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San Joaquin Valley. The problems of the San Joaquin Valley are well known: high unemployment; poverty; bad air quality; and high teen-pregnancy and school-dropout rates. However, there are reports that coastal residents are moving to the San Joaquin Valley to take advantage of lower home prices, which may presage a change in attitudes and politics.

The San Joaquin Valley has the worst air in the US, officially taking the title from Los Angeles in April 2004. The San Joaquin Valley was moved at its own request from "severe" to "extreme" nonattainment of the federal one-hour ozone standard in order to extend the Valley's deadline for cleaning its air from 2005 to 2010 National parks east of the San Joaquin Valley, Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon, are also on the smog violation list. The 25,000-square-mile San Joaquin Valley, extending from Stockton to Bakersfield, exceeded the one-hour national ozone standard 37 times in 2003.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District in January 2004 announced that it would spend $1.6 million to hire 18 inspectors to assess farm pollution and to process federal air operating permits for some of the Valley's 28,000 farms and 5,500 livestock operations. The inspectors will be paid out of fees collected from farmers. Large farms- those with at least 360 acres or 2,000 cows or an expected 12.5 tons of pollution a year- must file an application for a federal operating permit by January 1, 2005.

Salinas Valley. The Salinas Valley is the nation's salad bowl, the major source of fresh vegetables such as broccoli and lettuce from April through November. Most vegetable workers live year-round in the valley, but 2,000 to 10,000, depending on who is making the estimate, arrive in April for the peak harvest season. All agree that the number of migrants is declining, reflecting the lack of seasonal housing and the preference of many families to keep their children in one place year round for schooling. Legal immigrants with US-citizen children are staying in the US over the winter, and applying for UI benefits, Food Stamps and sometimes welfare for their children.

The new faces among farm workers include indigenous peoples from Oaxaca and Central Americans, especially from Guatemala and El Salvador. Partners for Peace outreach workers distribute wallet cards with 50 contact numbers to help newcomers find local services and urge them to open bank accounts so they do not become robbery victims. Most workers ask them about housing and health.

Housing. Napa is a high-cost area that lacks sufficient housing for a low-wage labor force. The county offers beds and meals for $11.50 a day in several camps: Calistoga (60 beds); River Ranch (60 beds, opened in June 2003 at a cost of $3.4 million); Mondavi (53 beds); and Beringer (24 beds). However, many workers preferred to pay $5 a day and sleep on the porch of the St. Helena Catholic Church, closer to day labor markets. With empty beds in the camps, the church porch was closed, and some of the migrants staying there moved to the banks of the Napa River, claiming that they could not afford the camps. Some were not farm workers or were not legally authorized to be in the US.

Napa grape growers tax themselves $8.49 an acre to provide funding for worker housing.

To avoid day laborers seeking jobs from rushing trucks driving into the parking lot at Sunshine Foods in St. Helena, the city opened a nonprofit day labor station south of the city called the Work Connection. Work Connection director Nora Selina Garcia says that construction and vineyard managers have made the switch to the site, and shoppers are no longer harassed.

Stanislaus County is looking more closely at farmers' requests for permission to place mobile homes on their land for farmworkers. An almond farmer with 590 acres was recently denied permission to have a mobile home for a year-round worker on one ranch until he justified the need for the worker. Many farmers buy used 1,400-square-foot mobile homes for $10,000 to $25,000 each to house farm workers.

Carlsbad in February 2004 demolished makeshift housing occupied by 60 to 70 migrants. Migrant workers protested, saying the city and the farmers should find a housing solution for the men before their shacks are destroyed.

Four farm worker housing projects are being built in Ventura county: a 58-unit project in south Oxnard, a 24-unit rental project in Santa Paula, a 24-unit apartment complex in downtown Oxnard, and a north Oxnard rental complex in which at least 27 units will be set aside for farm worker families. Santa Paula-based Leavens Ranch, with 700 acres of lemons and avocados, pays workers $10 an hour and provides on-site housing for 23 full-time workers.

The Ripley Migrant Center near Blythe, which receives $350,000 in state funds to provide 99 two-, three- and four-bedroom units for migrant families, is scheduled to be closed and sold. The center opens in late October and closes in late April, and has only filled about a fourth of the units; at least one member of the family must be a legal US resident and have a usual home at least 50 miles away. Meanwhile, at County Roads 36 and 105 south of Davis, there was a $4.4 million renovation of 62 units of migrant housing.

California does not have enough housing, but the shortfall is a matter of dispute: the Public Policy Institute of California put it at 138,000 housing units in March 2004. Housing construction plummeted in California during the 1990s, when recession drove many middle income earners out of the state, and relatively large and poor immigrant families moved in.

The Census reported that in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico, the number of over-65 residents rose sharply between 2000 and 2003, reflecting in part the movement of Californians who sold houses and used their equity to live better in states with cheaper housing. The US has 36 million over-65 residents, and the three states with the most elderly are California, Florida and New York (there are 37 million five- to 13-year olds in the US).

Many elderly migrants stay near large cities to have access to health care facilities, but some of those in sparsely populated communities have embraced community stores or mercantiles (mercs), with local residents owning stock in general stores so that residents do not have to drive long distances to shop for so-called dry goods.

USC demographer Dowell Myers examined the upward mobility of foreign-born Latinos since 1970, and found that their poverty rates drop over time. For example, a third of the 1.8 million foreign-born Latinos who arrived in California between 1980 and 1990 were poor in 1990, but only a quarter of the 1980s arrivals were poor in the 2000 census. Myers emphasized the positives- 70 percent of Latino immigrant children in California graduate from high school, and 55 percent of middle-aged California Latinos who have been in the US at least 20 years own their homes.

California repealed a law granting driver's licenses to unauthorized foreigners shortly after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003, but Florida Governor Jeb Bush in April 2004 endorsed a state bill that would grant two-year licenses to the estimated 400,000 adult unauthorized residents of Florida who agreed to undergo and pay for background criminal checks.

The Save Our State initiative, successor to Proposition 187, reported that over 400,000 of the required 600,000 signatures had been collected by early April 2004; the deadline is April 29, 2004. Unlike Proposition 187, the state Republican Party has not endorsed the SOS initiative; Republican Gov. Pete Wilson made his support for Proposition 187 a centerpiece of his 1994 reelection campaign. Like Proposition 187, SOS would prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving state-funded welfare benefits, and would make it a misdemeanor for state and local officials - such as police officers - not to report unauthorized foreigners to federal authorities.

Larry Parsons, "Workers follow the crops," Salinas Californian, April 12, 2004. Carlos Villatoro, "Upvalley, immigrants struggle for work, place to live," Napa Register, March 30, 2004. Elena Gaona, "Cleanup begins at Carlsbad migrant camps," San Diego Union-Tribune, February 18, 2004.