When immigration-related issues have come up for a vote, as they did in 1994 with California’s Proposition 187, the voting results don’t always look like the poll results reported above. “Prop 187,” billed as the “illegal alien initiative,” passed with 59 percent of the vote—a significant majority.1 The initiative would have prohibited undocumented immigrants from receiving public health and education services in the state, had not most of its provisions been quickly struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
There are two reasons why the vote on Prop 187 does not seem to correspond to the more positive attitude about immigrants that the polls tend to show. One is that the campaign itself mobilized virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric—and fallacious arguments—that may have influenced public opinion. In addition, while polls use scientific methods to come up with a representative cross-section of the population, electoral voting merely records the opinions of those who choose to vote. In California’s 1994 election, only 8.9 million people voted—fewer than half of those eligible.
“The demographic profile of voters in the 1994 election contrasts sharply with the state’s larger adult population and its citizen adults who are eligible to vote,” one analysis of the results concluded. “As a group, voters in 1994 are older, include more white non-Hispanics, are more conservative, have higher levels of income, are better educated, include fewer residents of Los Angeles County, and are more apt to be affiliated with Protestant religions.”2 By age, race, political affiliation, and religion, this election mobilized precisely those who were more likely to hold anti-immigrant views.
A couple of other facts stand out about the results. First, the poorest Californians—those earning under twenty thousand dollars a year—were more opposed to Prop 187 than any other income group. Not surprisingly, Latinos voted overwhelmingly against the initiative, and political liberals and Democrats also tended to oppose it. Interestingly, men supported Prop 187 much more than women did. Only 52 percent of blacks and Asians supported it, while 64 percent of whites did—and 69 percent of white men.3
Another study of the campaign tactics of the two sides notes that even the “No on 187” campaign failed to challenge the anti-immigrant message. Jan Adams, a leader of the anti-187 movement in northern California, explained that the professional political consultants who ran the campaign “concluded it was necessary to concede the problematic nature of immigration, but find something even more unpopular than ‘illegal’ immigrants to blame, preferably the Federal government for failing to police the border adequately. A second set of messages played on voters’ fears: rampaging gangs of (brown) children pushed out of the schools; the spread of tuberculosis by untreated ‘illegals’; and, the staple of anti-initiative campaigns, it would all lead to bureaucracy and cost too much.”4
By failing to offer a counter to the anti-immigrant message promoted by the pro-187 campaign, the “no” campaign may have actually strengthened anti-immigrant sentiment and encouraged some people to vote “yes.”
Although Prop 187 was struck down by the courts, many of its provisions were in fact implemented in 1996 through the Welfare Reform Act. The act carefully avoided the blatantly unconstitutional elements of Prop 187, like denying public education to undocumented immigrant children. But it effectively excluded immigrants, documented and undocumented, from almost all other public benefits.
Prop 187 also played an important role in President Clinton’s decision to unleash an enormous new border control initiative. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, according to Wayne Cornelius, is “broad but not very deep”—except when mobilized through campaigns like the 187 campaign. With the 1996 elections approaching and California a key to a Clinton victory, the president decided to capitalize on—and thus further fan the flames of—the anti-immigrant upsurge there. One former Clinton official recalled a deliberate decision to “put as much money into the INS as it could plausibly absorb.”5
The approval of Prop 187 does not necessarily show the strength of anti-immigrant attitudes in the United States. It did, though, provide a lesson to politicians on the potential for inflaming, and benefiting from, these attitudes.