(Sacramento) – Four weeks after the deadline to introduce legislation, a group of Republican Assemblymembers have revealed a package of twenty anti-immigrant bills touted as “common sense” despite an obviously biased intent. Many of the proposals are reruns of anti-immigrant legislation that have either been questioned in legal courts or unable to garner majority support, even among other Republican legislators.

“At a time when California is facing an economic deficit, we must not lack in working together to come up with real solutions and not scapegoat once again the immigrant undocumented community. The future of our state lies on our student body and workforce we must not be divisive in our common good and giving way to the rhetoric. The Latino Caucus will vigorously reject these misguided proposals in the State Legislature,” added Latino Caucus Chair, Assemblymember Joe Coto (D - San Jose).

The revelation of the anti-immigrant package coincides with the launch of a national clearinghouse for refuting immigration falsehoods. Sponsored by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the website seeks to “refute legal and factual inaccuracies about immigrants and/or Latinos” noting that “hateful dialogue threatens to drown out reasonable and thoughtful perspectives on immigration reform and other key policy issues.”

“Blatantly discriminatory actions such as these perpetuate the hysteria. We want to put those Draconian days in California behind us. Our focus should not be based on ethnicity but on immigrants’ activity and their conduct which point to home and business ownership, a desire for higher education and safe communities. Poll after poll, including a Fox News poll in September 2007, show national opinion favoring a path to earned citizenship by as much as 70% and yet California Republicans seem immovable on this topic. As with their unyielding opposition to budget compromise, it poisons policy discussions and public opinion and that is the great loss,” remarked Senator Gilbert Cedillo (D – Los Angeles) and Latino Caucus Vice Chair.

The Republican package assumes, without evidence, that immigrants are a burden to the state and cost billions of dollars in prison costs and health care despite recent non-partisan studies demonstrating otherwise. The very premises of these arguments are flawed. The bills purports to deal with several issues -- higher costs associated with healthcare services, incarceration, and taxes.-- which have been refuted by research, federal and state government analysis. In 2007 the Rand Corporation issued a report citing lower usage of healthcare services by undocumented immigrants who tend to be younger and healthier than their citizen counterparts, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) issued a 2007 brief citing lower incarceration and recidivism rates among immigrants than non-immigrant groups, a 2004 Social Security Administration analysis cited a $7 billion surplus in social security contributions as a result of payments from the undocumented, and a study by the Texas state comptroller in December 2006 reported the absence of an estimated 1.4 million undocumented in Texas would result in a loss to gross state product of over $17 billion. No similar analysis has been conducted in California whose undocumented population is similar in size to Texas. The Republican package also proposes the denial of some social services – such as education and treatment of life-threatening medical conditions – which are protected under the nation’s constitution or fall under federal authority. An effort to repeal in-state tuition ignores the fact that California is facing workforce shortages and needs to focus on training as many qualified employees as possible.

In a recent opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times by USC scholars Dowell Myers and Manuel Pastor the authors noted the need for an informed dialogue on immigration and a greater understanding of the “interwoven destinies” of immigrants and baby boomers as retiring boomers flood Social Security and Medicare in the next decade “generating a need for new workers and taxpayers.” The authors added, “For lack of a dialogue, wrongheaded facts fester in the public imagination, namely that immigration is accelerating, that prosperity is threatened and that assimilation is stalled.”

“The reality is that unfortunately the California Assembly Republicans are out of step with their Senate counterparts, the Republican Governor, the Republican President, and the presumptive presidential nominee of their party,” said Cedillo who has proposed several pragmatic, integrative bills, including the California Dream Act, the California Real ID Act and the Office of Immigrant Affairs, which garner support among Republican, Democratic, business, agriculture and social advocates.

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