Some Are Embittered by Fate of Prop. 187

The days since Proposition 187 was laid to rest last week have passed in the slow, lazy rhythms of high summer with nothing moving much quicker than a trickle of condensation down a glass of iced tea.

California, 1999, fat and happy in the glow of economic recovery, seems a far cry from the roiling, blood-boiling place that gave rise to Proposition 187 five years ago.

The measure was a citizens initiative intended to limit, and in many cases eliminate, illegal immigrants’ access to state and local social services. Its quiet demise at the hands of a mediation panel set up by Gov. Gray Davis was a marked contrast to the clamorous debate that accompanied its passage by voters.

Other than the noise level, what has changed since 1994? A lot, say political professionals; very little, say those who supported the initiative.

The politicians say growing Latino political strength can be traced directly to a backlash against Proposition 187. That strength helps account for a shift of more than half a million votes from the Republican to the Democratic Party in recent elections, they say.

The strongest statement of this idea came from Bill Carrick, a Democratic campaign consultant.

“Republicans put themselves on the wrong side of history,” he said.

That is pure nonsense, according to Proposition 187 advocates, who say the only mistake Republicans made was softening their support after the initiative was challenged in court. If anything, these advocates say, the conditions that led to Proposition 187 have grown more serious, and the way in which it has been killed will add fuel to any new fires they might light.

Today’s conventional wisdom holds that a now booming economy will shelter Davis and other politicians from a storm of controversy that otherwise might arise from an electorate whose will has been thus frustrated. Maybe.

But why does every poll taken on the subject show the same level of support for Proposition 187 now as before? And who are all these angry people in Roberta Gilliam’s La Mirada driveway?

Gilliam was drawn into politics by Ross Perot in 1992. In 1994, she was one of the foot soldiers in the pro-Proposition 187 campaign. She sees California’s extensive system of social services as a carrot drawing thousands of immigrants from around the world.

“We’re in the middle of an invasion,” she said. “And who can blame them?”

Proposition 187 would have moved the carrot out of reach. Absent that strategy, Gilliam is a decisive proponent of looking for a solution in the form of a stick--a big stick.

“Shoot ‘em,” she said. “Shoot illegals at the border. If people knew they were going to get shot dead they wouldn’t come.”

Obviously, not everyone who supported Proposition 187--it received a 57% yes vote--feels as strongly. Not even everyone in Gilliam’s group feels as strongly, but what she says indicates how intense opinions on the issue can get.

Gilliam got together with a couple handfuls of other former Perot supporters to discuss what to do in the aftermath of Proposition 187. Little of what they talked about had to do with border interdiction. For the moment, anyhow, their attention is less on the immigrants themselves than on those who would enable them. If their original support for Proposition 187 derived from general social ills, this time around they have a quite specific target: Davis.

A measure of that blame, as well as an indication of the age we live in, was displayed last week in the first action Proposition 187 proponents took upon receiving the news of the end of their proposal. They reserved the name for a new Internet domain: RecallDavis.com.

Ron Prince, Proposition 187’s original proponent, came to La Mirada to brief Gilliam and her friends on the course that he and his allies advocate.

A court challenge to the mediated death of Proposition 187 seems the likeliest direction, followed by a new initiative effort, Prince said.

To which Gilliam and her friends said: Fine, but let’s go after Davis, too.

Every time Prince tried to point out the advantages of some other strategy, somebody would bring up a recall.

The same thing happened earlier in the day a few miles to the south, where the Anaheim Union High School District board gathered to give preliminary approval to a measure demanding the United States government collect money from the nations of origin of undocumented immigrants attending Anaheim schools.

The debate over the measure was as bitter and dark as anything that occurred in 1994.

While protesters pounded drums and made speeches outside the boardroom, inside, speaker after speaker pledged support for it. They all rejected the notion that the proposal sprang from racist roots. Each told stories that were in a way all variations of the same story:

Things are changing and we don’t like it.

Several speakers mentioned how different the schools are today than when they attended them. They seemed to be groping for a way back to a remembered past that no longer exists.

The roots of Proposition 187 follow this same path, running as deep as fault lines into the structure of California.

Huge demographic shifts have been occurring in California for most of the last 20 years. A wave of immigration that was first felt in Los Angeles has spread far beyond the central city, erasing the notion of the prototypical lily-white suburb.

By some measures, many Southern California suburban neighborhoods are more integrated than those in Los Angeles, said William Clark, a demographer at UCLA.

Using census data, Clark has plotted integration on a block-to-block level. His work leads to a startling view of suburbia as a new American melting pot in the making.

The integration is not limited to housing, either, Clark said. Available information on occupational segregation indicate the same trends are underway.

“If you look at the data, this is the American dream,” he said. This broad view should not discount whatsoever, he said, the sometimes harsh local effects the sheer number of the new immigrants create.

It is these local effects that lead many people to see not dreams in the making, but nightmares.

Mary Grondie of Laguna Hills told the Anaheim school trustees that “illegal minorities” have overrun her old neighborhood in Anaheim. “They have trashed the neighborhood. It looks like a Third World nation.”

“People are angry, but a lot of them feel defeated,” said Glenn Spence, one of the organizers of the Proposition 187 campaign. “There’s a sense a lot of people have that there’s nothing we can do.”

Which isn’t to say they will do nothing.

“If Davis thinks this is going to go quietly into the night, he’s mistaken,” said Barbara Coe, another Proposition 187 advocate.

People are more perturbed now than before, advocates said, and the court-condoned undoing of Proposition 187 gives them yet one more reason to be mad.