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Immigration: Sinking Our State - PDF - / Send As Email
by Ron K. Unz
In Reason, November 1994, pp. 46-47 - Previous Article / Next Article

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Uncorrected Raw Text
Sinking Our State U
By Ron K. Unz
California's "Save Our State;
initiative is masquerading as an
attack on welfare.
F THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH
good intentions, then the Save Our I State immigration initiative on Cali-
fornia's November ballot represents a su-
perhighway.
At first glance, the measure, which pre-
vents illegal immigrants from receiving
public benefits, might appear quite attrac-
tive to opponents of California's over-
grown social welfare state. After all, if
rolling back the tide of wealth redistribu-
tion has to start somewhere, why not with
recipients who aren't even legal residents?
Even the staunchest libertarians who
believe in open borders don't believe that
illegal immigrants should receive finan-
cial subsidies from the country they enter.
Add to this California's horrendous bud-
get deficit, and support for any measure
which purports to save tax money seems
assured. Indeed, according to a Field poll,
the measure, which will appear as Propo-
sition 187, enjoys 64 percent support.
So much for theory. In practice, Prop.
187 would be an unmitigated disaster for
California, with regard both to personal
liberty and to state finance.
Consider a few simple facts. Illegal im-
migrants are already ineligible for state
welfare assistance or food stamps, and
their estimated use of medical services is
quite low, just a small fraction of 1 per-
cent of California's $57 billion budget.
The only significant government cost as-
sociated with illegal immigration is there-
fore through the public school system,
which immigrant children attend. Illegal
immigrants make up perhaps 5 percent of
California's total population, and most are
in the prime working years of 25 to 40;
those with children obviously make use of
the public schools, and the sums involved
Proposition 187 masks the real issue in California
and elsewhere, which is not illegal immigration,
but immigration period.
are substantial. So one of the central
thrusts of the SOS initiative is to root out
these immigrant children (most of whom
are actually American-born citizens) from
the public schools.
How to do this? By turning public
school teachers and administrators into de
facto INS agents, forcing them to investi-
gate the family background of each and
every child in their school, at enormous
effort and expense, and to report to the au-
thorities those whom they suspect may
have a father or mother who entered the
country illegally. Having schools encour-
age small children to inform on the status
of their parents has heavy totalitarian
overtones, and the practice was even
abandoned by the Soviet Union soon after
Stalin's death. In recent years, there have
been scattered reports of American school
drug-education programs that have per-
suaded their elementary school enrollees
to turn their parents in to the police. Es-
tablishing our public schools as agencies
of government law enforcement, as SOS
would do, is not a happy precedent.
HE INITIATIVE ONLY GETS WORSE. SINCE T the authors view immigrant workers
with as much alarm as immigrant lay-
abouts, the measure mandates a five-year
prison sentence (or $25,000 fine:, for any
illegal immigrant who uses false identity
papers in pursuit of gainful employment.
Although estimates vary, perhaps up-
wards of 1 million of the illegal immi-
grants employed as California's garden-
ers, housemaids, hotel workers, or con-
struction laborers have some form of false
identity documents.
Meanwhile, California's bloated
prison system has average annual costs of
$23,000 per inmate. Turning hundreds of
thousands of hard-working, tax-paying
minimum-wage gardeners and busboys
into prison inmates-at a cost of tens of
billions of dollars-hardly seems a sen-
sible means of solving the state's budget
problems. A state that pays generous wel-
fare benefits to those who don't work and
imprisons those who do defies rationality.
And Prop. 187's public school provi-
sions make false papers even more likely.
To keep the public schools from expelling
their 6- or 7-year-old children, many im-
migrant mothers will undoubtedly acquire
false documents and risk a five-year
prison sentence. For the land of liberty to
flood its prisons with identity-card viola-
tors seems an abomination.
How do the principal advocates of the
initiative respond to these charges, which
I raised with them privately during my re-
cent Republican primary challenge to
Gov. Pete Wilson? One prominent SOS
supporter claimed that much of the initia-
tive was "obviously unconstitutional" and
would be thrown out by the courts. An-
other felt that judges would refuse to en-
force a law so clearly unjust. But one fer-
vent grass-roots activist had the simplest
defense, arguing that SOS was intended to
be unworkable and bankrupt the state,
thereby forcing Washington to finally "do
46 REASON NOVEMBER 1994
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