California Dreaming: Proposition 187 and the Cultural Psychology of Racial and Ethnic Exclusion

This essay examines California's Proposition 187 as a paradigm of the contradictions engendered by new postnational social formations. On the one hand, most—if not all—advanced postindustrial democracies in Western Europe, the United States, and now even Japan, have developed an “addiction” to easily exploited foreign workers to do the jobs the Japanese call “the three K jobs” (for the Japanese words “dangerous, dirty, and demanding.”) On the other hand, in the context of a transnational malaise, new immigrants have become the focus of powerful anxieties—economic, demographic, and cultural. This essay concentrates on the social contexts generating these new anxieties in light of a psychocultural theory of “the need for strangers.”