Immigration and Unemployment

Only one thing was lacking from your otherwise excellent recent coverage of California’s high unemployment rate: discussion of a primary cause. For the past 25 years or so, but especially in the 1980s, California has been a destination country for hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. In the ‘80s alone, California became home to more than 2.5 million immigrants and, if present trends continue, under current law somewhere between 3.1 to 4.2 million immigrants will settle here in the 1990s.

Regardless of whether the economy improves or not, no reasonable rate of job creation can possibly provide jobs for our own homeless and unemployed in addition to the hundreds of thousands of job seekers who will arrive from foreign countries every year. Is it fair to immigrants to allow them to come in when the result is to deny opportunity to them and Americans as well?

Once the problem is recognized, then the first step toward a solution becomes clear. Californians must urge their representatives in Congress to act to drastically reduce legal immigration rates and to do what we reasonably can to stop illegal immigration. This means enactment of a replacement level (as many people entering as are leaving) legal immigration ceiling, cutting national legal immigration from more than a million in a year down to 200,000 per year.

We simply must begin to face the fact that a drastic reduction in immigration is a necessary condition for relieving not only our unemployment problems, but also the overcrowding, budget crisis, environmental degradation, infrastructure overload, deterioration of our schools and a host of other acute problems. If we don’t effectively confront this major factor in our problems--excess immigration--we will never solve our environmental and social problems.

ROSE M. HANES, Executive Director, Population-Environment Balance, Washington