries: What should a city’s public and private sector do to nurture its creative economy?

The post Imagination Is a City’s Most Vital Resource appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In advance of the Zócalo event, “Should Phoenix Exist?”, we asked a panel of experts: What is the single most important factor in the explosive growth of the Southwest over the last 70 years?

The post Here Are the Biggest Reasons Why the Southwest Keeps Expanding appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.