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Revisiting the Origins of California's Proposition 187
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the passage of California's Proposition 187. The 1994 ballot measure's far-reaching mandate-to make alleged violations of federal immigration law grounds for denying all public benefits, education, and health services and to require all public employees to report anyone suspected of such violations-immediately reordered the landscape for immigration policy debates nationally. Although the courts eventually ruled that most of the operating provisions of Proposition 187 were unlawful, key principles of the initiative found their way into the overhaul of federal welfare policies over the next two years. The measure fused together diverse political claims-demands for fiscal austerity, assertions of states' rights, racialized constructions of criminality, and coded appeals to white cultural nationalism- into a distinct ideological alchemy.1
The legacy of this powerful discourse was made evident in the debate surrounding the April 2010 passage of Arizona Senate Bill (SB) 1070, which gave police broad authority to detain anyone suspected of immigration violations. As Republican state senator Russell Pearce explained at the time: "Why did I propose SB 1070? I saw the enormous fiscal and social costs that illegal immigration was imposing on my state. I saw Americans out of work, hospitals and schools overflowed, and budgets strained. Most disturbingly, I saw my fellow citizens victimized by illegal alien criminals."2 The narratives in plain sight here-allegations about the fiscal burdens of immigration, the distinction between a beleaguered citizenry and burdensome newcomers, and the explicit linkage between immigration and crime-were drawn directly from the Proposition 187 campaign. In both Arizona and California, these narratives have framed the positions of proponents as well as opponents, forcing immigrants' rights leaders into the defensive position of refuting and disproving charges that immigrants are onerous, predatory, and deserving of harsh punishment.
To be sure, there is a long history of framing immigration debates in similar terms, and productive comparisons can be made between the recent restriction efforts witnessed in California and Arizona and nativist projects targeting Chinese, Irish, and other immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigration scholars have long posited that economic downturns combined with a changing demography, a heightened awareness of social and cultural differences, and currents of political demagoguery produce predictable...