California’s long-term shift from a competitive or Republican-leaning state to a Democratic stronghold has been driven primarily by demographic change through immigration.
In 2018, more than one million illegal immigrants received driver’s licenses from the California DMV, which automatically registered them to vote under the new “Motor Voter” program.
Alex Padilla was California Secretary of State.
Back in 2015, Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California,” with “new voters” code for ineligible voters. Remember what happened in 2018?
AB 60 by former Democrat Assemblyman Luis Alejo, was just one of the many attempts over the past decade to authorize illegal immigrants with driver’s licenses. Alejo said AB 60 would reduce fatal crashes and improve public safety. AB 60 followed another law from 2012, AB 2189, which granted California driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants who came to California as children.
AB 60 was similar to bills authored by former Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, a Los Angeles Democrat, to give illegal immigrants the legal right to drive in California. Cedillo tried unsuccessfully seven or eight times to get his bill passed, but not without a fight. Cedillo’s bill was passed by the Legislature three times, but vetoed twice by then-Gov. Gray Davis.
Davis finally signed one of Cedillo’s bills in 2003, and it became an issue during his historic recall election. Davis was hammered on the issue by candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was elected to replace Davis. The Legislature then signed a repeal of the bill, and Schwarzenegger signed it into law.
Republican lawmakers said the 50 individual states should not be writing piecemeal immigration laws, as it is something Congress needs to handle at the federal level.
Not one lawmaker could answer how does a state government provide a document to drive legally, if the person came here illegally?
But even before then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 60 in 2013 to require California DMV offices to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, the fix was in.
Longtime Democratic political consultant and lobbyist with deep United Farm Workers ties (he worked with Cesar Chavez), Richie Ross openly boasted of targeting the Latino community’s fear of anti-illegal immigration measures, to drive the community even further into the arms of the Democratic Party, I explained in my book co-authored with attorney James Lacy, “California’s War Against Donald Trump; Who Wins? Who Loses?”
Ross, and now-State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, who once led the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, a group of self-proclaimed socialist and Communist California labor officials, and Democrat Party operatives created a program in the 1990s to target Latinos and immigrants, illegal and legal, to permanently drive California politics far to the left. They tripled registered Latino voters, increased the Democrat share of that vote substantially, and roughly doubled Latinos’ share of total votes cast in California.
