In 1994, a 26-year-old Alex Padilla, sporting a newly minted engineering diploma from MIT, was again at house residing together with his dad and mom within the San Fernando Valley when that fall’s most heated poll measure marketing campaign dragged him into a lifetime of politics.
Proposition 187, the Save Our State initiative, would bar undocumented immigrants throughout California from utilizing public faculties, taxpayer-funded social providers and non-emergency medical care.
“I needed to get entangled, in order that households like mine, communities like mine, wouldn’t proceed to be scapegoated or focused,” Padilla, whose dad and mom emigrated to the US from Mexico, stated in an interview in 2018.
That angle put him within the political minority on the time. Backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who made the marketing campaign a centerpiece of his reelection, Prop. 187 handed with a commanding 58%, together with majorities in 51 out of 58 counties. That included Padilla’s Los Angeles County, the place it received by eight proportion factors.
California has modified within the three a long time since, a political and cultural transformation that’s in some ways personified by Padilla’s profession. In only a single era, the political clout immigrants maintain in California has soared. So have the authorized protections afforded even to these immigrants who’re unauthorized to dwell right here. On the entire, public opinion on immigration coverage, border safety and the rightful function of immigrants in American life has inverted from 31 years in the past. Prop. 187 was voided by a federal judge shortly after its passage, however its impact on California politics endures.
Living proof: Padilla, the reluctant younger activist, is now the primary Latino U.S. senator to characterize California. In that function he has grow to be some of the seen symbols of the conflict of values between the nativism of President Donald Trump’s administration and California’s liberal consensus on immigration. After final week’s jarring altercation, wherein Padilla was forcibly faraway from a press convention held by Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem and briefly handcuffed, elected officers throughout California lined as much as lionize and defend him.
This isn’t Pete Wilson’s California anymore.
Immigration coverage a ‘settled situation’ in California
Pollster Mark Baldassare has been chronicling the change for many years. In 1998, he and his colleagues on the Public Coverage Institute of California started asking Californians a easy query: Are immigrants a “profit” or a “burden” to California?
Respondents had been evenly cut up within the first survey. Ever since, a majority — one which has grown with every decade — has come to see immigrants as a boon to our state. In February, when PPIC most not too long ago requested the query, 72% of respondents selected “profit.” That included 91% of Democrats and 73% of political independents, although solely 31% of Republicans.
“That is just about a settled situation,” stated Baldassarre.
A part of that sweeping change will be defined by the state’s shifting demographics. If the U.S. is the land of immigrants, California is doubly so. Greater than 1 / 4 of the state’s inhabitants was born overseas, and virtually half of California’s kids had been born to an immigrant father or mother. Greater than half of California’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.
And California’s immigrant neighborhood is various: 49% are initially from Latin American nations and 41% from Asia. For the previous decade, more immigrants from Asia have entered California than from Latin America.
However California’s altering demographics are solely a part of the explanation immigration politics have seen such a radical shift in such a comparatively quick time period, stated Adrian Pantoja, a political science and Chicano research professor at Pitzer College in Claremont.
It’s not a legislation of nature that Latinos and different demographic teams with sizable immigrant populations ought to favor the Democratic Celebration. Loads of Latinos and Asian Americans, for instance, maintain historically conservative opinions — on particular border and immigration-related insurance policies and a number of different points.
Had the GOP “reached out successfully to Latinos, to Asian American voters — populations that had been inclined and trending towards the Republican Celebration” the state GOP may nonetheless be an electoral pressure, stated Pantoja.
As a substitute, the state social gathering hitched its political future to a poll measure aimed toward penalizing undocumented immigrants and their kids — and hasn’t received a statewide race since 2006.
Nonetheless, as in a lot of the nation, Latino assist for Republicans within the final presidential election ticked up in California. In 9 of 12 counties the place Latinos are the most important demographic group, assist for Trump elevated from 4 to six proportion factors between the final two presidential contests, relying on the county.
The legacy of Proposition 187
Three a long time after that nice California political rupture, the fruits of Prop. 187 are obvious in who holds energy in California.
Padilla is California’s senior U.S. senator. Each chambers of the state Legislature have elected Latino leaders — Meeting Speaker Robert Rivas of Salinas and Senate President Professional Tem-elect Monique Limón of Santa Barbara. Within the early Nineties, the rely of Latinos within the Legislature bounced across the single digits. In the present day, there are a mixed 42 members within the Democratic and Republican events’ respective Latino caucuses out of 120 members.
That rise in political energy has translated to modifications in coverage.
In 2017, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into legislation Senate Invoice 54, California’s sanctuary state law that largely bars state and native legislation enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The invoice’s creator, Kevin de Leon, additionally traces his start in politics to Prop. 187.
Extra not too long ago, the state has expanded Medi-Cal, the state’s medical health insurance program for low-income Californians and people with disabilities, to all immigrants with out authorized standing. Newsom signed successive expansions into legislation beginning in 2020.
The place Prop. 187 was authored to deprive undocumented immigrants of social providers, California’s Medi-Cal growth was its antithesis.
The generational influence of that poll measure was demonstrated in 2010, when immigrants had been mobilized to vote and shift the state additional to the left.
By then, 1 / 4 of the state’s voters was Latino, stated Thad Kousser, a professor of California politics at UC San Diego.
“Latinos grow to be this voting block that helps ship the state to Jerry Brown, after which the state turns into Democratic in each single statewide workplace, in each election” since, he stated.
That 12 months, Brown defeated billionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman in an acrimonious gubernatorial race, showcasing California as an outlier within the nationwide pink wave and ending a run wherein Republicans received the governor’s race six occasions out of the earlier eight elections. Democrats misplaced no congressional seats in California even because the social gathering was routed nationally.
By 2016, the respective leaders of the State Meeting and Senate had been Latino, a first in California.
However not all efforts to reverse the conservatism of the Nineties in California have succeeded. In 2020, a poll measure to largely reverse the state’s ban on utilizing race, ethnicity or gender as elements in public college admissions and authorities grant-making failed to woo voters. Within the state’s inhabitants middle of Los Angeles County, a majority of Asian voters shot down the proposal whereas only 55% of Latino voters backed it.
And immigrants or their kids make up a large chunk of the GOP within the state capital. When voters in 2020 elected Redlands Republican Rosilicie Ochoa-Bogh, the kid of Mexican immigrants, she turned the primary GOP Latina state senator in California’s historical past. In the present day the Republican Senate caucus has at the least three members who’re immigrants or whose dad and mom had been born overseas, in accordance with their public biographies — 30% of the caucus. Earlier than being elected to the Meeting as a Republican, Tri Ta turned the primary Vietnamese American to serve as mayor of a U.S. city.
Medi-Cal rollback shifts views
Latest polling exhibits the newest wave of Medi-Cal expansions might have gone too far even for California’s immigrant-friendly voters. A majority of Californians — 58% — oppose well being protection for immigrants with out everlasting authorized standing, in accordance with PPIC’s June 2025 survey.
Different polls present a majority of seemingly voters nonetheless assist medical health insurance for immigrants.
This combined image emerges as California grapples with a 3rd successive fiscal 12 months of multibillion-dollar deficits and sharply growing Medi-Cal prices. Whereas these knowledge might point out softening political assist for the boldest of California’s insurance policies aimed toward serving to undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t spell a political realignment, stated Kousser.
“California moved to this point to the left that there’s virtually nowhere to go aside from the slight counter-reaction,” he stated.
Baldassare of PPIC agreed, saying the Medi-Cal survey outcomes might merely mirror a rising concern in regards to the state’s funds. He famous that Newsom has proposed freezing enrollment.
On another measures affecting immigrants, Democratic lawmakers and Newsom have diverged. Final 12 months the Legislature authorised a invoice to basically undertake a novel authorized idea to allow public faculty college students with out authorized authorization within the U.S. to work on their campuses. Newsom vetoed the bill.
Anti-ICE protests: A brand new Prop. 187 second?
There’s some indication that California’s philosophical assist for immigrants is, at the least partly, accelerated by Trump. The share of respondents who referred to as immigrants a “profit” in PPIC’s surveys shot up throughout the first Trump administration and ebbed throughout Joe Biden’s stint within the White Home. The newest survey, the primary since Trump returned to energy, noticed one other spike.
That has some immigrant rights advocates hoping that the Trump administration’s present sweeping deportation coverage will provoke a brand new era of political activists in California.
“Whether or not it’s post-Prop. 187 or post-9/11 for center japanese South Asian communities, sooner or later you understand that you’re being endlessly and inhumanely focused and if you happen to don’t communicate up, and if you happen to don’t observe your First Modification rights, and if you happen to’re not civically engaged, then you definitely’ll be taken benefit of,” stated Masih Fouladi, government director of the California Immigrant Coverage Middle. “I feel these are actually the issues that introduced individuals collectively then, and what are bringing individuals to the streets now.”
He stated if he had been requested just a few months in the past whether or not California elected leaders had been shifting to the middle on immigration, he’d have stated sure. However Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles are “permitting elected officers to come back out extra strongly” towards the apprehensions, he stated.
Christian Arana, vice chairman of coverage on the Latino Group Basis, was simply six years outdated when Prop. 187 was on the poll. He has distinct reminiscences of marching together with his household, everybody clad in white shirts, surrounded by a big selection of his neighbors chanting delightfully brash slogans about somebody named Pete Wilson.
“For six-year-old me, what I understood was that my dad and mom, my neighbors, my neighborhood was below assault as a result of some man — in that case the governor of California — was blaming California’s issues on them,” he stated. “I ponder how younger kids are experiencing this second now.”
Fifteen-year-old Nathon Ponce has a solution: He feels susceptible. The rising highschool sophomore at USC Hybrid Excessive Faculty Prep stood together with his aunt a number of hundred ft from legislation enforcement as they fired projectiles and less-lethal rounds at protesters in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday. He needs to see the federal government create a authorized pathway to citizenship for immigrants with out that standing, “as an alternative of pushing them away.”
Extra broadly, he was there to assist his neighborhood, which “some individuals contemplate a susceptible group, like Hispanics and low-income working individuals,” he stated. “And I simply need to present my assist by, like, really attending a protest.”
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