interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Immigration as Incorporation
by Irene Bloemaard
August 16, 2021
This interview with Irene Bloemraad, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary and Migration Initiative, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Irene | The Berkeley Interdisciplinary and Migration Initiative is a network of researchers and students on campus who are seeking to educate, train, and provide knowledge about migration, both in the Bay Area and globally.
My own interest in migration comes, as it does for a lot of other people, from my personal background. I was born in Europe and I migrated a number of different times before moving to the United States over 25 years ago. I have been at the University of California, Berkeley since 2003.
frank | You write about immigration as not just about policy and border, but also about what happens once that movement has happened. Settlement both on the side of the migrant and on the side of the host country. Can you talk about the U.S. in that regard?
Sure. So in the United States, when people say immigration is a political issue or a policy issue, they almost always are thinking about border control or entry policy — who gets in as asylum seekers, who's allowed to stay as DACA recipients, or who we force out, more generally. It is really a conversation about the borders, but that's only half the story. Once people come in, they have to establish their lives. They have to get their kids into school. They have to look for work. They have to figure out how to use the healthcare system. They have to figure out how to be good neighbors. They have to learn the language.
A lot of my research focuses on the integration and incorporation side. I have been very influenced in thinking through this, by comparing the United States to Canada. My earliest research looks at comparing people with legal, permanent residency in the two countries on whether they become citizens and why they become citizens.
When I was starting this work, I would go to very prominent, public figures on immigration — people in the government in Washington DC and think tanks and academics — and ask why this was the case? Why are the levels of citizenship among the immigrants in Canada so much higher than in the United States? The standard answer people would give me, was that Canada doesn't have as many undocumented immigrants as the United States, and Canada has an economic selection policy to choose its immigrants. Now, both of those things are true. Canada does have many fewer undocumented immigrants. And, obviously, it's impossible to become a citizen if you're undocumented, so that's going to depress levels of naturalization in the United States. And the second point is true, too.
The assumption again was that it was border control policy driving things like citizenship and political inclusion. However, my research showed that while border policy and immigration policy matter, it doesn't explain the entire gap. It explains about half the gap. I argued that in the Canadian case, there is much more public support for settlement and multicultural, diversity integration programs coming from the federal government, provincial governments, and sometimes from municipal governments. I focused often on the federal level. But you can go down to community-based organizations, public hospitals, and community colleges that are doing things like helping people learn English, hosting citizenship classes so that people can get naturalized, teaching programs for economic integration that help immigrants who have college degrees get their professional credentials. The U.S. has never had a federal integration policy with the exception of programs for refugees. If you're an officially resettled refugee coming in through the State Department and then getting resettled through some of the voluntary organizations, then there is some infrastructure of support.
The communities that get this support, whether it is in Canada or in the United States among officially resettled refugees, tend to do better than those who don’t get this support. That is totally not surprising. You could imagine if you went to medical school and you take all of your classes and you get your nice little degree, and then they throw you into a hospital and tell you to go treat people, you're going to have a hard time. This is why we do things like residency programs.
Money is a super important part of this. It is essential in running community based organizations, but it was also symbolic. I did lots of in-depth oral history interviews with immigrants, and Candian immigrants would talk about how they thought that the Canadian government cared about them, in a way that people in the United States did not. American immigrants did not have a feeling that the federal government really cared about them. They did not have the sense that they were legitimate stakeholders.
If the government is giving the Vietnamese Association of Toronto money to do English language training, for example, they feel valued and like they belong. Now, does that mean there was no discrimination? Absolutely not. People talked about discrimination and they talked about prejudice. It's not that this is a silver bullet, but it creates a sense of being wanted, and, because of that, a sense of engagement.
By using another country as a comparison, you can really see what's missing in the U.S. If you live in the United States, you might be used to a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality because that is what immigrants have done for the last hundred years. It is taken for granted that that is normal. But by looking at Canada, at least in my case, it became clear that these settlement programs really make a difference. I think the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program is an amazing example of this. If you look at some of the most successful refugee communities, think of the Vietnamese community or the Cuban community, these are communities that have gotten a lot of support over the course of their time in the United States. And then if you think of other communities that have not gotten that level of support, because they weren't designated as official refugees, Central Americans, and Haitians, for example, it has not been quite as easy.
This may be a silly question, but why is it so different? I mean, you listed all of the things that were different, and I can understand why they are impactful, but why are the attitudes of the governments so different?
That is a very good question. I always point out the fact that there is support for refugee resettlement, which shows that it's not inevitable. When the U.S. wants to, we can have the political will to do this. Why were refugees helped? I mean, then you do get into politics and Cold War politics. You can't understand the U.S. refugee resettlement system and the help offered to official refugees without understanding that. Why was the door open to people from Vietnam and the Soviet Union and Cuba? Why was the door closed to people from Central America or Haiti? The answer lies in Cold War dynamics.
Now, at the same time, Americans are known to be fairly charitable and give much larger proportions of their salaries to charitable causes than many other countries. I do think there's a certain generosity in the United States, but it's certainly been politicized as to who we help. Canada has always had to work harder, at least historically, to attract immigrants because people want to come to the United States. For example, the United States was seen in the 19th century as the gold mountain where Chinese migrants wanted to come to make money during the gold rush. Canada was almost always the second choice.
The Canadian government is more interventionist. In general, Canadian politicians and the Canadian public believe more strongly in public intervention.
The third reason is that after World War II, Canada had to reinvent its national identity. In those tensions between British Canada and French Canada, people latched onto this idea that Canada was a multicultural nation and that it was different than the United States.
It was different from the old world. It was different from Europe. It doesn't mean that there's no discrimination, there are not racial inequalities, but it's much more part of Canadian national identity to believe that we are a nation of immigrants and we are multicultural. In the United States, many believe that we're a nation of immigrants, but it's contested to a larger degree than it is currently in Canada. And it's much more of a, "We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" narrative than it is a narrative of "We are going to help."
I would say the fourth thing is that once all those immigrants become citizens, they are voting. 20% of people in Canada are foreign-born and over 80% of the foreign-born people are citizens. If you do the math, that means that if you want to win office in Toronto or in Vancouver, you better watch what you say about immigrants.
Can you talk about how you categorize migration in your research?
When I teach immigration, I underscore for students that there's a sociological way of understanding migration, and then there's a legal, political way of understanding migration. Both are very important.
The sociological way of understanding migration is very much about what happens when you move from one place to another. When your culture, your language, your norms are different, what does the process of feeling comfortable, learning how things work, and getting settled look like?
On the side of law and politics, the rules that come with your visa or your status in the country have a huge impact on your ability to live your life. Whether you are a legal, permanent resident, temporary migrant, or undocumented, your status is going to impact your ability to get social benefits, your ability to go to school, especially post-secondary education, your ability to get a driver's license, to get a job, whether you're allowed to get social security once you turn 65 or 68. It impacts all areas of your life. Your legitimacy is constantly undermined.
There are something like 45 million people who are foreign-born living in the United States, and less than half of them have become naturalized citizens. Thinking again about the politics of this, this means that over half of the foreign-born have no official voice in our electoral system.
So about 20 to 21 million people are naturalized citizens. Another quarter, about 12 million, are legal, permanent residents. These people are allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely, as long as they don't commit a crime. This means that kids who came here when they were 10, 12, never bothered to become citizens, and have a run-in with the law in their 20's — maybe they're caught with some drugs, they're at a party that they shouldn't be at — can be deported back to their parents' homeland, even if they don't speak the language very well, and have nobody there. People used to think it was secure, and that as long as you have a green card, everything's fine. But, because of the uptick in enforcement and deportation and the narrowing of the grounds on which you can challenge deportation, all of these people are in a precarious status.
On top of that, you have another 2 to 3 million people who are living in some kind of temporary resident status. This could be a temporary protected status for people who are from places where there's been a civil conflict or a huge natural disaster, earthquakes, or hurricanes. And then there are somewhere between 10 to 11 million people who are unauthorized or undocumented.