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.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican running for president, publicly supports the bill, arguing that “illegal aliens” are destroying the Sunshine State. It is expected to easily pass the Florida legislature 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 Proposition’s newest grandchild

.

187

The 1994 ballot initiative was also designed to make life miserable

illegal

immigrants

illegal here

by denying them access to public education, social services and health care

care, and forcing government employees to turn them in.

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 for the Democrats

now

to fill elected offices

,

from school boards to the

California S

state legislature to the US Senate, how are you, 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.

They will refer to 2006, when a congressional law against illegal immigration led to the biggest protests since the Vietnam War and a record turnout of Latinos 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. No way would Latinos in a Spanish-named state 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

let the Republican-dominated legislature approve 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 of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Colombians and Brazilians have also drifted to the GOP because of the widespread belief that the Democrats are too soft on leftist leaders in their native countries.

Playing on their anti-communist fears, Donald Trump increased his share of the Florida Latino vote from 35% in 2016 to 46% in 2020, making national headlines. DeSantis, meanwhile, won 58% of Florida’s Latino vote in his 2022 reelection, an improvement from 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.

Driving this right turn is Cuban-American politicians, who have embraced the GOP 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.

Would it be possible that in the next cycle

…

that Latinos will turn out in response 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 in which [these new immigrants] are portrayed, Gamarra continued, is that ‘They are not like us, they come illegally, they are

chusma

[riffraff]they are like the

marielitos

.’ They say, yes, we must have order.

Multiple surveys have shown that younger Latinos are more progressive than their parents, and the professor sees that in his students on issues such as abortion and LGBT

Q rights issues

.

But in Florida, “if you do the polls and do the crosstabs by age, you see that when [its an election]they don’t vote, and if they do, they vote Republican.

Gamarra sees it

the state as an outlier when it comes to Latino politics. But Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern University who studies the issue across the country told me that SB 1718 could very well serve as a warning to Democrats.

There’s some 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 within the [Republican] party right now, so he’s doing this in Florida to boost himself nationally.

Cadava noted that Trump made gains among Latinos nationwide in 2020 despite campaigning

edit

about building a border wall, describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and bringing drugs and bringing crime” and calling El Salvador

like it

a shit country.

He also pointed out that Democrats are reaping diminishing returns by trotting the parable of Proposition 187 to no avail, citing a 2021 Equis Research study that found that 51% of Latinos who voted in the last presidential election , Trump supported preventing refugees from entering the country. US, and 49% welcomed his plan to curb legal immigration.

Part of the frustration among Democrats and Latinos is that Democrats keep making promises they won’t keep their immigration, Cadava said. Latinos have heard so much about immigration from Democrats that they say, okay, we know how you feel about immigration so well, 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’s a long history of transnationalism and solidarity with migration,” which is lacking in states with recent increases in Latino population adopting anti-immigrant statutes.

That’s what makes SB 1718 so dangerous. If passed with little resistance, conservatives may point out that anti-immigrant policies are playing well among Latinos. Gone are the days when Democrats could dangle the legacy of Proposition 187 over Republicans like the sword of Damocles.

And then what, Dems?