You won’t be surprised that Donald J. Trump doesn’t know history. After all, one of the very first things he said when he rode down his tacky gold escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015 was this:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
It was a different age 10 years ago. The world gasped instead of shrugging. And back then, the corporate media corrected Trump’s ignorance, pointing out that immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. Of course, no one knew how much more criminally inclined Trump himself was compared to undocumented immigrants, as he had yet to be convicted of 34 felonies.
You might be surprised, as ABC and CBS (the latter, through its parent corporation) have already caved to Donald Trump’s extortion demands. But that racist rambling statement caused NBC to fire Donald J. Trump. We were so innocent back then!
Now, of course, Donald Trump was racistly and stupidly wrong about immigrants’ criminal proclivities. But bigotry hasn’t hurt a Republican candidate in a long, long time. No, what’s going to hurt Donald J. Trump is what he doesn’t how about the history of anti-immigration laws.
Once upon a time, California was a purple state that often elected Republicans statewide. I know, I know! Hard to believe! How did that change?
In the late 1990s, California had a Republican governor named Pete Wilson. In 1994 Wilson came up with what must have seen a brilliant idea, a harbinger of Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade 20 years earlier. He championed bans on affirmative action, bilingual education, and public services to undocumented immigrants. Sound familiar? To accomplish his racist goals and to rally the bigoted masses toward the Republican Party, Wilson needed to pass Proposition 187.
Wilson’s advertising for Prop 187 was as racist as you could get back in those more naïve days: hordes of huddled masses yearning to take advantage of White taxpayers. Republicans saw opposing immigration as a wedge issue to convert Whites to the GOP. More than 10,000 California teenagers walked out of their high schools in protest. Prop 187 drew the most protesters against it since the Vietnam War. Even so, it passed handily.
Eventually, thanks to the ACLU and others, Prop 187 was voided. But the damage was done.
Now 93 years old, Wilson has had the chance to see the results. He still insists, despite all the evidence, that the measure wasn’t racist.
Lorena Gonzalez, now the president of the California Labor Federation, was devastated, as The Guardian reported.
“When Prop 187 passed, I remember calling my mom and just crying, ‘how do they all see us as the enemy’? My mom was a no-nonsense, working-class woman, and I remember her saying to me, ‘Well, are you going to sit and cry about it or are you going to do something?’”
“It really was seen as an attack not just on illegal immigration, but on an entire immigrant community,” Gonzalez told KPBS on the 20th anniversary of Prop 187. “Most of us came from blended households, from blended families, and, if not, our neighbor maybe did. Definitely somebody in our community. So it was really seen as an affront to our entire community, and many of us decided then to go into public service.”
Sound familiar?
So Prop 187 changed California forever, even though it never went into effect. Thanks to Prop 187, Gonzalez became a lawyer, a gubernatorial aide, a San Diego councilmember, an assemblymember, and, now, the head of one of the biggest labor federations in the United States, representing 2.3 million workers.
“We were angry, but you woke up a sleeping giant,” said then-California Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, talking about Wilson and his Prop 187, in a YouTube video six years ago. So many current Latino elected officials got their start protesting against Prop 187.
“We helped create supermajorities in both houses of the legislature,” noted Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, a member of the California Latino Legislative Caucus.
Prop 187 was so counter-productive that The Hill wrote:
Today, California is so blue, and so alienated from Republican America, that many Californians talk seriously about seceding from the union.
Conservatives decry California’s liberal bent, and point out that if it wasn’t for this alien blue state and its out-of-touch voters, Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College [in 2016].
But it wasn’t always this way. California, of course, is the state where GOP demi-god Ronald Reagan made his name in politics. It was in California, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that Governor Reagan perfected his message of small government, low taxes, and shrinking the welfare state.
Yet California transitioned from red to deep blue, and this should be instructive for the national Democratic Party. We are seeing signs of the same processes that shifted California at work across the United States.
Donald Trump doesn’t know any of this, of course. Because he doesn’t know anything.
But, next time a corporate Democrat makes the argument that the Democratic Party needs to throw undocumented immigrants, gays and trans folks, women, and people of color under the bus, remember Prop 187. Remember that what seemed expedient in the late 1990s was a terrible, terrible idea for those who espoused it.
And take heart from knowing what Donald Trump doesn’t.
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