Also, it must be noted that Prop. 187 saved Republican Pete Wilson's governatorial campaign. Before he endorsed it, he was far behind in the polls. Once he got on board and started campaigning for it, aggresively, he took the lead and went on to win.
Bush has always supported amnesty, but I think one of the reasons he’s so determined to pass this particular bill is to get a nice write-up in the history books. Lyndon Johnson has been trashed by most historians for supporting the Vietnam War, but the trashing has been more than balanced by the fawning write-ups he receives for supporting the Great Society, three major “civil rights” bills, and the 1965 Immigration Act.
There’s been a lot of talk that future historians (whom it’s simply assumed will be “liberals”) will fill our public schools with history texts painting Bush as a failure and a criminal for invading Iraq. Bush figures that by getting a leftist amnesty bill passed, he’ll at least have some praise directed his way in those future texts. And as more and more of those texts will be written by “multi-culturalist” historians, especially if the bill passes and radically changes our demographics, he’ll probably be correct. He may even be credited as the great hero who drove the final nail into the coffin of the ugly, old America envisioned by our founders, thus locking leftist Democrats into power for all the forseeable future.