Closing California

By Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange.com. Posted September 29, 2004.

If the Republican Party’s pre-convention decision to keep immigration issues and developments in Utah and Colorado – where a xenophobic candidate was defeated and an anti-immigration initiative failed to qualify for the ballot, respectively – out of the spotlight are indicative of a sea-change in the nation’s “immigration wars,” the conservative California Republican Assembly, and Dr. Franklin L. Banker, a Carmichael, California, oncologist, apparently haven’t gotten the news.

The California Republican Assembly, a Monrovia-based, ultra right-wing grassroots GOP group headed by Mike Spence, is aiming to gather enough signatures to qualify another anti-immigrant initiative for the March 2006 state ballot. According to Copley News Service, the Save Our License initiative "is a narrowed version of the polarizing Proposition 187,” a 1994 ballot measure that was handily approved by voters by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin.

Proposition 187 was later invalidated by the state’s courts, which decided to allow children of illegal immigrants to attend school and receive medical care.

The new initiative would not ban services the courts have already exempted.

"I'm trying to protect the Constitution, trying to protect the great United States of America," Spence told the Pasadena Star-News. "Wave upon wave of immigration throughout history has had a way of integrating itself into American society. Now, we have created a process where that isn't happening. We're not having assimilation, they're not embracing American values."

Spence, who has been in the forefront of efforts to deny driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, told the newspaper that "the will of the voters was betrayed in the deal that ended Proposition 187."

According to the CRA web site, the Save Our License Initiative consists of three main provisions: "First, the government will not provide any benefits not mandated by federal law. Second, the government will defend this law against any and all legal challenges. Third, individual citizens will be granted the power to sue to compel compliance with the law.”

Banker's Brief

Dr. Franklin L. Banker is taking a different approach to the question of immigration. He is cleverly couching his proposal as a pro-environment, anti-population growth and pro-sexuality education measure – with a number of anti-immigrant sections tucked into it. Dr. Banker’s magic number is 373,816 – the number of qualified signatures he needs to collect by October 15, 2004 in order to qualify for the California ballot.

“Dr. Banker’s initiative comes on the heels of the Save Our State initiative – Proposition 187 redux – introduced in California by Paul Nachman, a leader of SUSPS,” Devin Burghart, the director of the Building Democracy Initiative of the Chicago-based Center for New Community and a veteran anti-immigration watcher, told me in a recent e-mail interview. “That initiative went nowhere; it wasn’t even able to garner enough support to get on the ballot. Now, it appears that they’re looking for new ways to package anti-immigrant legislation and make it more appealing to environmentalists as a constituency.”

The good doctor’s effort also appears to be stamped from the same mold as the recent failed “hostile takeover” of the Sierra Club by SUSPS activists and other anti-immigration organizations. “The proposed ballot language is remarkably similar to the way in which anti-immigrant activists pitched their candidates to Sierra Club voters,” said Burghart.

Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements.

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