California's current booming economy offers the ideal environment for crafting new policies that will ease integration of immigrants, suggest the authors. State legislators then have more room to promote policies that will treat immigrant integration as an investment in and benefit to the state's long-term vitality. During budget crunches, legislation such as federal welfare reform in 1996, which grew out of the approval of California's Proposition 187 in 1994, is enacted to save money, but then soon is modified when the human consequences become clear. Proposition 187 restricted immigrants' access to public health care and education. Immigrants comprise 25 to 30 percent of California's workforce and a higher percentage of low-wage workers, according to the report.
Many immigrants face substandard working conditions and limited work-related benefits.
Many immigrant business owners or operators have difficulty obtaining capital and lack knowledge of the state's business regulations. As a group, immigrants may contribute less in tax revenue and require more costly social services, in large part because immigrant families tend to be larger and have more children to be educated. Immigrants also tend to be younger and earn lower wages than native-born residents. They also suggest that California pursue a partnership with the federal government that would give states with large immigrant populations a greater say in drafting national immigration policies and provide those states with funding to deal with the impacts of immigration. The California Policy Research Center, which funded and published the immigration report, applies the research expertise of the UC system to the analysis, development and implementation of state policy and federal policy of statewide importance.