Twenty years ago this month, 59 percent of California voters passed a ballot measure designed to set up a state-run immigration system and deny most public benefits — including K-12 education — to illegal immigrants. Proposition 187 was widely viewed as one of the harshest anti-immigrant measures in the country.
But when President Barack Obama last week signed executive orders to protect about 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, there were only muted protests in the Golden State. And polls show that more Californians back Obama on this than oppose him.
“It’s a very different atmosphere from what we had in the 1990s, when there was more fear,” said pollster Mark Baldassare, president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California.
He said California has found that “if you’re going to have a strong economy, you’ve got to have an immigration policy that’s working for you” — from Central Valley farms, to restaurants and hotels, to domestic work in homes across the state.
There’s no doubt that the California of 2014 is a much different place than the California of 1994. It’s much less white, and a whole lot more blue at the ballot box. Most of all, it’s a state — unlike much of the nation — that has come to see illegal immigration as a fact of life.
While employing and living alongside these immigrants, Californians see in them reflections of their own families, said Mark Silverman, immigration policy director at the San Francisco-based Immigrant Resource Legal Center. An immigration attorney since 1983, he recalls his grandmother weeping as she described escaping to America from Ukraine’s anti-Jewish pogroms.
“We need to remember the tears of our grandmothers,” he said.
In hindsight, the change began almost immediately after the passage of Proposition 187.
The Rev. Jon Pedigo remembers he was so angry that he instantly started planning a march from his parish in Morgan Hill to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose.
“I said, ‘I’m going to take that frickin’ cross from the church and I’m gonna walk to the downtown cathedral and demand that something be done,'” said Pedigo, now pastor of East San Jose’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The next morning he led 250 people on the 21-mile walk.
“We filled the cathedral. We filled the park. It was amazing,” he said. “We said, ‘We will not put up with this, and we want God on our side.'”
Watching Obama on television Friday as he spoke in Las Vegas about his executive actions, Pedigo mused that California’s powerful transformation on the illegal immigration issue is rooted in the traditions of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Both, he said, understood that “you don’t start with power — you start with people, and people grow into their power. Now, today in California, you can’t get elected if you are anti-immigrant.”
Baldassare’s institute in September found that 61 percent of Californians believe immigrants are a benefit to the state because of their hard work and job skills, compared with 32 percent who said they’re a burden because they use public services. That’s a far cry from when PPIC first asked the question in April 1998 and a roughly equal number of Californians felt each way.
Early this year, PPIC found that 86 percent of California adults favored providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. And with Congress dragging its feet, the Field Poll found in late August that 46 percent of California voters favored Obama issuing an executive order to make broad changes to the nation’s immigration policies; 36 percent were opposed.
But former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed Proposition 187 two decades ago, told this newspaper that Californians who support the president’s action “frankly haven’t thought about it very much.”
Wilson said he remains convinced most Californians oppose protecting those who broke the law to get here — and also oppose the president ignoring Congress.
“For the president to become a scofflaw … is really unsupportable,” he said. “Whatever his intentions, they should not supersede the Constitution.”
Yet Bill Whalen, Wilson’s chief speechwriter and public affairs director for five years, said California’s “emotional outburst over immigration” is over.
“A lot of the anger over the subject … that is going on in other states and on television now, we went through in 1994,” said Whalen, now a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
Proposition 187 was quickly frozen and later struck down by the courts, and Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, in 1999 pulled the plug on the appeals. But the measure’s lasting legacy was alienating the Golden State’s burgeoning Latino population from the GOP, a rift that helped make California a Democratic stronghold.
Still, Ira Mehlman longs for a return to those days.
“Obviously, the state government has done a 180 on how it deals with the issue,” said Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies to lower immigration levels. “The state of California can’t do enough to protect illegal aliens — driver’s licenses, softening ICE detainers. They are prepared to give them anything they want.”
Mehlman, FAIR’s California spokesman when Proposition 187 passed, believes such a measure could still pass today, depending on how it’s written. “There is still support for enforcement of immigrant laws and against handing out all kinds of benefits and services,” he said.
Whalen, however, says Californians have left Mehlman’s point of view behind. And Dan Schnur, who was Wilson’s chief spokesman for five years, agrees.
Today’s younger Californians “have grown up in a much more heterogeneous society than their parents or grandparents” and so are more supportive of immigration reform efforts that are kind to the undocumented.
Now, he said, it’s the rest of the nation’s turn to go through the angst California went through in the ’90s.
“Other parts of the country are experiencing the same kind of demographic and cultural shifts that California did some time ago, so now they’re struggling through the same policy debates that we’ve already experienced,” said Schnur, who now directs the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics.
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” he said. “It just moves east.” Follow Josh Richman at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman and David E. Early at Twitter.com/DavidEarlySr.
