SAMUEL FRANCIS
Why Arizona's Prop 200 is important.
FOR RELEASE Tuesday, October 12, 2004
While George Bush and John Kerry, Dick Cheney and John Edwards, debate
democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy may be taking a bit of a small
lurch forward inside the United States -- much to the dissatisfaction of the
above-named global democrats. In Arizona, citizens fed up with massive
illegal immigration and the indifference of their own government to ithe
invasion are trying to do something themselves.
The something is Proposition 200, a ballot measure directly descended from
California's Proposition 187, passed by an overwhelming margin in 1994 but
struck down by the courts. Prop 200 will also face the courts if it passes,
as it seems about to do, but it's important that Arizonans and all other
Americans get behind it anyway.
Like Prop 187, Prop 200 requires that applicants for public benefits --
meaning welfare -- prove their eligibility for them in the form of
verifiable identity or immigration documents. Unlike Prop 187, it requires
proof of U.S. citizenship as a requirement for registering to vote, and one
section requires voters to show a valid photo ID at the polling place. Those
are the measure's main provisions. The truth is that they are largely
bloodless.
Prop 200 does nothing (and could do nothing) to reduce illegal immigration
into Arizona or the Untied States, nor does it deny welfare to anyone who
already has a legal right to receive it. But the importance of the ballot
measure is not so much that it effectively reduces or controls either
illegal immigration or welfare but that it mobilizes citizens on these
issues.
Arizona in fact is already mobilized -- by the presence of some 500,000
illegal aliens, estimated to cost the state more than $1 billion a year in
welfare; and by the fact that some 40 percent of the illegal aliens who
enter this country come over the state's borders with Mexico; and by the
absolute refusal of either the state or the federal government to do
anything whatsoever to control illegal immigration.
In the case of Prop 200, neither of the state's two Republican senators,
John McCain and John Kyl, supports it. Neither do either of the two
presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties or their
running mates. Neither does Arizona's Democratic governor. Nor does the
state's Chamber of Commerce. Nor the government of Mexico, which reportedly
has vowed to join court challenges to the measure if it passes. As with Prop
187, for which some 60 percent of Californians voted a decade ago, the only
support for Prop 200 comes from the people of Arizona themselves. The most
recent poll conducted by the Arizona Republic shows 57 percent of the
state's voters saying they will vote for it.
Critics of Prop 200 often argue that the costs of enforcing it would be
prohibitive, but that's not the real reason they're against it. They know
they have to stop Prop 200 and any similar measure because they know
perfectly well what its victory would mean. Neo-conservative foes of Prop
200 like Tamar Jacoby, writing last month in the Wall Street Journal, the
bible of the Open Borders lobby, made their real reasons clear.
Immigration restrictionists, she wrote, would wave a Prop 200 victory
"around like a bloody shirt," arguing "the outcome vindicated their claim
that the American public doesn't like immigrants and opposes immigration
reformŠ. Copycat ballot initiatives would follow in a half a dozen other
states -- indeed a similar measure is already circulating in California. And
other elected officials, in both the White House and Congress, would start
to find even more reasons than they already cite for avoiding all discussion
of immigration issues."
Miss Jacoby k |
