Sinking our state.

• Author: Unz, Ron
• Position: Immigration

California's "Save Our State" initiative is masquerading as an attack on welfare.

IF THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH good intentions, then the Save Our State immigration initiative on California's November ballot represents a superhighway.

At first glance, the measure, which prevents illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits, might appear quite attractive to opponents of California's overgrown social welfare state. After all, if rolling back the tide of wealth redistribution has to start somewhere, why not with recipients who aren't even legal residents?

Even the staunchest libertarians who believe in open borders don't believe that illegal immigrants should receive financial subsidies from the country they enter. Add to this California's horrendous budget deficit, and support for any measure which purports to save tax money seems assured. Indeed, according to a Field poll, the measure, which will appear as Proposition 187, enjoys 64 percent support.

So much for theory. In practice, Prop. 187 would be an unmitigated disaster for California, with regard both to personal liberty and to state finance.

Consider a few simple facts. Illegal immigrants are already ineligible for state welfare assistance or food stamps, and their estimated use of medical services is quite low, just a small fraction of 1 percent of California's $57 billion budget. The only significant government cost associated with illegal immigration is therefore through the public school system, which immigrant children attend. Illegal immigrants, make up perhaps 5 percent of California's total population, and most are in the prime working years of 25 to 40; those with children obviously make use of the public schools, and the sums involved are substantial. So one of the central thrusts of the SOS initiative is to root out these immigrant children (most of whom are actually American-born citizens) from the public schools.

How to do this? By turning public school teachers and administrators into de facto INS agents, forcing them to investigate the family background of each and every child in their school, at enormous effort and expense, and to report to the authorities those whom they suspect may have a father or mother who entered the country illegally. Having schools encourage small children to inform on the status of their parents has heavy totalitarian overtones, and the practice was even abandoned by the Soviet Union soon after Stalin's death. In recent years, there...