Our view: The Land of Opportunity

0

It’s not exactly a news flash that many of L.A.’s poor are concentrated among recently arrived immigrant groups, most of them Latino.

Their stories are compelling, even profound, as they struggle to survive and get ahead. They want to get beyond minimum-wage work. They want to someday own a home. Most of all, they want to sock away enough money for their families.

Some of them find success, but as reported this week in the final installment of a three-part series on poverty in Los Angeles, for those without basic language and educational skills and there are many the prospects are limited at best.

The fundamental question is whether such inequity is a cause for concern. Does it matter that hundreds of thousands of workers in Los Angeles County always will have lower-wage jobs and be vulnerable to corporate downsizing and other economic shifts? Does it matter that this same group will most likely receive minimal health care and little, if any, preventative care? And does it matter that even as L.A.’s working poor struggle to get by, a stream of undocumented aliens keeps crossing the border in search of those same low-paying jobs.

To be sure, there is nothing new or novel about a wide disparity between rich and poor. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith recently told the Los Angeles Times, “It has always been true we have made ourselves into the most unequal society in terms of income in the world, and certainly the most in the recent past.”

Some would argue that the rich-poor split is a devilish-but-necessary part of a market-driven economy. But for most of this century, the rich-poor dynamic has included an important clause the land of opportunity clause. That is, no matter how little you earn upon entering this country, hard work ultimately will allow you to move up the financial ladder. To buy that house. To make sure your kids see a doctor. To invest in the stock market.

It’s an inspiring precept and it’s been true over the years for millions of Americans. But it’s less true for the 600,000 or so Latinos in L.A. County at or below the poverty line. Their chances for higher-paying jobs are hampered by several marketplace realities: the limited number of manufacturing jobs that they might have moved into in previous generations; the need for specialized training in many of those jobs; and the lack of union-style apprentice programs.

Most of all, they’re hampered by sheer numbers. The low-wage labor pool is simply too large and in these economic boom times the demand for their services is too big for the upward movement to make much of a dent in the overall disparity.

It’s hard to find a smoking gun or an evildoer in all this; mostly, it reflects economic vicissitudes that inevitably find winners and losers. That’s the problem the struggles of the working poor, especially the newly immigrant poor, cannot or should not be legislated away through artificial devices such as an inflated minimum wage. The answers are a lot more confounding, starting with better schools and a commitment among businesses to better reach this population.

Can the economy chug along perfectly well without such support? For the moment, obviously it can. But giving people little hope for the future, no matter their income, is a recipe for lots of future trouble.

No posts to display