California’s Lessons in Tolerance
phobia, of racism, of trying to wipe each other out,” said Connie Rice, a longtime civil rights lawyer in California. “It’s not like we were all of a sudden born the Golden State.” State leaders pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “This is where the Chinese weren’t even allowed to own property,” she noted.
The ’90s in California brought the Rodney King riots, more restrictive sentencing laws, the contentious Proposition 187 fight and ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and bilingual education.
But this is the same state that today vows to defend immigrants from deportation, and where voters have supported a higher minimum wage and prison reforms that benefit minority residents. “You would not have predicted that from amid that chaos,” said Manuel Pastor, a University of Southern California sociologist.
The demographic change California underwent between 1980 and 2000, Mr. Pastor said, mirrors the change in the United States since 2000 and up to 2050, when whites are expected to be less than half of the nation’s population.
“The United States just went through its Prop. 187 moment,” Mr. Pastor said of this presidential election. The question is whether the rest of the country can adjust faster to demographic change — or with less conflict — than California did. “Why go through all of our pain? That was no fun, and it dashed a lot of people’s lives. We underinvested in education. We over-imprisoned, so we got a lot of people locked out of the labor market. We broke apart a lot of families because of anti-immigrant sentiments. We did a lot of stupid things to ourselves.”
California’s example suggests that the very demographic trend Democrats believe will benefit them in the long run could aid Republicans in the near term. At least, that remains true so long as Republican candidates like Mr. Trump or Mr. Wilson position themselves in opposition to immigration or policies perceived as aiding minorities.
In the general election, voters were more likely to shift to Mr. Trump in the counties with the strongest growth in the Hispanic and nonwhite populations since 2000, according to research from a coming book by Ryan Enos, a Harvard University political scientist. It appears in survey data, Mr. Enos argues, that this shift in 2016 was driven by whites who had previously voted Democratic — and who don’t appear to have responded as negatively to rising diversity before Mr. Trump came along.
It is not abrupt demographic change alone that unnerves, said Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, but that kind of change amplified by politics.
“In this brew that generates anti-immigrant sentiment, there needs to be a politicizing factor,” Mr. Hopkins said. “There needs to be a politician, a set of politicians, or a party who call attention to immigration, who make it an issue.”
White voters in California may have eventually been persuaded that their Hispanic neighbors were no threat to the local economy or their children’s classrooms. But white voters in Midwestern small towns, where diversity is quickly rising as immigrants come for jobs on farms or oil and gas fields, may have been unnerved by the change enough for a meaningful shift in votes in this past election.
In another study, Mr. Enos found that the mere presence of a few Spanish speakers on a train platform was enough to raise anti-immigrant sentiment among commuters in the white, liberal Boston suburbs. But as the same Spanish speakers kept appearing over two weeks, those attitudes softened. The commuters began to smile at one another.
“In the short run, diversity is difficult,” said Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist. He published a paper in 2007 arguing that diversity causes groups to withdraw from one another, both from people who don’t look like them and — surprisingly — from those who do. But in his full argument, Mr. Putnam, too, insisted that the trouble eventually ebbs.
“In the long run, America is pretty good at coming to terms with that and moving past it,” he said. “But the long term is measured in terms of decades.”
It may be measured in the difference between where California is today and where the United States is about to go.