California expands illegal immigrants rights, adding health care for kids

California already offer in-state tuition and driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, but now moves ahead on limits on deportations and state-funded healthcare for children. Additionally, a new law to erase the word “alien” from California’s labor code.

“We’ve passed the Rubicon here,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist. “This is not an academic debate on the U.S. Senate floor about legal and illegal and how high you want to build the wall…. [The state] doesn’t have the luxury of being ideological…. The undocumented are not going anywhere.”

Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists, with diminishing opposition from the GOP, continue to seek new laws and protections for illegal aliens.

These measures include cracking down on employers withholding pay from low-wage workers and expanding state-subsidized healthcare to adult immigrants without papers.

Arizona protesters 2010 photo/Chzz via wikimedia commons

California politicians point to the lack of action in Washington to overhaul the nation’s immigration system for the push for changes to state laws.

“The reality is, despite the bills that we’ve done, there are up to 3 million undocumented immigrants that still live in the shadows,” said Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville), chairman of the Latino Legislative Caucus. “Their legal status as immigrants does not change — only Congress can do that.”

The LA Times noted the history in the state:

California was one of the first states to authorize driver’s licenses for those affected by Obama’s order; two years later, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law enabling all immigrants in the U.S. illegally to seek licenses. The same year, the state expanded in-state tuition for more students in the country illegally and allowed people without legal status to obtain law and other professional licenses.

There have been symbolic wins too, such as a law last year to repeal vestiges of Proposition 187. The initiative, which overwhelmingly passed in 1994, denied immigrants in the country illegally access to public services; it had been mostly overturned by the courts. And on Monday, Brown signed a measure striking the word “alien” — seen as derogatory to those not born in the U.S. — from the state’s labor laws.