California voted to bar immigrants from schools and social services in 1994. Now most Californians see immigrants as a benefit to the state
by Ben Christopher and Mikhail Zinshteyn
CalMatters
In 1994, a 26-year-old Alex Padilla, sporting a newly minted engineering degree from MIT, was back at home living with his parents in the San Fernando Valley when that fall’s most heated ballot measure campaign dragged him into a life of politics.
Proposition 187, the Save Our State initiative, would bar undocumented immigrants across California from using public schools, taxpayer-funded social services and non-emergency medical care.
“I had to get involved, so that families like mine, communities like mine, would not continue to be scapegoated or targeted,” Padilla, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Mexico, said in an interview in 2018.
That attitude put him in the political minority at the time. Backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who made the campaign a centerpiece of his reelection, Prop. 187 passed with a commanding 58 percent, including majorities in 51 out of 58 counties. That included Padilla’s Los Angeles County, where it won by eight percentage points.
California has changed in the three decades since, a political and cultural transformation that is in many ways personified by Padilla’s career. In just a single generation, the political clout immigrants hold in California has soared. So have the legal protections afforded even to those immigrants who are unauthorized to live here. On the whole, public opinion on immigration policy, border security and the rightful role of immigrants in American life has inverted from 31 years ago. Prop. 187 was voided by a federal judge shortly after its passage, but its effect on California politics endures.
Case in point: Padilla, the reluctant young activist, is now the first Latino U.S. senator to represent California. In that role he has become one of the most visible symbols of the clash of values between the nativism of President Donald Trump’s administration and California’s liberal consensus on immigration. After last week’s jarring altercation, in which Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and briefly handcuffed, elected officials across California lined up to lionize and defend him.
This isn’t Pete Wilson’s California anymore.
Immigration policy a ‘settled issue’ in California
Pollster Mark Baldassare has been chronicling the change for decades. In 1998, he and his colleagues at the Public Policy Institute of California began asking Californians a simple question: Are immigrants a “benefit” or a “burden” to California?
Respondents were evenly split in the first survey. Ever since, a majority — one that has grown with each decade — has come to see immigrants as a boon to our state. In February, when PPIC most recently asked the question, 72 percent of respondents chose “benefit.” That included 91 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of political independents, though only 31 percent of Republicans.
“This is pretty much a settled issue,” said Baldassarre.
Part of that sweeping change can be explained by the state’s shifting demographics. If the U.S. is the land of immigrants, California is doubly so. More than a quarter of the state’s population was born abroad, and almost half of California’s children were born to an immigrant parent. More than half of California’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.
And California’s immigrant community is diverse: 49 percent are originally from Latin American countries and 41 percent from Asia. For the past decade, more immigrants from Asia have entered California than from Latin America.
But California’s changing demographics are only part of the reason immigration politics have seen such a radical shift in such a relatively short period of time, said Adrian Pantoja, a political science and Chicano studies professor at Pitzer College in Claremont.
It’s not a law of nature that Latinos and other demographic groups with sizable immigrant populations should favor the Democratic Party. Plenty of Latinos and Asian Americans, for example, hold traditionally conservative opinions — on specific border and immigration-related policies and a host of other issues.
Had the GOP “reached out effectively to Latinos, to Asian American voters — populations that were inclined and trending toward the Republican Party” the state GOP might still be an electoral force, said Pantoja.
Instead, the state party hitched its political future to a ballot measure aimed at penalizing undocumented immigrants and their children — and hasn’t won a statewide race since 2006.
Still, as in much of the nation, Latino support for Republicans in the last presidential election ticked up in California. In nine of 12 counties where Latinos are the largest demographic group, support for Trump increased from 4 to 6 percentage points between the last two presidential contests, depending on the county.
The legacy of Proposition 187
Three decades after that great California political rupture, the fruits of Prop. 187 are apparent in who holds power in California.
Padilla is California’s senior U.S. senator. Both chambers of the state Legislature have elected Latino leaders — Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas of Salinas and Senate President Pro Tem-elect Monique Limón of Santa Barbara. In the early 1990s, the count of Latinos in the Legislature bounced around the single digits. Today, there are a combined 42 members in the Democratic and Republican parties’ respective Latino caucuses out of 120 members.
That rise in political power has translated to changes in policy.
In 2017, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 54, California’s sanctuary state law that largely bars state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The bill’s author, Kevin de Leon, also traces his start in politics to Prop. 187.
More recently, the state has expanded Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for low-income Californians and those with disabilities, to all immigrants without legal status. Newsom signed successive expansions into law starting in 2020.
Where Prop. 187 was authored to deprive undocumented immigrants of social services, California’s Medi-Cal expansion was its antithesis.
The generational impact of that ballot measure was demonstrated in 2010, when immigrants were mobilized to vote and shift the state further to the left.
By then, a quarter of the state’s electorate was Latino, said Thad Kousser, a professor of California politics at UC San Diego.
“Latinos become this voting block that helps deliver the state to Jerry Brown, and then the state becomes Democratic in every single statewide office, in every election” since, he said.
That year, Brown defeated billionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman in an acrimonious gubernatorial race, showcasing California as an outlier in the national red wave and ending a run in which Republicans won the governor’s race six times out of the previous eight elections. Democrats lost no congressional seats in California even as the party was routed nationally.
By 2016, the respective leaders of the State Assembly and Senate were Latino, a first in California.
But not all efforts to reverse the conservatism of the 1990s in California have succeeded. In 2020, a ballot measure to largely reverse the state’s ban on using race, ethnicity or gender as factors in public university admissions and government grant-making failed to woo voters. In the state’s population center of Los Angeles County, a majority of Asian voters shot down the proposal while only 55 percent of Latino voters backed it.
And immigrants or their children make up a sizable chunk of the GOP in the state capital. When voters in 2020 elected Redlands Republican Rosilicie Ochoa-Bogh, the child of Mexican immigrants, she became the first GOP Latina state senator in California’s history. Today the Republican Senate caucus has at least three members who are immigrants or whose parents were born abroad, according to their public biographies — 30 percent of the caucus. Before being elected to the Assembly as a Republican, Tri Ta became the first Vietnamese American to serve as mayor of a U.S. city.
Medi-Cal rollback shifts views
Recent polling shows the latest wave of Medi-Cal expansions may have gone too far even for California’s immigrant-friendly electorate. A majority of Californians — 58 percent — oppose health coverage for immigrants without permanent legal status, according to PPIC’s June 2025 survey.
Other polls show a majority of likely voters still support health insurance for immigrants.
This mixed picture emerges as California grapples with a third successive fiscal year of multibillion-dollar deficits and sharply increasing Medi-Cal costs. While those data may indicate softening political support for the boldest of California’s policies aimed at helping undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t spell a political realignment, said Kousser.
“California moved so far to the left that there’s almost nowhere to go other than the slight counter-reaction,” he said.
Baldassare of PPIC agreed, saying the Medi-Cal survey results may simply reflect a growing concern about the state’s finances. He noted that Newsom has proposed freezing enrollment.
On some other measures affecting immigrants, Democratic lawmakers and Newsom have diverged. Last year the Legislature approved a bill to essentially adopt a novel legal theory to permit public college students without legal authorization in the U.S. to work on their campuses. Newsom vetoed the bill.
Anti-ICE protests: A new Prop. 187 moment?
There is some indication that California’s philosophical support for immigrants is, at least in part, accelerated by Trump. The share of respondents who called immigrants a “benefit” in PPIC’s surveys shot up during the first Trump administration and ebbed during Joe Biden’s stint in the White House. The most recent survey, the first since Trump returned to power, saw another spike.
That has some immigrant rights advocates hoping that the Trump administration’s current sweeping deportation policy will galvanize a new generation of political activists in California.
“Whether it’s post-Prop. 187 or post-9/11 for middle eastern South Asian communities, at some point you realize that you are being endlessly and inhumanely targeted and if you don’t speak up, and if you don’t practice your First Amendment rights, and if you’re not civically engaged, then you’ll be taken advantage of,” said Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. “I think those are really the things that brought people together then, and what are bringing people to the streets now.”
He said if he were asked a few months ago whether California elected leaders were shifting to the center on immigration, he’d have said yes. But Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles are “allowing elected officials to come out more strongly” against the apprehensions, he said.
Christian Arana, vice president of policy at the Latino Community Foundation, was just six years old when Prop. 187 was on the ballot. He has distinct memories of marching with his family, everyone clad in white shirts, surrounded by a wide array of his neighbors chanting delightfully brash slogans about someone named Pete Wilson.
“For six-year-old me, what I understood was that my parents, my neighbors, my community was under attack because some man — in that case the governor of California — was blaming California’s problems on them,” he said. “I wonder how young children are experiencing this moment now.”
Fifteen-year-old Nathon Ponce has an answer: He feels vulnerable. The rising high school sophomore at USC Hybrid High College Prep stood with his aunt several hundred feet from law enforcement as they fired projectiles and less-lethal rounds at protesters in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday. He wants to see the government create a legal pathway to citizenship for immigrants without that status, “instead of pushing them away.”
More broadly, he was there to support his community, which “some people consider a vulnerable group, like Hispanics and low-income working people,” he said. “And I just want to show my support by, like, actually attending a protest.”
