Global Courant 2023-04-16 17:00:35
When I heard about Florida’s plan to crack down on immigrants without legal status, California’s Proposition 187 immediately came to mind.
Florida’s bill, SB 1718, is a grab bag of punitive bills, requiring hospitals, law enforcement and others to report the immigrants and criminalizing anyone who aids them.
It would even repeal state laws that allow students who grew up in Florida but are not U.S. citizens to pay tuition and practice law in the state.
Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican seeking a presidential candidate, publicly supports the bill, arguing that “illegal aliens” destroy the Sunshine State. It is expected to pass the Florida legislature easily and become law as early as this summer, if it doesn’t get bogged down in the courts.
Sound familiar, Californians?
That’s because this bigoted brouhaha is the newest grandchild of Proposition 187.
The 1994 ballot was also designed to make life difficult for immigrants here by denying them access to public education, social services and health care and forcing government employees to report them.
Supporters said the move was necessary to save California; opponents called it racist. Voters approved the measure by a wide margin, but it never became law — a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional and the state did not appeal.
The whole ordeal had a famously unintended result: It transformed California from a swing state into the deep blue monolith it is today.
Young Latinos, many of whom dropped out of school or joined rowdy rallies, registered to vote Democrat and run for elected office, from school boards to state legislatures to the U.S. Senate — what’s up, Alex Padilla! The Republican Party, which enthusiastically supported Proposition 187, was thrown into the political wilderness and is now as relevant in statewide elections as the Bull Moose Party.
Democrats across the US have recited this history as an incantation whenever GOP officials push xenophobic policies in states where Latinos are emerging as a political force.
Maria Campos listens to speakers at a 2019 immigrant rights rally in Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
They will refer to 2006, when a congressional law against illegal immigration led to the biggest protests since the Vietnam War and a record Latino voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election. Or 2010 in Arizona, where SB 1070 and the draconian policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio urging Latinos a decade later to support President Biden and help him win the state.
Therefore, my knee-jerk reaction was that SB 1718 would be DeSantis’ downfall and a turning point for Florida politics. Latinos in a state with a Spanish name that is home to refugees who came with next to nothing and found the American dream, and where Miami stands as the capital of Latin America, would in no way allow the Republican-dominated legislature passes through it.
But oh wait. It’s Florida.
Progressive Latinos in California and beyond have long stereotyped Florida Latinos as crazy conservative cousins whose politics seem to get redder with each election cycle.
Cuban Americans remain a Republican stronghold. But newer immigrant groups — Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Brazilians — have also drifted to the GOP because of the common belief that Democrats are too soft on leftist leaders in their native countries.
Donald Trump played on their anti-communist fears and increased his share of the Florida Latino vote from 35% in 2016 to 46% in 2020, that made national headlines. DeSantis, meanwhile, won 58% of Florida’s Latino vote upon his re-election in 2022, an improvement of the 44% in his 2018 win.
Democrats? Their cries about racism and their disinformation campaigns made no sense, and they offered Florida Latinos little else.
This right-wing turn is being fueled by Cuban-American politicians, who have embraced the GOP’s culture wars so much that Florida International University political science professor Eduardo Gamarra told me they have become “the new Anita Bryants.” That’s the former citrus industry spokeswoman who made national headlines in 1978 for leading a repeal of a Miami-Dade County law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
I called Gamarra, an expert on Latino politics in Florida, because I wanted to know if he thought the Proposition 187 effect could be happening there.
“Could it be possible that in the next cycle … that Latinos will turn out to respond to the bills?” he said. “Maybe. But if they get out, how do they get out?”
Gamarra is working on a survey asking Florida Latinos how they feel about illegal immigration, which has been on the rise in the state in recent years.
Last year, DeSantis authorized more than a million dollars in state funds to fly 48 Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in a move he openly admitted was a political stunt.
“I only know from interviews and conversations with people that there is an opinion that this is the new Mariel,” he said, referring to the 1980 boatlift of more than 125,000 Cubans, who were denounced as criminals by US media and even Cuban Americans .
“The way[these new immigrants]are portrayed,” Gamarra continued, “is that ‘they are not like us, they come illegally, they are chusma (scum), they are like the marielitos.’ They say: ‘Yes, we must have order.’”
Multiple studies have shown that younger Latinos are more progressive than their parents, and the professor sees that in his students on abortion and LGBTQ rights.
But in Florida, “if you do the polls and do the age crosstabs, you see that when (it’s an election), they don’t vote, and when they do, they vote Republican.”
Gamarra does see the state as an “outlier” when it comes to Latino politics. But Geraldo Cadava, a Northwestern University history professor who studies the issue across the country told me that SB 1718 could very well serve as a warning—to the Democrats.
“There’s truth to the idea that Latinos care about immigration,” he said. “But it’s not the problem it once was… DeSantis knows that an immigration crackdown is politically popular right now within the (Republican) party, so he’s doing this in Florida to boost himself nationally.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis addresses a crowd in 2022 before signing the so-called stop-wake bill in Hialeah Gardens.
(Daniel A. Varela / Associated Press)
Cadava noted that Trump made gains among Latinos across the country in 2020 despite campaigning to build a border wall, describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “bringing drugs and bringing crime” and calling El Salvador a “shithole country” .
He also pointed out that the Democrats are reaping diminishing returns by propagating the parable of Proposition 187 with no results. citing a 2021 study by Equis Research which showed that 51% of Latinos who voted in the last presidential election supported Trump in restricting refugee access to the US, and 49% welcomed his plan to curb legal immigration.
“Part of the frustration among Democrats and Latinos is that Democrats keep making promises that they won’t honor their immigration policy,” Cadava said. “Latinos have heard so much about immigration from Democrats that they say, ‘Okay, we know how you feel about immigration, but what else do you have?'”
The Proposition 187 effect doesn’t transfer to other places as easily as Democrats and Latino activists might think, Cadava said.
“Part of what was going on in California” in 1994 “was that Mexican Americans were thinking about their relationship with Mexican immigrants,” he said. “In California, there is a long history of transnationalism and solidarity with migration,” which is lacking in states with a recent increase in Latino populations that adopt anti-immigrant statutes.
That’s what makes SB 1718 so dangerous. If passed with little resistance, conservatives may point out that anti-immigrant politics are playing well among Latinos. Gone are the days when the Democrats could dangle the legacy of Proposition 187 over the Republicans like the sword of Damocles.
And then what, Dems?
