A Matter of Help, Not Rights

Although Los Angeles has always advertised itself as a place of new beginnings for migrants, it has never properly prided itself on being an immigrant city. One reason is that, until the 1960s, most new arrivals were native-born Americans from the Midwest, East and South. Neither rich nor poor, most were old-stock, middle-class Americans drawn to Southern California’s image as a sun-drenched, suburban paradise.

But since the 1970s, an enormous influx of international migrants has transformed the city into the single largest recipient of immigrants in the nation. With roughly 40% of its residents foreign-born, L.A. is today as heavily immigrant as was Chicago in 1890 and New York City in 1910.

Nonetheless, Los Angeles has yet to fully free itself of its self-image as a Mediterranean-like leisure environment. To be sure, over the past 20 years, some critics have turned this escapist mythology on its head, portraying L.A. as a hellish and segregated “capital of the Third World.” But neither caricature serves the city and its citizens well.

Metropolitan Los Angeles must first re-envision itself as a melting-pot immigrant city if its institutions are ever going to successfully incorporate the millions of newcomers, 44% of whom are from Mexico, who now call it home.

Before the era of unemployment insurance and Social Security, struggling immigrants regularly sought out nongovernmental institutions for help in their new environment. Because city, county and state governments provided only minimal assistance before the New Deal, ethnic groups tended to care for their own. Immigrant groups set up agencies offering everything from cemetery plots, hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages and day nurseries, to old people’s homes, employment services, insurance plans and even relief benefits.

Churches also recognized that religious pastoring had to involve material as well as spiritual salvation. In addition to charity, the Catholic Church’s most important contribution to immigrant upward mobility was its parochial school system. Nurturing cultural continuity between the old and new worlds, ethnic parishes provided immigrants with a comforting way station in their new communities.

Ironically, in a time of bigger government, the wider community may forget that it can do more to help newly arrived, needy immigrants. L.A.’s labor unions are a good example of an institution that was fiercely anti-immigrant a generation ago but has since reoriented itself toward improving the lot of low-wage workers, most of whom are foreign-born. Unfortunately, the region’s Catholic and ethnic-Mexican social infrastructures have not responded as successfully.

One reason is that immigrant issues are considered synonymous with minority rights. In Los Angeles, the major Latino organizations are more concerned with rights and representation than with constituent services. This orientation can be traced to the 1960s, when the country’s largest philanthropic foundations, most notably the Ford Foundation, abandoned their traditional strategy of building lasting institutions in favor of funding organizations committed to challenging existing ones. This shift in direction, in part, reflected smaller numbers of new immigrants. Philanthropy focused on native-born ethnic Americans, and while undeniably valid, the new strategy eventually undermined the historically successful notion that immigrants are best helped by facilitating their assimilation into U.S. society.

The Ford Foundation was instrumental in the establishment of two of L.A.’s most celebrated Latino organizations: the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southwest Voter Registration Project. While both organizations perform needed work, there is still a conspicuous absence of a comparable privately funded constituency-based organization in the city. Sure, there are plenty of ethnically oriented social-service outlets offering AIDS testing, gang-prevention programs, mental-health therapy and so on. But they do not constitute a network of providers. Instead, they are, at best, a patchwork of independent operators heavily reliant on public funds and guided by government priorities.

L.A.’s decentralized geography makes it difficult to implement a coherent approach to any social problem, yet it doesn’t explain away the fact that there is not one major Mexican American organization designed to raise money for and assist newcomers in their adjustment to life in Los Angeles. Nor does geography explain the absence of a network of organizations that help immigrants manage the demands of daily life like opening a bank account, improving language skills, dealing with bureaucracies and even securing credit.

Mexican immigrants have their own informal social networks--primarily their families--that offer such advice and aid. They send an estimated $4 billion to $6 billion in remittances back to Mexico each year. USC sociologist Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, who studies the growing network of Mexican hometown associations in Los Angeles, says the more formal groups “could potentially work to provide services to immigrants here.” But, for now, he says, most of their donated money and efforts are focused on helping the communities they left behind.

Despite Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s high-profile advocacy on behalf of immigrants, the Catholic Church has done a poor job incorporating the millions of immigrant Catholics who have arrived here over the last quarter-century. Catholic Charities still provides a wide array of services to needy Angelenos. But the physical infrastructure of the L.A. archdiocese has not sufficiently expanded to serve the growing number of foreign-born congregants.

Between 1976 and today, the archdiocese has grown by approximately 2.5 million members. However, there are only 12 more parishes this year than there were a quarter-century ago. Consequently, at an average of 4,400 families per church, compared with a national average of 950 to 1,000, Los Angeles has the largest and most crowded parishes in the nation. Similarly, the archdiocese’s school system educates fewer children today than it did in the 1976-77 school year. Despite the phenomenal growth in school-age Catholic children, there are 14 fewer parish schools in L.A. than there were 25 years ago.

By contrast, during Southern California’s last population boom in the postwar years, the L.A. archdiocese built extensively to accommodate new members. Between 1950 and ‘61, the late Cardinal James Francis McIntyre blessed a new elementary school every six and half weeks and a new parish every 11 weeks. While church and school officials cite financial and personnel problems--the declining number of priests--for their lack of building, the real culprit may simply be a lack of interest. “Any diocese could find a way to respond to these growing infrastructural needs if the vision were there,” says Joseph Harris, a research analyst who has studied the financial structure of the L.A. archdiocese.

But whatever the cause, it is clear that the support and guidance the church is giving Mexican immigrants is not nearly what it could be. “In the long run, people are not going to support a church in which they feel only casually involved,” says Father Allan Figueroa Deck, executive director of the Loyola Institute for Spirituality. While local Catholic churches are likely to be brimming over for decades to come, the natural departure of an untended immigrant flock will contribute to the growth of smaller evangelical churches, which offer a more intimate experience of community and worship.

In the absence of other leadership, local government should take the initiative and focus more attention on immigrant incorporation. Of the nation’s three largest cities, Los Angeles is the only one that does not have a city agency serving as a clearinghouse for immigrant-related services. While most turn-of-the-century immigrant-service networks collapsed during the Depression or languished under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, they still serve as models of what can be established to assist new immigrants. Now that the anti-immigrant hysteria of the early 1990s is history, America’s gateway to the world needs to develop a coherent public-private approach to helping immigrants lift themselves up. *