Davis Wisely Spurns Wilson’s Divisiveness

California Gov. Gray Davis took a firm step last week to end some of the ugly divisiveness that marred the final term of his predecessor, Pete Wilson.

It was a small step, really. By one estimate, it is 0.08% of a state budget of $78 billion. But it was a step fraught with symbolism to one-quarter of California’s population, almost 8 million Mexican Americans and other Latinos.

The step involved a practice so logical that it should never have been the focus of an argument--political or otherwise: providing prenatal care for pregnant women too poor to afford it. Health care specialists agree that every dollar spent on prenatal care saves more than twice what could be spent later treating preventable maladies in newborn infants.

The issue became divisive because many of the women who get state-funded prenatal care in California--perhaps 70,000 a year--are in the United States illegally. Wilson chose to make illegal immigrants, and the harm he believes they do, a key theme of his 1994 reelection campaign.

The former governor followed up his campaign rhetoric by, among other things, trying to cut state funding for prenatal care for illegal immigrant women.

Wilson never succeeded, largely because of critics who took their case to court, pointing out that even if the women at issue were illegal immigrants, their children were going to be U.S. citizens and thereby entitled to public health care. The courts agreed, and consistently ordered the Wilson administration to provide money for prenatal care.

Last week, in modifying the 1999 California budget that he inherited from Wilson, Davis opted to include the money that his predecessor had long refused to earmark--$60 million for prenatal care for illegal immigrant women. And while one or two state legislators grumbled at the shift, most indicated that the era of fighting over such a fundamentally sound and humane policy are over.

Still, I wonder if Wilson gets it--even after all that has happened since his reelection five years ago.

Our former governor, of course, has become a hated symbol in Latino political circles, the boogeyman Latino activists used--and will continue to use until a better symbol comes along--to scare Latino immigrants into becoming citizens, then to vote against Republicans who share Wilson’s sentiments.

That Latino backlash helped elect Davis, a Democrat, and it helped fellow Democrats take over the state Legislature. The conventional wisdom is that all those angry new Latino voters are lying in wait for Wilson himself, should he ever run for public office again.

That is one reason most political pros who handicap the 2000 presidential race consider Wilson a weak noncontender, rather than the California heavyweight former California governors like Ronald Reagan and Edmund G. Brown were.

Still, Wilson has indicated he may try to run for the White House again, despite a failed attempt in 1995. If he does, look to him to revive an argument he often used to justify his stance against prenatal care and other government benefits, like public education, for illegal immigrants:

“We are not anti-Latino or even anti-immigrant,” Wilson and his aides would insist. “We are against illegal immigrants.”

Sounds perfectly reasonable--unless you’re Mexican American.

To illustrate why, consider another story that appeared in last week’s Times: A federal appeals court ruled that a group of Latinos from Arizona can file a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Border Patrol. The plaintiffs, all U.S. citizens or legal resident aliens, allege that border agents routinely stop motorists in southern Arizona who “look Mexican.”

Latinos “cannot drive between Nogales, Tucson and Phoenix without a good chance that they will be stopped by a Border Patrol agent,” said an Arizona attorney who filed the case.

Obviously, that case will have to be adjudicated to determine whether the Border Patrol is engaged in a pattern or practice that amounts to discrimination against Latino citizens.

But I can assure you that few, if any, Latinos believe that it can’t possibly happen. There are just too many instances where it has happened, as in the 1930s, when thousands of U.S.-born Latino children were deported with their Mexican-born parents to clear U.S. welfare rolls.

Most Latinos suspect that such blatant discrimination could happen again, and all too easily--whether on the highways of Arizona or in the maternity wards of California. That’s why they tend to take political immigrant-bashing personally, even when couched in reasonable language.

It’s also why Gray Davis is smart to back away from any semblance of his predecessor’s anti-immigrant stance. And why Pete Wilson may yet regret the re-election campaign he ran five years ago.