Save Our State? It’s More Like Spite Our State : This initiative, brainchild of a man who was burned by an illegal contractor, would amount to ethnic cleansing.

California is in a borderline state of mind between desperation and xenophobia. The unease of feeling like aliens in our own land is partly due to our federal system, which forbids states from controlling their borders; partly due to the geocultural reality of a region that ethnographer Joel Garreau calls “Mex-America,” a former Mexican territory slowly being reabsorbed by la reconquista. Where once American migrants from the Dust Bowl sought the California Dream, now their embittered descendants scapegoat immigrants for its changing reality. In the fat years, California beckons undocumented immigrants to pick its strawberries, make its motel beds and nurture its babies. In the lean years, we demonize the strangers in our midst, blaming them for pestilence, unemployment and criminality, including the crime of being born.

The grapes of wrath are being cultivated anew by a group calling itself Save Our State, which has qualified an initiative for the November ballot. The SOS initiative is vintage 1994 California white Zinfandel with a blush of populism and a nutty nativist flavor. It is being marketed with great success--a Los Angeles Times poll shows 62% favor it--as a tonic for California’s ills. Its provisions are designed for purgative effect: SOS would purge undocumented children from public schools, where bilingual programs teach them to read and write English; purge their mothers from MediCal clinics, where they receive life- and cost-saving prenatal care; purge poor undocumented families from Aid to Families With Dependent Children, plunging their American-born children deeper into poverty. This is not only irrational; it is also unconstitutional.

A 1982 Supreme Court decision, upholding the right of undocumented children to receive public education in Texas, would almost certainly invalidate key parts of the California initiative. Why, then, put so much effort into getting it passed? The answer is simple, and troubling: SOS was born out of spite.

The idea was conceived by Ron Prince, an obscure accountant in Orange County who lost half a million dollars in an aborted house construction project. Prince says he was bilked by the contractor, who, he later discovered, was neither licensed nor a legal resident. Prince asked local authorities to prosecute, to no avail. Frustrated, he stood in front of a supermarket with a homespun petition; few people signed.

“I knew something needed to be done, but I didn’t know what,” Prince said. If the disgruntled accountant had dropped it there, California might have been spared the “Spite Our State” campaign. But Prince teamed up with two Reagan-era immigration officials now working as lobbyists. Harold Ezell and Alan Nelson knew how to hit hot buttons for political profit. They helped draft the Draconian provisions that would turn teachers into border guards, disrupt and create a permanent alien underclass vulnerable to pogroms.

The flaw of this misguided initiative is that it confuses immigration policy, solely a federal responsibility, with policies for immigrants, which are under federal, state and local control. This distinction is important. It is appropriate for a nation to choose whether to open or close its borders to immigrants. But it is hypocritical for citizens en masse to subvert immigration laws by inviting illegal immigrants to do their dirty work and then hound their children.

The place to halt immigration is at the border, where the Clinton Administration is focusing increased manpower. The second line is employer sanctions, punishing bosses who knowingly hire undocumented workers. Employer sanctions are the law of the land, the very law Ron Prince unwittingly broke by hiring an undocumented contractor to build his house. If millions of Californians continue to knowingly hire undocumented workers while moving to violate their children’s basic rights, our collective house is in sad shape.

California’s border anxiety reflects deep ambivalences about our identity, ethnic composition and place in the world. These conflicts cannot be resolved by cutting off our nose to spite our face, but by looking in the mirror and seeing the reality of who we are, how we got here and where nativist fears are taking us. People who feel frustrated and powerless are easily manipulated by false saviors to turn on their neighbors. It happened in Europe during the Nazi era; in Cambodia under Pol Pot; it’s still happening in Bosnia and Rwanda. A bloodless ethnic cleansing masked in the trappings of a democratic vote can happen here. Save our state from SOS.