Georgie Anne Geyer
by Georgie Anne Geyer
Web posted by VCT October 9, 1999
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CALIFORNIA SHOWS CREATIVE POLITICS ON IMMIGRATION
LOS ANGELES -- For many years now, California has been developing a different
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Governor Gray Davis and Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. --VCT File Photo |
It was in this beautiful Golden State that political campaigns as we have historically known them were all but abolished during the last 25 years, as candidates vied through television and the Internet, and the ballot initiative became the new thermometer of civic passions.
Now California has come up with some precepts that stretch the limits of political creativity even further. The governing elite of the state has decided that: l) the majority of the vote is meaningless, 2) the decision of a single, highly ideological judge should be worth more than 59 percent of the vote, and 3) leaders of foreign countries now have the perfect right to formulate American policies.
Of course, California's Democratic Gov. Gray Davis would surely not admit to such dangerous thoughts. He sees it as only right and reasonable that he should have made a deal on Proposition l87, the l995 citizens' ballot initiative that received 59 percent of the vote to restrict welfare, social benefits and education to illegal aliens. Building on the single ruling by U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer that the popular l87 was unconstitutional, the pro-immigration governor refused to allow l87 to go to the Supreme Court and instead set up a mediation panel in which he personally negotiated with the anti-l87 and pro-immigration lobbies.
Then, on June 29, the epic political and legal struggle seemed to be over. The governor formally announced that he had agreed not to appeal the federal court ruling, thus effectively voiding l87. But in order to make it look and sound good to everybody, he said that the kinds of citizenship controls that l87 would have provided were now provided by similar federal laws anyway. He even went so far as to state, "The spirit of l87 has been implemented."
Mario Obledo - co-founder of MALDEF - June, 1998 |
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Indeed, Gov. Davis had said during the Zedillo visit that "in the near future, people will look at California and Mexico as one magnificent region." Meanwhile, in all of this intense jockeying, the very real issues that Proposition l87 speaks to become ever more lost.
Two new studies provide unmistakable proof that the United States' wantonly lax immigration policies are fueling a dangerous increase in poverty. Both the respected Urban Institute in Washington and the federal General Accounting Office found that poverty in immigrant households is dramatically higher than that of the native born and that new immigrants use government assistance substantially more than the native born. (Here in Los Angeles, to cite one example, immigrant households constitute 59 percent of those classified as poor.)
Anti-l87 circles such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund play constantly on the theme that propositions such as l87 in California are "racist." To the contrary, they are desperate attempts by responsible citizens to move around increasingly unrepresentative government, to determine how their tax monies should be spent and, by the way, to try to define what citizenship possibly means today.
If one looks at the tactics of the anti-l87 groups, one can see why the
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Villaraigosa, a leading Reconquista, is Speaker of the California Assembly. Photo inserted by VCT - from archives.... |
Finally, this governor tries to smooth everything over -- and, by the way, end the controversy completely on his terms -- with his words about how federal laws cover the same territory. Not only is this false, but the governor's record has been openly and provably that of extending more and more benefits to illegal aliens. (In one of his policies, Davis guaranteed that California taxpayers would cover the costs of prenatal care for any illegal aliens.)
The pro-l87 lobby, led by Glenn Spencer, longtime citizen initiative leader, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, is rightly outraged at all of this manipulating and at these shenanigans. They are already engaged in another mammoth effort, this time to press for a recall of Gov. Davis through gathering l.1 million signatures. "What we're asking for is a new election in California," he told me, exulting that his movement had already had 20,000 visits* to its Web site on this issue without as yet any publicity. And Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, seeing a backlash over his comments in Mexico, has already pulled back on them.
Almost certainly, California is merely the first conflict in a long national struggle over rights and responsibilities.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
*- RecallDavis.com has had over 50,000 hits as of noon on 10/9/99
