In the Central Valley—Fresno, Sacramento, Merced—there are some 75,000 Hmong, Southeast Asian hill people who had no written language, as well as other Laotians, Thais, and Cambodians, with thousands more arriving periodically from the refugee camps in Thailand where they, or their parents, have been since the Vietnam War. Some become small farmers or janitors, but as rural hill people who have never seen a kitchen or a toilet and have no written language, they’ve had particular adjustment problems. As with the Cambodians in Sacramento, there are high rates of depression and suicide. And while many of the kids have become valedictorians, joining the great march into the mainstream—and some are now doctors and engineers—some assimilate downward into drugs and gangs so they can feel safer. Says Pao Fang, director of the Lao Family Community: “They want to be protected.” They fight the Hispanic gangs even though their own English is laced with Hispanic inflections. Conversely, there also have been adjustment problems for county welfare, medical, and child-protection authorities who had no protocols on how to deal with their new arrivals’ arranged marriages for their 13-year-old daughters or their deep beliefs in the spiritual basis of illness and how to treat it.

There’s not much doubt, as Juan Arambula learned in his years as a Fresno County supervisor, that low-wage illegal immigrants in California’s San Joaquin Valley and in other poor areas place an enormous burden on communities, and particularly on schools, emergency rooms, and law enforcement. The most comprehensive study, published in 1997 by the National Research Council, concluded that overall, immigration benefits the economy and has little impact on native Americans other than those without a high school education. But the report also found that in 1994–95, the latest year for which the panel had data, immigrants were imposing “a net fiscal burden of $1,178 per native-headed California household.” According to another study, state and local taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the low prices of goods as well as the growers, contractors, restaurants, big-box retailers, and the other employers of low-wage workers, native and immigrant, that produce them.

At the same time, however, national data also indicate that illegal immigrants are heavily subsidizing the surpluses of the Social Security system, contributing as much as $7 billion a year—roughly 10 percent of the 2004 surplus—most of which they’ll never get back. Put all that data together and you seem to have a picture showing that while state and local jurisdictions bore the lion’s share of the short-term burdens, the long-term effects on the economy were positive, and the federal treasury and especially the Social Security Trust Fund were big gainers.

For the immediate future, the Valley’s economy, like California’s hotel and restaurant industry, and much of its construction business, will depend on those low-wage immigrant workers, most of them undocumented. “Without them,” Arambula said, the small-farm towns, many of which have lost most of their Anglos, wouldn’t be able to survive. “They’d blow away like tumbleweed.”

The parade of gowned graduates at Berkeley or UCLA defy spot categorization: Chinese, Korean, Cuban, Mexican, Chilean, Pacific Islander, Iranian, Saudi, Palestinian, Israeli, Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Russian, Polish, American Indian, West Indian, Anglo American, African American, North African, East Indian, Pakistani. Which was what? Which were combinations? What language did their parents or grandparents speak?

The establishment of a University of California campus at Merced, the first new UC campus in nearly 40 years, is seen by its local promoters as a great boost for business. But initially, at least, it’s likely to struggle, as Professor Kenji Hakuta, who now heads its division of humanities and social science, said, to “serve the survivors of a terrible education system.” In the Valley, a lot of people use the same image: The kids would rather have a pickup truck than an education. When UC Merced admitted its first class in 2005, only 38 percent of the students were from the Valley.

But in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, an immigrant is more likely to be an Indian engi­neer or a Pakistani entrepreneur or even a Mexi­can engineer on an H-1B visa—a cerebrero—than a Mexican farmworker. When the high-tech boom fizzled after 2000, one of the places that was hard hit was the East Bay city of Fremont, where engineers and technicians had sparked a shadow boom in Indian restaurants and shops. In the little city of West Sacramento, there are three Russian communities—Orthodox, Baptist, and Pentecostal. Given the enormous ethnic and, more important, the huge class differences, not to mention the differences between recent and settled immigrants, legal and illegal, there is no typical California immigrant.

Ethnic labels often conceal as much as they reveal. At Montebello High School in Los Angeles County, as at many other schools, the students, 93 percent of whom are Latino, divide themselves sharply between recent immigrants who call themselves “TJ” for Tijuana, whose primary activities are folklorico and soccer, and “Senior Park,” those who speak English comfortably and have assimilated to American sports, music, and institutions and some of whom never spoke Spanish at all. Those divisions, too—divisions of culture, of class, of loyalty—reflect similar splits within the larger Latino community, and indeed within other American ethnic communities as well, just as they have through much of the nation’s history.

“Asian” is a grab-bag term that includes everything from those Indian and Pakistani engineers and programmers to the newly arrived Hmong—Korean architects, Sikh farmers, Chinese physicians, Vietnamese entrepreneurs—but it generally doesn’t include Filipinos, who with nearly 700,000 immigrants are the second-largest group of foreign-born Californians. At the University of California, Asians, who make up a disproportionate part of the student body, have long ceased to be counted as a minority. The same is true for Filipinos. UC’s diversity agenda focuses only on “underrepresented minorities,” meaning Hispanics, African Americans, and American Indians.

The toughest questions of all, however—and those that clearly trouble middle-class intellectuals most—are the cultural ones. What’s the justification for putting the newly arrived children of illegal immigrants—or indeed any of the nation’s millions of new immigrants, most of them Hispanic—in the front of the line in affirmative action programs that, if they are still appropriate, were designed to mitigate the effects of historic discrimination against blacks and, inferentially, American Indians? Is multiculturalism, as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, sinking the country into too much pluribus and not enough unum?

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