In case you missed it, California’s latest ballot initiative purports to slash public benefits for immigrants without legal status. The measure would also affect American-citizen children of these immigrants. It would cut off all benefits and impose new rules for birth certificates, threatening the Fourteenth Amendment as we know it. If passed, it would likely lead to a new class of “stateless” children.
Why? To some activists, immigrants are the root cause and only fix for California’s looming budget crisis.
This isn’t the first time that California activists have unfairly pinned budget woes on immigrants. In 1994, Barbara Coe and her minions tried to pass Proposition 187, an initiative that sought to pretty much do the same thing in the way of taking away public benefits. She is known to have called Mexican immigrants “savages,” and is more recently reported in an LA Times article to have said:
“Illegals and their children are costing the state billions of dollars. It’s invasion by birth canal.”