sacbee.com
By Peter Schrag
Special to The Bee
Last modified: 2011-12-31T03:42:59Z
Published: Sunday, Jan. 1, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 5E

Don't bet that California voters will pass the proposed initiative asking Washington, D.C., to create a "safe harbor" for a million-plus illegal aliens in this state by formally exempting them from federal immigration law enforcement and immunizing the employers who hire them.

But even if it qualifies for the November ballot it would be a telling indication that Washington's paralysis on immigration reform can spark particularist state proposals on the left as readily as it's been producing them on the right. And, as its sponsors hope, it could also put its own spin on the 2012 presidential campaign.

Formally the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act, COPA is sponsored by a bipartisan group of Latino political activists, Democrats and Republicans. If it were to pass it could signal that the national mood is changing faster than immigration restrictionists in Congress – these days mostly Republicans – realize.

In the past couple of years the Democrat-dominated California Legislature, in granting undocumented students the right to get financial aid in the state's public colleges, took small steps in liberalizing the treatment of illegal aliens. Voter approval of COPA, its backers believe, would be much more significant.

COPA would allow undocumented California aliens who are taxpayers, have no criminal records, have been here four years or more, are not public charges and meet other criteria, to apply for formal designation into the tier of illegal aliens who, according to recent Obama administration pronouncements, are given the widest latitude in federal immigration law enforcement.

In directing the governor to ask Washington to place all those who qualify under California program into the feds' low-priority tier, COPA is a direct response to directives earlier this year from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton and other administration officials setting priorities in the use of federal resources in deportation proceedings.

Morton's directive assigns the highest priority to criminal aliens and terror suspects, and the lowest to stable long-term residents with strong family and community connections in this country.

Morton's memo and subsequent statements from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano don't grant blanket waivers to low-priority individuals, but in bowing to political pragmatism, humanitarian concerns and administrative necessity, they squint in that direction.

In playing to those priorities, COPA has immigration restrictionists, like California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, frothing. "It essentially asks the federal government not to enforce the law," Donnelly told The Bee's Jim Sanders.

Donnelly is right. But it's hardly a secret that the law doesn't work – that deportation of 11 million illegal aliens, some 2.5 million of them in California, many with citizen children or spouses, is economically and logistically impossible and morally indefensible.

Mike Madrid, a former political director for the state GOP who now heads the COPA campaign, is convinced that COPA has a good chance of passing. Even the views of Republicans have "changed dramatically" in recent years, he said, a "sea change."

Madrid cites private poll data showing that some 63 percent of California voters would support COPA – hardly a guarantee of anything in California's mutable initiative politics.

Even Madrid concedes "it's not a slam dunk." Americans are fundamentally ambivalent on the issue, supporting punitive anti-immigrant laws like Arizona's SB 1070 while at the same favoring paths to legalization for illegal aliens meeting criteria like COPA's.

But there are signs that, as Madrid says, the mood is changing. And as the nation's demographics change – ethnic change, obviously, but generational change, too – the body politic is likely to be become more comfortable with the ethnic diversity and social tolerance on abortion, gay rights and ethnic intermarriage that grows around it.

COPA creates a danger even for its sponsors. If it should pass, it could easily make a lot of illegal aliens, who would become self-confessed immigration law violators, even easier targets for deportation by some future administration less sympathetic to their cause than the current one. If it fails, it could demonstrate that even California isn't ready for liberalization.

But Madrid is probably right that if there were to be any place that might lead the nation out of its immigration morass, it would have to be California.

It's been nearly 20 years since this state, in the fight over Proposition 187, went through the immigration turmoil that Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina and other states are going though now. California, with its majority-minority population – and with the likelihood that it will have a Latino majority in another generation – is probably well beyond that.

Given the complexities of the issue, both as politics and as policy, writing a workable comprehensive immigration reform law will hardly be easy. But the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act is surely a reminder that immigrants and their children and grandchildren – legal and illegal – are becoming politically more formidable and culturally more integral in thousands of American communities. Along the way, the vacuum left by federal inaction can only generate more uncertainty and confusion – and thus make the need for the feds to act all the more urgent.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/01/415...#storylink=cpy