Proposition 187 is dead. That’s the common wisdom, even if it’s
now challenged by activists against illegal immigration trying to
qualify a revival of the 1994 ballot initiative for California’s
2006 primary election.
Proposition 187 is dead. That’s the common wisdom, even if it’s now challenged by activists against illegal immigration trying to qualify a revival of the 1994 ballot initiative for California’s 2006 primary election.
As this effort proves, the ideas in Proposition 187 don’t die easily, even though the measure – which passed with a 63 percent majority – was gutted by federal judges and has been reviled for years both by Hispanic leaders and virtually every elected official and major political party officer in California.
But bet on this: If Arizona passes the proto-187 Proposition 200 as handily next month as every poll now indicates it probably will, the new California version will gain ground fast in shopping malls and supermarkets.
Plus, “If Proposition 200 passes, it could be a springboard for new federal legislation on illegal immigration,” Brantley Davis, an initiative analyst based in Washington, D.C., told a reporter.
He may be right. But the effects of the Arizona vote could be more direct here. For despite what Latinos may believe and despite the efforts of both big parties to distance themselves from 187 in order not to offend the growing corps of Hispanic voters, the ideas that made this proposition popular 10 years ago lost none of their popular appeal.
As passed, the measure sought to ban welfare payments to illegal immigrants. It mandated throwing children of the undocumented out of public schools, prevented illegal immigrants from receiving unemployment benefits and barred them from publicly-funded medical care except in the most dire of emergencies.
Much of the focus on the current Arizona proposition so far has been on its election provisions: The initiative seeks to force voters to show secure, government-provided identification like drivers licenses, passports or Bureau of Indian Affairs cards before they receive ballots.
Arizona voters, like those most everywhere else, are now required only to declare they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote. Proposition 200 would force them to prove it.
But this proposition, like 187 before it, goes far beyond regulations on voting. It would force all state and local government employees to check the immigration status of anyone applying for public benefits that are not mandated by federal law. State workers would face fines of up to $750 and four months in jail if they refused.
The now-circulating California proposition includes almost everything except the voting provisions of the Arizona measure.
It’s unlikely either proposal could bar children of the undocumented from public schools, as education is a federal mandate. But courts might not consider health care and welfare federal mandates even though they draw plenty of federal dollars. Judges would have to decide this issue and many others about the two initiatives.
The caveat in both that exempts public programs with federal mandates was written specifically to skirt rulings made by U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of Los Angeles and others who decimated Proposition 187.
So far, polls show Proposition 200 likely to win by as much as 2-1 or 3-1. Its provisions are popular for the same reasons Proposition 187 passed here as easily as it did: resentment of immigrants arriving here without respect for U.S. laws, fear that undocumented immigrants willing to work for substandard wages will take jobs from citizens, anger that many illegal immigrant women bear children here after they arrive and that those children automatically become full U.S. citizens, and financial pressure from paying for the education and medical care of poor immigrants and their children.
The battle lines over the Arizona proposition also mimic those that formed around Proposition 187. Most Republican state legislators are strongly in favor, while most Democrats and labor unions oppose it.
It remains to be seen whether passage of the measure would spur a strong drive for citizenship among longtime resident immigrants in Arizona and an anti-Republican tide among Latino voters there, as Proposition 187 did here.
One thing that is sure, though, is that ripples from Proposition 200 already are having a profound California effect.
And if it passes as easily as expected, it will prove that even if the ideas behind Proposition 187 are not politically palatable, they retain plenty of power, which can do nothing but boost the new California “son-of-187.”
