Senator Dianne Feinstein makes an implausible undercover agent, which made her recent experiment in black-market-document procurement all the more persuasive. The California Democrat decided to find out for herself just how easy it would be to get a fake green card and driver's license. So she traded her Hermes scarf for some urban camouflage -- in this case, a gabardine pantsuit -- and went shopping in MacArthur Park, a crime-infested mini-mall for phony immigration documents near downtown Los Angeles. Never mind that the patrician politician went trailing a swarm of agents in dark suits; the fake IDs were hers for the asking. "They would have cost anywhere from $10 to $60," she says, "and I could have had them within the hour."
Feinstein was prescient enough to make illegal immigration a pet issue, which gives her some political cover in her unexpectedly tight race against conservative Santa Barbara Congressman Michael Huffington. But the same cannot be said of Democrat Kathleen Brown, who in a struggle to unseat Governor Pete Wilson finds herself slipping over what has become the most hazardous issue of the 1994 elections. If California runs true to form, leading America's social revolutions through the ballot box, it will pass Proposition 187, an implacable, baldly unconstitutional plan to cut off services to illegal immigrants, from schools to health care to welfare. Wilson strongly endorses the measure; Brown emphatically opposes it, and at the moment that puts her at odds with as many as 3 out of 5 California voters.
Proposition 187 is truly a referendum for the 1990s: if successful, the initiative will constitute a dramatic statement by voters that if the government does not move to solve the immigration problem, the people will. In a country built by immigrants, it is a measure of the deep dissatisfaction with the generosity of the welfare state that the public has seized on aliens as the enemy within. A TIME/CNN poll determined last week that 77% of those surveyed felt the government was not doing enough to keep out illegal immigrants. For years now, the battle has raged between the federal authorities who are supposed to police the borders and the states who pay the price if they fail. Hoping for some ammunition, the Clinton Administration helped fund a study by the Urban Institute that for the first time assesses the costs of immigration. The study found that illegals drain about $2 billion a year for incarceration, schooling and Medicaid from the budgets of such major destination states as Texas, Florida and California. But the survey also discerned that for the country as a whole, legal and illegal immigrants generate a $25 billion to $30 billion surplus from the income and property taxes they pay.
That finding has not prevented angry Democratic and Republican Governors from demanding that Washington pay up. Lawton Chiles of Florida has already filed suit in a Miami federal court against the U.S. Government for "its continuing failure to enforce or rationally administer its own immigration laws since 1980." The suit asks for $1.5 billion in compensation. "So far, all we've got is a lot of hand wringing," says Chiles. Governors in Texas, Arizona and California are taking Washington to court as well.