By Rick Oltman, May 23, 2018
If you haven’t already, add the Los Angeles Times to the lame stream media which purposely misreports to its readers. A May 20 piece by John Myers titled, “California’s illegal immigration fight is back, and so are the political pitfalls for Republicans,” rewrites history going back to 1994, the year California voters passed the Proposition 187-Save our State (SOS) initiative by 59%.
He writes, “In 1993, a Los Angeles Times poll found only 2% of voters surveyed cited immigration as the state’s top problem. Jobs and the economy were more pressing, they said.”
Only 2%? Well, in one year, the support for enforcing our immigration laws and cutting off welfare benefits to illegal aliens skyrocketed. My own experience gathering signatures for the initiative tells a different story about voter attitudes. I was chairman of one of the three political campaigns organized to qualify Save Our State for the ballot.
We would collect signatures in the parking lots of big box stores, like a COSTCO. Not just once, but several times, a family would be walking towards the entrance, and I would say to the father, “Would you like to sign the “Save Our State” initiative?”
“No” or “No thank you” was the usual polite decline. Then I would say quickly as they passed, “It cuts off welfare to illegal aliens.” And many times, the whole family would turn around and walk back and sign the petition. Several other signature gatherers in the state told me essentially the same story. That one statement became a statewide winning strategy in our efforts to get voter signatures and qualify Save Our State. It was so effective, our signature gathers began carrying multiple clip boards with petitions so that everyone in the group could sign simultaneously, and not wait in line.
That one statement, “It cuts off welfare to illegal aliens,” turned more people around to sign our petitions than any other.
After the 2% claim, Myer then misleads with the statement, “And yet Republican leaders of the time insisted otherwise.” In late 1993, then-Governor Pete Wilson said, “our state is facing a crisis in illegal immigration.”
Wilson may have said that, but our main complaint with all elected officials, and the California Republican Party (CRP), was that they weren’t lifting a finger to help us qualify SOS. Nobody at the state or national level was helping us. It wasn’t until Governor Pete Wilson’s re-election campaign decided that immigration reform was a winning issue that they asked the CRP to inject a few hundred thousand dollars to hire paid-signature gatherers that put us over the top and qualified Save Our State, which became Proposition 187.
Wilson’s TV commercial, showing actual footage of illegal aliens running through the Port of Entry, which we called the “Banzai Charge,” helped us win with nearly everybody opposing us. Of course, the “LAme Times” criticized the Wilson ad 24 years ago this month claiming, among other things, “immigrant bashing.”
That TV ad moved Pete Wilson from mid 20% in the polls to crush his opponent Kathleen Brown (daughter of former governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, and sister of current governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown) and win re-election in a landslide, 55.2% to 40.6%. Proposition 187 got 59%.
Myers concludes, “The hard line on illegal immigration worked in 1994. But it’s haunted the party since, as public opinion shifted and Latinos grew in size and power. So why try it again?”
Contrary to that myth, which open borders advocates continually repeat, Proposition 187 did not haunt the CRP. The CRP effectively euthanized itself by failing to follow up on the fantastic public support for immigration enforcement.
One would think that if supporting immigration enforcement was a big negative, the open borders supporters would not say anything, following the advice of Sun Tzu in The Art of War:
“When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, stay out of his way.”
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. [Winston Churchill.]
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