We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion famously wrote, and Proposition 187 is what California Democrats have been repeating for decades.
Californians of a certain age can recite this. The 1994 ballot initiative aimed to make life miserable for illegal immigrants, with supporters arguing that illegal immigrants were destroying the Golden State by straining social services and changing the demographics of cities. He claimed that there was. The bill passed with a nearly two-thirds majority, despite opponents calling it racist and protests attended by hundreds of thousands of people across the state.
It was darkness before light for the Democratic Party. Republicans won the battle over Proposition 187, but ultimately lost the war.
The ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued to block the proposal from becoming law, and a federal judge ultimately ruled it unconstitutional in 1998 by then-California Judge Atty. did. Gen. Dan Lundgren withdrew the state’s appeal the following year.
By then, Latinos, the primary targets of Proposition 187 and its harmful advertising, were running for Democratic office in record numbers. Within a decade, the California Republican Party had all but declined in Sacramento as the state became more diverse. By 2012, Democrats had a supermajority in the state Legislature and have rarely given up seats since then.
The lesson of Prop. 187 seemed so clear that a 2013 Republican National Committee report warned angry old gringos that “our party’s appeal…will not continue to shrink to its core base of supporters. The party concluded that it needed to tone down its anti-immigrant rhetoric.
On the 25th anniversary of this proposal in 2019, the California Latino Congressional Caucus led a flagging campaign to 187 and an upset victory that brought former Gov. Pete Wilson to power. It included an ad that mockingly thanked the company for letting them do so. That year, I also hosted “This is California: The Battle of 187,” a one-hour podcast about the legacy of propositions.
I was part of a generation of Latinos who abandoned the Republican Party. I’ve talked about how that shift has changed California’s political landscape in dozens of talks, articles, and interviews over the past 20 years. However, while creating the podcast, I realized that there is an important part that many historians, politicians, and activists rarely pay attention to. That’s the fact that Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly in the first place.
They dismissed this legislative victory as a last gasp for white voters, and they preached the Democratic triumphalism part of the Democratic Party as if it were gospel, treating Latinos who live in a state that spawned dozens of copycat laws, bills, and politicians. I reassured her by fixing it. Their prediction was that if Republicans campaigned again on anti-immigrant politics, the blue wave that had engulfed California would spread across the country.
And here we are.
More than 200 UCLA students march in protest of Proposition 187 of 1994. Proposition 187, a ballot measure designed to make life miserable for California’s undocumented immigrants, passed with a nearly two-thirds vote.
(Paul Morse/Los Angeles Times)
Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have run the most anti-immigrant presidential campaign in modern times, spreading lies that Haitian refugees are eating cats in Vance’s home state of Ohio and recently arrived He complained that the people were “tainting the blood of our country.”
Nevertheless, they easily defeated Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, or rather, they did so through the power of hatred. Exit polls show Trump, who launched his first candidacy in 2015 by declaring that Mexicans crossing the border are “rapists and drug traffickers,” has lost the Latino vote for the second consecutive election. He increased his percentage and did better this time than any Republican president. You are a candidate because your statistics are tracked.
Opponents had predicted that Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric would boost Harris Walz’s ticket to the White House, but Trump received unchecked support from the old Prop. 187 supporters he enlisted in his first campaign. I learned a lot by talking about how immigration caused havoc in California. He understood that the immigrant bashing exploited Americans’ primitive fear of newcomers. This fear is so powerful that, at this point, the Democratic takeover of California with Prop. 187 appears to be the exception rather than the rule.
We now live in the America of Prop. 187, an America that is in many ways more tolerant of anti-immigrant politics than it was 30 years ago.
Far more Latinos now oppose open borders than then. As I wrote in a previous column, 23% of Latinos and 63% of whites voted for Prop. 187, but a UC Berkeley Institute of Government poll this year co-sponsored with the Times found that Californians We found that 63% of Latinos consider illegal immigration. feel like a “burden” compared to 79% of whites. Even Ms. Harris had to move to the right on immigration policy to catch up with Mr. Trump.
The language of Proposition 187 is silent about deporting illegal immigrants, and requires local law enforcement and public officials to alert immigration authorities if they suspect someone does not have legal status. It only said that it should be done. Meanwhile, President Trump has vowed to deport all illegal immigrants at all costs, while his immigration official, Santa Monica native Stephen Miller, previously announced that he would deport all illegal immigrants at all costs. It was considering bans and deporting immigrants for their activities. There is no doubt that Miller will pursue these measures further, with news outlets reporting that he will become President Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
This year’s vote even included his 187-year-old son. It was Arizona’s Proposition 314, which would allow local law enforcement to arrest immigrants who are in the country illegally. The state has turned more purple over the past decade, a shift experts have long attributed to Latino backlash over SB 1070, a 2010 anti-immigrant bill.
In a year when Mr. Trump won Arizona with only 52% of the vote and Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego had just voted to become the state’s first Latino senator, 63% of voters supported Prop. 314. . Even two majority-Latino counties in Arizona voted in favor. , Santa Cruz and Yuma.
The Democratic Party’s traveling firing squad is already in full effect, but one question California’s party leaders should ask themselves is whether their own version of Prop. 187, ad nauseam, has learned its lessons. This means that it has become invalid.
The story of Prop. 187 convinced party leaders across the country that Latinos would become a rock-solid voting bloc because the racism they encountered in other parts of the country would drive them to the Democratic Party. Ta. This absolves Democratic leaders of efforts to appeal to Latinos, in addition to claiming they are not as anti-Latino as Trump.
Besides, there’s something good about thinking that Latinos would break with the age-old immigrant tradition of spitting on recently arrived immigrants if Liz Cheney campaigned alongside Harris. It was just as stupid to think there would be.
As Jim McDonnell addresses the Los Angeles City Council, protesters turn away and hold signs criticizing his cooperation with ICE while he was sheriff. McDonnell was approved as the new LA Police Chief by the City Council in an 11-2 vote and was sworn in on Friday.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
Protests against President Trump’s deportation plan are already occurring across the United States. Immigration activists I know are already bracing for things to get much worse before they get any better. On social media, Trump supporters have already posted about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement hotline for reporting illegal immigrants.
I want to remind the president-elect and his supporters that history is ultimately not on their side. Despite decades of hustling about kicking people out, the country’s leaders are quick to realize their mistake, and the proverbial welcome mat is just as quickly pulled down.
After the Hoover and FDR administrations deported more than 1 million Mexican immigrants and their American-born children to Mexico during the Great Depression, labor shortages led to the introduction of the Bracero Program, which deported millions of Mexicans into labor. were legally accepted.
Dwight D. Eisenhower may have launched Operation Wetback, which deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, in the 1950s, but President Trump hailed the program as “very skilled” in Time magazine. did. But in 1965, Congress eased immigration restrictions and reshaped the country’s demographics.
In the 1980s, amid high-profile immigration raids, Democrats and Republicans worked on amnesty, which President Reagan signed into law in 1986. When Congress tried to pass anti-immigrant legislation in 2006, the largest protests in U.S. history up to that point occurred. Time galvanized a new generation of activists who won protection for the so-called Dreamers in the years that followed.
I want to remind immigration activists that the Latino backlash against Prop. 187 was by no means the silver bullet against xenophobia that so many claimed it was — and I mean, it’s been hijacked by the Democratic Party, frankly.
However, there are still valuable lessons to be learned:
It is said that the night is always darkest before dawn. And activists are now staring into a black hole that looks bigger than the one they faced in 1994.
But people 30 years ago finally found the light to move forward. Because the light always shines in the darkness, but the darkness can never understand it.
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