California closes its doors.

• Author: Weinstraub, Daniel M.
• Position: California's Proposition 187

Chafing under the costs of caring for illegal immigrants, Californians have approved a measure that is probably unconstitutional

For years, legislators and other officials in states around the country have been complaining about unfunded federal mandates. Now that notion has become the unlikely battle cry of California voters, who on Nov. 8 registered a loud message of protest to Washington by passing a ballot initiative that would deny public services to illegal immigrants.

But for the time being, the vote for Proposition 187 will be just that--a message--and no more. A federal court immediately issued a retraining order that stopped the state from implementing the controversial new law. The state superintendent of schools told local districts to do nothing to implement the law until at least Jan. 1, 1995, and a private hospital group urged its members to "maintain the status quo."

If upheld, the ballot measure, approved on a 59 percent to 41 percent vote, would deny education, health and social services to illegal aliens and require local police to report anyone they suspect of being here illegally to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the state Department of Justice.

In an executive order issued even before the election results were official, Governor Pete Wilson told his department heads and agency secretaries to develop emergency regulations to make the statute work.

Wilson's order applied to the state universities, the community colleges and the state Board of Education as well as the highway patrol, the state police, the correctional agency, and the health and welfare agency.

The first casualty of the new law is likely to be a state-funded program that provides prenatal care to poor women as part of Medicaid. Wilson said he would ask the Legislature to take the $84 million that would have been spent annually on those services for illegals and put it into a similar program that provides prenatal care for working poor pregnant wome who are legal residents of California. He said the new money for the residents-only program, which he created, would enable the state to serve an additional 1,000 women each month.

"California has a right to set its own priorities, and to fund them, and not continue as we have been compelled to do, to short-change our own legal residents because of the obligations imposed by federal law to provide services to illegal immigrants," Wilson said.

Proposition 187 grew out of the state's...