The 1994 election was a turning point for California. Pete Wilson cruised to reelection and Republicans won 40 seats in the Assembly in a year friendly for Republicans around the country. But that election sowed the seeds of the Republicans’ downfall in California, turning the state deep blue and sending the Republican Party into a death spiral.

The reason was Proposition 187. Scapegoating immigrants for economic problems is one of the most common political phenomena in California history, as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Okies, and Latinos can tell you. The 1990s saw an upswing in immigrant-bashing and in 1994 a group of Orange County Republicans put on the ballot this attack on the rights of the undocumented. Prop 187 would have denied schooling, medical care and other social services to undocumented immigrants and their families.

It passed by a large margin in November 1994, but was never implemented. Courts granted injunctions against its enforcement, and in early 1999 when Gray Davis became governor, the state’s appeals to uphold the initiative were dropped.

It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans. The anti-Latino attitudes voiced by many Prop 187 supporters drove California Latinos into the arms of the Democratic Party. Voter registration soared, and many Latino immigrants became citizens to protect their rights at the ballot box. Since the 1996 election Republican fortunes have been in terminal decline in California, a party that has become a Zombie Death Cult more interested in purity fights than addressing California’s needs.

Of course, anti-immigrant sentiment never really went away after 1994. By 2003 it had returned and played a role in Davis’ recall, as the recession led to renewed immigrant-bashing and Arnold Schwarzenegger ran on the “driver’s licenses” issue. Still, Arnold had little appetite for actually pushing anti-immigrant legislation while governor, and somewhat surprisingly, the anti-immigrant movement never tried to go to the ballot to revive Prop 187 or otherwise target the undocumented.

Until now.

Right-wingers have in circulation an initiative to raise Prop 187 from the dead:

Requires applicants for state, local, and state-administered federal aid to verify lawful presence in United States. Requires applications for public benefits submitted by undocumented parents on behalf of their lawful-resident children to be given to federal authorities. Denies birth certificates to children born to undocumented parents unless mother provides fingerprint and other information to be given to federal authorities. Limits benefits for children in child-only CalWORKS cases to federal minimum. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: If upheld in the courts, unknown potential one-time and ongoing costs to state and local governments due to changes in the application process for public benefits as well as changes in the way birth certificates are issued. These costs would be partly offset by additional new fees for certain birth certificates. Unknown, but probably minor, state and local law enforcement costs due to provisions in the measure creating new crimes, such as for the filing of false affidavits to obtain public benefits. If upheld in the courts, state savings of over $1 billion annually from prohibiting child-only CalWORKs cases, partially offset by state and county costs for children who shifted to Foster Care or county general assistance programs. Further unknown savings from the provisions changing the application processes for public benefits. (09-0004.)

This is not just a revival of Prop 187, of course – it goes after CalWORKS as well, an effort to scale back the safety net couched in an attack on the children of the undocumented. This is an especially sick and unconscionable attack on Californians in a time of crisis, especially the deliberate targeting of children in order to cause them pain and suffering.

Obviously this is part of the Republicans’ 2010 election strategy. Despite the fact that earlier efforts in 2006 to ride anti-immigrant sentiment to victory failed spectacularly for Republicans, and despite the massive political price they paid after 1994 for backing Prop 187, they are at it again.

And although we’d like to think that Californians would reject this kind of horrific attack on our neighbors and community members, the wide margin of victory for Prop 187 in 1994, the passage of Prop 8 last fall, and the long history of immigrant scapegoating in California suggests to me that these have a very high chance of passage.

Progressives and Democrats will have to start organizing NOW to fight this, starting with a “do not sign” campaign.

And in a related move, George Runner has an initiative in circulation to mandate voters bring a photo ID to the polls. This maneuver has been used by Republicans to suppress the vote in several other states, including Georgia, and is of dubious constitutionality. I include it here because Runner is almost certainly going to sell this as a crackdown on the undocumented, who don’t have that kind of photo ID.

Republicans nationally and here in California appear determined to treat 2010 like 1994. Progressives and Democrats need to be ready to fight back.

Friends, there are some things that cannot go unchallenged. They are affronts to human dignity and to what it means to live in America.

Yesterday one of those things happened in Maricopa County, Arizona, the mega-county that contains Phoenix. In a move that smacks of the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and that harks back to the days of the chain gang in the South, the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, is clustering 200 undocumented inmates of the County Jail in their own special tent city. The tent city is surrounded by an electric fence, further bringing home the treatment of human being as chattel. The Phoenix New Times has a compelling story detailing yesterdays outrage.

We cannot let this stand. We are circulating a petition that asks Congressman John Conyers, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to hold hearings into this latest outrage and the long history of abuse carried out by Sheriff Arpaio.

What makes this move especially troubling is the Sheriff’s determination to expand his tent city to accommodate up to 2500 prisoners, an indication of the scope of his determination to continue his devastating policies of racial profiling, retaliatory arrests aimed at silencing critics, and forced family separation.

These actions are an affront to anyone who cares about human rights and are the logical outcome of a police state mentality that sees the only solution to our immigration challenge coming at the end of a gun.

Therefore, we at ACORN, through our Arizona ACORN members, are taking a stand against this action and the on-going immigration enforcement policies of the Sheriff that have resulted not just in this indefensible move, but in widespread human rights abuses of American citizens and our immigrant cousins.

We are following the lead of community leaders like AZ ACORN Board Member Alicia Russell who said, “This march is an extremely callous and inhumane move, aimed directly at degrading undocumented immigrants. In claiming to justify this action as a way to improve”budget savings”, Arpaio is degrading these immigrants, violating their civil rights, and overreaching his jurisdiction”, the entire Maricopa County town of Guadalupe, and Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability (MCSA) who recently staged a “Death of Democracy” funeral procession protesting the Sheriff’s actions.

We are answering the call of local leaders like Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon who has demanded a federal probe into Arpaio’s recent crime sweeps in Hispanic neighborhoods using tactics that are tantamount to racial-profiling and reflect poorly on all Arizonans, regardless of their ethnic heritage. We are answering the call of Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, who said, “We treat people equally in America. I think it’s wrong.”

Even the conservative Goldwater Institute calls Apraio’s policies “ineffective” in a report released in December. “[He] has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally[.]”

Help us take a stand by asking Rep. Conyers to lead an investigation into these tactics. America needs to stand for justice under the law, not the law of “just us”.

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.