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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
A message to Trump protesters in California: Put down the Mexican flags
As thousands of demonstrators take to the streets of Los Angeles protesting immigration enforcement operations, images of Mexican flags waving alongside burning cars and clashes with federal agents are once again dominating news coverage. While the passion and commitment of these protesters are undeniable, they are making a critical strategic error that could undermine their cause and harm the very communities they seek to protect. They are ignoring an important lesson from history on how prominently displaying this flag can backfire with the broader public. More than 30 years ago, Californians were facing intense economic insecurity as the state was crawling out of a recession amid a dramatic influx of immigrants, trends eerily similar to today. It led to a public backlash against immigration led by then-Gov. Pete Wilson. The political centerpiece of the movement in 1994 was Proposition 187. The measure called for denying public services to undocumented immigrants. Latino students and activists organized massive protests across the state. Like today's demonstrations, these protests featured prominent displays of Mexican flags. One demonstration at Los Angeles City Hall drew an estimated 70,000 protesters, one of the largest protests in city history. But it only served to inflame a distressed public. Proposition 187 passed decisively with 59% of the vote. Post-election analysis revealed that the Mexican flag imagery had become a powerful weapon in the hands of the measure's supporters. Harold Ezell, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service Director who helped author Prop. 187, later declared that the 'biggest mistake the opposition made was waving those green and white flags with the snake on it. They should have been waving the American flag.' Technically, opponents of the measure eventually would win. Courts ruled that Prop. 187 was unconstitutional. But the political damage for supporters of immigrants would extend far beyond that single election. Prop. 187's passage, aided by the visual narrative of foreign flags at protests, helped transform California politics for a generation—but not necessarily in the way protesters intended. While an entirely new generation of Latino political activism was stirred by the heated passion of that campaign, so too was an anti-immigrant fervor that consumed California politics for a generation. Rather than just building sympathy for immigrants and a show of ethnic solidarity when the community was under attack, the imagery reinforced opponents' framing of immigration as a question of national loyalty rather than human and constitutional rights. Today, protesters in Los Angeles risk repeating this strategic blunder. The Mexican flag being waved amid destruction, violent interaction with law enforcement, and burning vehicles allows opponents to shift the narrative away from legitimate concerns about immigration enforcement tactics and toward questions of patriotism, lawlessness, and national identity. It transforms what should be a debate about American constitutional rights and due process into a conversation about foreign loyalty and cultural assimilation. It highlights division and, at least optically, prioritizes foreign loyalty over American loyalty. This messaging problem is particularly acute given how Latino political attitudes have evolved since 1994. Research shows that today's Latino voters, especially younger generations, are increasingly assimilated and respond differently to ethnic appeals than their predecessors. Millennial and Generation Z Latinos are more motivated by intersectional movements that promote equality for all Americans rather than country-of-origin symbolism. For these assimilated voters, substantive policy discussions prove more influential than ethnic appeals tied to ancestral homelands. Pew Research Center shows that more than half of all Hispanics view themselves as 'typical Americans.' That number grows to 80 percent in younger Latinos. The Mexican flag imagery also alienates more than just Latinos. It also turns off potential allies who should be natural coalition partners. The 1994 protests should have included not just Latinos but also far more whites, Asian Americans, and African Americans who opposed Prop. 187 on civil rights grounds. In the end, Prop. 187 lost only among Latinos but was supported by white, Black, and Asian voters due, at least in some part, to the ethnic polarization Latino activists were imparting to rally their communities. Similarly, today's immigration enforcement concerns affect diverse communities across Los Angeles. But when protests are visually dominated by Mexican flags, these broader coalitions understandably feel excluded from what should be an American civil rights movement. Perhaps most damaging, the flag imagery provides opponents with exactly the ammunition they need to dismiss legitimate grievances. This is how immigration activists lose the message to Donald Trump. Using the flag of a foreign nation undermines the moral high ground of this position. Moreover, it cedes the American flag to the rising extremism we're witnessing on the American right. Latinos are Americans concerned about American issues like economic opportunity, public safety, and constitutional rights. Treating them as a monolithic bloc defined by ancestral nationality not only misreads their political priorities but also reinforces stereotypes that opponents can exploit. Put away the Mexican flags. Embrace American symbols and American values. Frame the debate in terms of constitutional rights and due process rather than ethnic identity. The stakes are too high, and the lessons of history too clear, to repeat the strategic errors that helped doom the fight against Prop. 187. American protesters fighting for American rights should carry American flags. Mike Madrid is a political analyst and a special correspondent for McClatchy Media.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Column: Orange County once was an anti-immigrant hotbed. What changed?
For decades, I could count on my native Orange County to act against immigrants, legal and not, as regularly as the swallows returned to Capistrano. It was like a civic version of the Broadway classic 'Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),' except not as clever and with more xenophobia. Cue the lowlight reel! In a 1986 article in Time magazine, Newport Beach resident Harold Ezell, then director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Western region, criticized immigrants who use fraudulent papers. 'If you catch 'em, you ought to clean 'em and fry 'em yourself," he said. Republicans illegally posted uniformed security guards outside voting booths in Santa Ana in 1988 with signs stating noncitizens couldn't vote. A group of residents — including Ezell — drafted Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot measure that sought to make life miserable for "illegal aliens" and their children. After downing margaritas at El Torito, they named the initiative 'Save Our State." In 1996, the Anaheim City Council allowed immigration authorities to screen the legal status of detainees in the city jail — the first program of its kind in California. Three years later, Anaheim Union High School District trustees passed a resolution to sue Mexico for $50 million for the cost of educating people like me, who were the children of unauthorized immigrants. Long before it became a GOP tradition, local Republican candidates and politicians took trips to the border to boast about how tough they were on the 'invasion.' In 2005, Mission Viejo grandfather Jim Gilchrist created the Minuteman Project, which enlisted suburbanites to help the Border Patrol find migrants who illegally crossed into this country. That same year, Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor tried to get police officers to enforce federal immigration laws, which would have been a first in the nation. Read more: O.C. can you say ... 'anti-Mexican'? From theorizing about how to repeal birthright citizenship to suing California over its "sanctuary" state law and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold detainees in city and county jails, Orange County has shown the rest of the country how to be as punitive as possible toward the undocumented. With Donald Trump in the White House again, this Know Nothing legacy has its most powerful acolyte ever. If you're against mass deportations and want to see some sort of amnesty, it's easy to feel deflated and even easier to curse Orange County for its past. I've been doing the latter for nearly all of my adult life — first as a college activist, then as a columnist. It's a subject I wish I could leave but — to paraphrase Michael Corleone — it keeps pulling me back in. Because I've covered Orange County for a quarter-century, though, I haven't lost all hope. I know the result of O.C.'s scorched-earth campaigns against illegal immigration: initially shoving the national conversation rightward, but eventually, repeatedly, becoming the political equivalent of an exploding cigar. Though Proposition 187 passed, it famously made my generation of California Latinos vote Democratic for decades and permanently kneecapped the O.C. GOP. The local anger over the ballot initiative led to Loretta Sanchez's historic 1996 win over incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan, as she became the first O.C. Latino elected to Congress. Her victory was so stunning that a House subcommittee investigated Dornan's claims that immigrants illegally voted in the election and swung it for Sanchez (they didn't). The Minuteman Project? It quickly fizzled out. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman's law school who sparked Trump's interest in banning birthright citizenship with a cockamamie 2020 article claiming Kamala Harris wasn't a 'natural born citizen'? He faces disbarment for pushing Trump's unfounded claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. Costa Mesa? It now has a progressive, Latino-majority City Council that has loudly distanced itself from Mansoor's actions. As the years went on, trashing immigrants for political gain in Orange County just wasn't as popular or effective as before. Trump, despite his noxious rhetoric over three presidential campaigns, never won the county. A UC Irvine School of Social Ecology poll released this month showed that 28% of O.C. residents thought immigration was a 'top problem' locally — compare that with a 1993 Times poll putting that number at 80%. Meanwhile, the UC Irvine poll found that 58% of people in O.C. favored some type of legal status for immigrants who have none, while 35% preferred deportation. This ain't John Wayne's Orange County anymore. Hell, it's not mine. What changed? Demographics, for one. In 1990, as anger against illegal immigration was beginning to rage in Southern California, whites were 65% of the county. Fourteen years later, U.S. census figures showed they had become a minority in O.C. The latest stats put whites at just 37%. Nearly a third of residents are foreign-born, with immigrants living all across the county and occupying all rungs of the social ladder. It's harder to trash them when they're your neighbors, your children's friends, your in-laws or your co-workers, you know? Those changing demographics also led to the political purpling of the county. Few O.C. politicians outside of Huntington Beach's MAGA City Council have publicly praised Trump's promises to clamp down on immigration. Even O.C. Sheriff Don Barnes — who's about as liberal as a Winchester rifle and who has drastically increased the number of jail inmates his department turned over to immigration authorities — put out a news release this week asserting that his deputies "remain focused on the enforcement of state and local laws," rather than joining Trump's deportation posse. Most of all, it's the activists who have had enough of the old Orange County. There's always been pushback against anti-immigrant lunacy here. When I was a sophomore at Anaheim High, thousands of high school students walked out of class to protest Proposition 187. In 2006, there was a huge rally in Santa Ana — along with other marches in the rest of the country — to protest a congressional bill that would have made Proposition 187 seem as friendly as President Reagan's amnesty. But most of those efforts were haphazard, devolved into infighting among Chicanosauruses and didn't develop into a full-fledged movement. Read more: In Orange County, land of reinvention, even its conservative politics is changing Over the last 15 years, activists who grew up here — and not just Latinos — have organized rallies, staged sit-ins and formed nonprofits or community-based groups that coalesced into a multifront network standing up for people without papers. They campaigned to kick ICE out of local jails, aided various lawsuits seeking to change local policies and even helped pro-immigrant candidates populate school boards and city councils. If such a loud, successful resistance can happen in Orange County, it can happen anywhere. It's not easy, but it's possible — nay, necessary. One of the people fighting the good fight is Santa Ana native Sandra De Anda. She's a network coordinator for Orange County Rapid Response Network, which connects immigrants to legal help and runs a hotline to report ICE sightings. The 31-year-old grew up on Minnie Street in a historically Cambodian and Latino neighborhood where migra detained residents 'all the time." When she returned to her hometown from Portland, Ore., in 2017, De Anda began to volunteer for pro-immigrant groups 'and never looked back.' She's proud of how far Orange County has come and is more committed than ever to her cause. Friends and family worry for her safety, but De Anda remains undeterred. 'There's such a nasty conservative tradition here, but our folks have still been here just as long,' she told me in a matter-of-fact tone after a long day of work. 'We deserve to stay here. We're going to have to fight together through any means necessary for the next four years." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
