We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion famously wrote, and the one Democrats in California repeated for decades was Proposition 187. Californians of a certain age can recite it by ...

The Prop 187 story is now well-known: Governor Pete Wilson’s decision to fuel his re-election campaign with fear and scapegoating ultimately backfired spectacularly. He campaigned and won re ...

That fear led to the passage of Proposition 187, an initiative to bar undocumented immigrants from accessing state services including public education and health care. “It meant I couldn’t ...

I asked if we could be seeing a national version of what happened in California after Proposition 187, 1994's aggressively anti-immigrant measure pushed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson. Prop 187 ...

But that began to change in the 1990s with Gov. Pete Wilson endorsing Proposition 187, which would make undocumented immigrants ineligible for public benefits. (“Ghost of Prop. 187 rises as ...