By Paul Nachman
12/02/2012
The November 6 election had some more under-reported good news for immigration patriots: Montana’s Legislative Referendum 121 [LR-121, pdf, see pp. 8-11], restricting illegal immigrant’s use of taxpayer-funded programs (think California’s Prop 187 or Arizona’s Prop. 200), passed overwhelmingly — with an astonishing 80 pecent of the vote.
You’ve not seen that endlessly chewed over in the Main Stream Media, have you?
It’s especially instructive to compare LR-121’s thumping triumph with statewide-candidate races which show Montanans to be ticket-splitters par excellence:
As far as I can see, none of the GOP candidates mentioned LR-121.
It won. They lost.
Illegal immigration is not even particularly noticeable in Montana (yet). But since retiring to the Bozeman area from southern California in 2005, I've found that Montanans generally have a healthy aversion to it. You see this in the plentiful comments from online readers on immigration-focused articles or letters in the Billings Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper. Look at the critical comments by readers on this op-ed which opposed LR-121: Guest opinion: LR-121 would bring costly, racist burden to Montana, by Bethany Letiecq, Great Falls Tribune, Nov 3, 2012 — in addition to a few published letters.)
I linked those letters, my op-ed, and the interview because I think the arguments in them are pretty good and may be useful to others. But it seems unlikely that they, and the "broadcasts" by Numbers and FAIR, could have reached more than a small fraction of potential voters statewide.
Thus, as multi-decade immigration-sanity activist Rick Oltman enthused to me after Election Day, LR-121 was close to a "pure" case: Montana voters made up their minds about it without much outside influence, most were interested enough to vote on the subject, and they overwhelmingly displayed disgust for illegal immigration.
This didn’t surprise Oltman. Shortly after the 2010 election, he posted a memorable article about politicians around the country who had just won big in races where they had forthrightly endorsed Arizona’s "notorious" SB1070, which had been enacted that spring. In the most heartening case, wrote Rick:
Fontana [CA] city councilwoman Acquanetta Warren in July of 2010 publicly endorsed Arizona’s SB 1070. Pro-illegal alien activists denounced her in the media and at city council meetings. To quote the November 3rd San Bernardino Sun “She’s a history maker. Councilwoman Acquanetta Warren became the first black mayor and the first female mayor of this city, with a blowout victory over five opponents on Tuesday. She took 54.6 percent of the vote.” Five other candidates split the remainder of the vote, with number 2 in the race getting 14%.
[Polls are polls and pols are pols. The ultimate poll is Election Day. November 10, 2010]
LR-121 will be fully implemented starting on January 1, 2013. Its direct effect will be modest at first. This is because the biggest burden on Montana’s state budget arising from illegal-alien families is the K-12 public education of their children (whether the children are illegal aliens themselves or anchor babies) — FAIR’s calculations (see pp. 70- 71 of that PDF document linked above) put this cost at about $20 million/year. But because of 1982’s appalling Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision, the bill can’t affect K-12 education, so that major fraction of the $31 million/year in our total costs won’t decline — except that LR-121’s implementation will encourage illegal-alien families to leave the state.
But LR-121’s enactment will sensitize workers in the state’s affected agencies to the fact that illegal immigration is serious business.
And, overall with LR-121, the vote was the thing: If citizens in "remote, unspoiled" Montana are concerned enough to so decisively approve a referendum aimed at discouraging the presence of illegal aliens in their state, that sends a message about the salience of this subject across the entire nation.
It should send a message to Dem politicians especially. After seeing the vote on LR-121, maybe even some members of the Democratic caucus during Montana’s coming legislative session will have second thoughts — or, as Thomas Sowell would write, "perhaps first thoughts" — about their lock-step unwillingness to serve the broad public interest in combating illegal immigration.
Still, Montana’s vote on LR-121 had a significant but too-little-publicized precedent in 2006. That year, Arizona’s legislature referred to their voting public for enactment three state constitutional amendments and a statute that focused on illegal immigration, Propositions 100, 102, 103, and 300.
The results were summarized in Around the States: National Restaurant Association ELECTION WRAP-UP, Decision ’06 (no longer available online):
In Arizona 4 immigration ballot initiatives passed overwhelmingly, including making English Arizona’s official language (74%), denying bail to illegal aliens (78%), barring illegal aliens from winning punitive damages (74%), and denying in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants (72%).
So America, and specifically the GOP, which had a disastrous 2006 election, has had a chance to learn this fundamental lesson before.
But Montana’s 2012 vote is even more striking, since Montana, unlike Arizona, isn’t — yet! — an "illegal-immigration state." (And we topped Arizona, 80 percent to 78 percent!)
Here, then, is the takeaway for immigration patriots:
If anyone quotes some opinion poll to you saying that most Americans favor a "path to citizenship for illegal aliens," ask them to explain the actual ballot results on Montana’s LR-121 — results which might even be enough to impress, or at least motivate to further repression, the goons of the $PLC, the National Council of la Raza, and the ACLU.
Paul Nachman is a retired physicist and immigration sanity activist in Bozeman, MT.
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