In 1994, California was in the throes of an economic recession, its unemployment rate increasing rapidly as it continued to bleed jobs in once flourishing industries. At the same time, it had the largest population of undocumented residents of any state in the country, already up to 1.3 million and getting larger.
So it wasn’t hard that year for Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy, R-Monrovia, and Republican allies in the state Assembly to find supporters for one of the farthest-reaching pieces of anti-immigrant legislation in the the country’s recent memory.
Proposition 187, also known as the Save our State, or SOS, initiative, banned undocumented immigrants from accessing any public benefits in California, including health care and public education. Had the law not eventually been struck down as unconstitutional, it would have prevented undocumented children from attending K-12 education, and it would have prevented every undocumented student living in California from attending college in the state.