2016 Postmortem

22 years ago in 1994, California passed Proposition 187, making it illegal for undocumented immigrants to receive state services including sending children to school. It was subsequently overturned in the courts.

Prop 187 was a primal scream against illegal immigration. Many people voted for it (not me, I am an adult in the voting booth), knowing it was stupid to exclude children from school and trusting the courts wouldn't let that happen, because it was the only way available to tell the federal government that illegal immigration hurts people. The immigration and labor laws must be enforced. It's not fair to anyone to have people here that can be exploited by unscrupulous employers, and it does hurt the wages and job opportunities of native born and legal immigrant workers, especially low-skilled workers.

When Trump first started his campaign, I told my SO that he sounds like Prop 187. I remembered that it DID pass. Were the demographics of the entire country about equal to California 22 years ago, such that 187/Trump could win? Yes, just barely.

Here we are.

I recently read this prophetic article from 1999, predicting a nationwide Prop 187 and the rise of white nationalism, as whites become the 'new emerging minority.' It's worth reading, and thinking about these issues, imho.

http://www.unz.com/article/california-and-the-end-of-white-america/

California and the End of White America
The unprecedented racial transformation of California and its political consequences.
RON UNZ • COMMENTARY • OCTOBER 17, 1999

much, much snipped......

But surface appearances are deceiving. Underlying social dynamics, whether in California or in the nation at large, have not changed, and ethnic conflict, temporarily submerged, has far from disappeared. To the contrary, given the nature of the demographic processes now at work in the country, the potential for such conflict is growing rather than diminishing, and any sudden crack in our unprecedented economic prosperity might well be the occasion for its revival.

This need not occur. The overwhelming evidence is that today’s immigrants are at least as economically productive and socially assimilative as their European predecessors, with low rates of crime, welfare dependency, and social instability. Asians have followed the pattern of high academic achievement and economic entrepreneurship exhibited by America’s Jews before them, while Latin American immigrants have demonstrated much the same social conservatism and working-class values as Italians or Slavs. (One remarkable sign of their assimilationism is the high rate of conversion to evangelical Protestantism among Latin American immigrants.) As the campaign for Proposition 227 proved, today’s immigrants are no less eager than yesterday’s to have their children merge into our English-language society. Most significantly, nearly 40 percent of third-generation Asians and Latinos are intermarrying, usually with whites, a figure far greater than the intermarriage rates of Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans with other ethnic groups as late as the 1950′s.

It is therefore a tragedy of the first order that, even as the reality of the American melting pot remains as powerful as ever, the ideology behind it has almost disappeared, having been replaced by the “diversity” model and by the politics of grievance. A social ideology that allots to blacks and Latinos and Asians their own separatist institutions and suggested shares of society’s benefits cannot long be prevented from extending itself to whites as well, especially as whites become merely one minority among many minorities. Before it is altogether too late, those who support this status quo must realize that the diversity prescription contains the seeds of national dissolution.

America today stands as one of the very few examples in history of a large and successful multiethnic society. If we are to continue and extend our success–which is hardly foreordained–we can only do so by returning to the core principles of Propositions 209 and 227: ethnic assimilation, and individual equality under the law. Otherwise, we face the very real threat of future movements along the lines of Proposition 187, each worse than the last, and on a national scale. There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.