What Happened to the Golden State?
Editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Californians’ shifting views on illegal immigration
Sunday, February 24, 2013
In 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, which sought to deny basic services to illegal immigrants. The controversial initiative (which was never implemented, as the courts declared it to be unconstitutional) was the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the nation on the topic of illegal immigration.
Within a decade, states and counties all over the nation were competing to see who could create the harshest anti-immigrant proposal.
But the latest Field Poll should alert the rest of the country about how swiftly the voters can change their minds on illegal immigration - and what that shift will mean for the nation’s politics.
The newest Field Poll shows that a whopping 90 percent of California voters now support offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have lived for years in the United States and have stayed out of trouble.
There’s resounding support (76 percent) for guest-worker programs and for offering more visas to highly skilled immigrants (73 percent).
California voters are now so open to immigration that even still-controversial ideas, such as offering driver’s licenses to undocumented residents, get a thumbs-up - a 52 to 43 percent majority now favors issuing the licenses.
Sixty percent of voters believe that undocumented students should be allowed to pay the same tuition rates as other residents to attend public universities.
These are startling numbers. In many ways, they are good news - they show that California’s voters have grown more humane. After living and working among undocumented immigrants for two decades, they accept that the people who have made their lives here deserve a place here, paperwork or not.
While Californians still dislike illegal immigration - the poll also notes that 65 percent of voters support increasing the number of federal agents on the U.S.-Mexico border, and 57 percent want strong penalties for those who hire illegal immigrants - they’ve clearly made a distinction between immigration as an issue and the immigrants themselves.
On a state level, this has been great for the Democratic Party. Although Proposition 187 propelled Republican governor Pete Wilson to re-election in 1994, support of anti-immigration positions became an albatross for the GOP in the ensuing decades. Today, two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the Legislature are held by Democrats. And as California’s demographics continue to shift away from older, whiter voters and toward a younger, more diverse electorate, the Republican Party may find itself more and more marginalized.
On a national level, the Republican Party is beginning to realize that it may suffer the same fate, which is why it’s trying so desperately to rehabilitate its image with Latino voters.
But California’s experience suggests that this rehabilitation will take more than delivering the same message in Spanish: It’s going to take a wholesale rethinking of many policies, including how the country handles the 11 million undocumented people already living within our borders. A path to citizenship isn’t just smart policy - in the long run, it’s smart politics, too.
These “undocumented” people hate our country and have no interest in becoming responsible citizens. They had no notion of citizenship from the countries they fled and they have none for this country either.
Big deal...BTW, half that article is bull cheet.
On the other hand, look at the so-called big red states like Texas...
Read it and weep..
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Study: 70% of Texas’ illegal immigrant families receive welfare
In Texas, 54 percent of legal immigrants and 70 percent of illegal immigrants receive welfare assistance, with illegal immigrants generally receiving benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children
Overall, Texas tied with California and New York for the second highest immigrant welfare rates behind Arizona.
Texas showed 61 percent of households headed by an immigrant utilizing at least one program compared to the 42 percent of Texas natives on welfare.
“This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work,” Steve Camorata, Director of Research at CIS, said.
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Yuk yuk..
That article you provided does get one thing right; for the GOP to win over Hispanics and Asians it would take more than just caving and going along with liberal comprehensive immigration reform. The reason Hispanics in particular vote Democrat is because they are a natural Democrat constituency. They vote Democrat because they are a liberal population on most issues. They overwhelmingly support Obamacare. They support ever more gun control and have little regard for the Second Amendment. They look unfavorably on capitalism. They support bigger government. The Democrats would be hard pressed to design a more perfect voter. The evidence suggest that 25-30% of the latinos are consistently open to voting Republican. And even if the GOP can consistently repeat Bush’s 40% in 2004 (the figure so often repeated as the magic number for Republicans), then simple math says that as the Hispanic electorate grows, the net loss for the GOP will grow as well.
Yet somehow most of the GOP leadership and elite conservative voices promote the utter nonsense that Hispanics are natural Republicans/conservatives, who would flock to us if only we’d become liberal on immigration. They push the garbage that if only we surrender on this one issue, then Hispanics will suddenly forget all the other issues on which they prefer the Democrats.
Do the Rubios and Bushes really believe the crap they push? I find it hard to believe they can really believe such fantasies. They should be honest and tell us that immigration will just be the first of many issues we have to go left on in order to win over immigrant communities.
You're arguing like the real losers who advise a rape victim that, if she can't prevent it, she might as well enjoy it. Most Californians, with a long memory of the past, aren't buying your social snake oil.