Voting on state initiatives usually has local political implications only, but the vote on what Californians call Prop 187 will have national impact. It bans education, health and employment benefits for illegal aliens.
Recently there has been prominent bi-partisan opposition to the initiative. Jack Kemp, who is pondering seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and William Bennett, a leading Republican idea man, came out against it. So did President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno. In the state, it is still a partisan issue. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is against it, and her opponent, Rep. Michael Huffington, is for it. She was an early odds-on favorite; now it is close. If she were to lose, politicians will take notice.
More significantly, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson has made support of Proposition 187 the centerpiece of his re-election bid. His opponent, Kathleen Brown, opposes it. In part because of this difference, Governor Wilson, once given up for dead in his recession-wracked state, now leads in polls.
Should he and Prop 187 win, he will become a potential presidential nominee, perhaps the immediate front-runner. His is the biggest state, in delegates and electoral votes. It is having an early primary in 1996. So the road to the White House leads through California this time. Governor Wilson is unlikely to be challenged on an issue he won on. Messrs. Kemp and Bennett are probably right when they say the proposition is unconstitutional and un-Republican, philosophically speaking, but politics is not only about legality and philosophy.
A law that could turn teachers and doctors into border guards and turn children out into the streets is wrong. But something has to be done about illegal immigration. The Urban Institute calculates that in California and six other states, prison, health and school costs for illegals is approximately $4 billion a year. If the federal government can't stop illegals from coming in, and if it won't subsidize states for that failure, no one should be surprised to see radical efforts endorsed by the grass roots. Proposition 187 may seem tame someday.
The opponents of the measure do not do themselves or their cause a favor when they demagogue the issue. Mr. Kemp said Prop 187 was a case of his party's "turning its back on people of color." But according to one recent poll, almost half the Latinos and a majority of blacks and Asians in California support the proposition. They, as a California scholar, put it, are "most directly threatened by the pool of illegal labor [which] depresses the wages of legal immigrants and the working poor."