In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, California believed it could solve its economic crisis by deporting 2 million Mexican and Mexican American residents – including many US-born citizens. It did absolutely nothing to ameliorate the Depression – you cannot exclude your way to prosperity – but nevertheless the deportations went on throughout the decade.

The Assembly Republicans, better known as the Yacht Party, appear to be heading down the same failed path. They have come up with the foolish idea that the budget crisis can be balanced by attacking immigrants:

Assembly Republicans this week promoted nearly two dozen bills they said would reduce the “negative impact” that illegal immigrants have on the state budget and border security. The proposals range from requiring individuals to show proof of citizenship when receiving state-funded benefits to repealing a law enabling undocumented students to pay in-state college tuition….

Assembly Republicans on Tuesday said illegal immigrants cost the state $9 billion annually, citing a Federation for American Immigration Reform study released in 2004. The group estimated that California spends an estimated $7.7 billion alone on education for undocumented students.

Those numbers are suspect at best. In Gil  Cedillo’s response to this nonsense he cites these numbers:

a 2004 Social Security Administration analysis cited a $7 billion surplus in social security contributions as a result of payments from the undocumented, and a study by the Texas state comptroller in December 2006 reported the absence of an estimated 1.4 million undocumented in Texas would result in a loss to gross state product of over $17 billion. No similar analysis has been conducted in California whose undocumented population is similar in size to Texas.

Arnold, for his part, actually got it right in replying to this:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it a “big mistake” Wednesday to blame illegal immigrants for the state’s looming $8 billion budget gap, just as Republican lawmakers have proposed a rollback of benefits for illegal immigrants to save money….

“There is, you know, always a time like this where you start pointing the finger at various different elements of what creates the budget mess, and, you know, some may point the finger at illegal immigrants,” Schwarzenegger said. “I can guarantee you, I have been now four years in office in Sacramento, I don’t think that illegal immigration has created the mess that we are in.”

Of course, Arnold himself bears most of the responsibility here. And his approach to the budget has been to blame the Legislature and obscure the fact that his actions are what caused this crisis – from the reckless elimination of $6.1 billion in VLF money to the borrowing to close the last deficit to his destructive 10% across the board cuts, this crisis is Arnold’s and Arnold’s alone.

As the recent PPIC numbers show, immigrant bashing has quickly lost its political luster. Fewer and fewer Californians are falling for the Yacht Party’s scapegoating efforts.

California’s future depends on immigration. The trolls in the newspaper and blog comments may not agree, but they are in the minority and unwilling to face reality. The only way to solve our budget crisis is to solve  the structural revenue shortfall, and most Californians now agree.

The Yacht Party merely puts itself further and further out on a limb and out of step with public  opinion each time they propose solutions that benefit the wealthy few at the expense of everyone else. It’s not entirely clear to me how bipartisan solutions are going to work when one of the parties has gone off the deep end like this.