An obscure ballot initiative in Florida intended to end a legacy of bias against Asian-Americans was defeated Tuesday, apparently because voters incorrectly assumed it would prevent illegal immigrants from owning property.
Had it passed, the initiative, known as Amendment No. 1, would have removed from the state’s Constitution language adopted in 1926 allowing the Legislature to prohibit foreigners who were barred from citizenship — Asian-Americans at the time — from owning land.
No such legislation was ever enacted here, and every other state that had such laws has scrapped them on grounds of equal protection. But on Tuesday, Florida’s effort to delete the provision went down, with 52 percent voting “no” and 48 percent voting “yes.”
Immigrant advocates said they were stunned. “It’s terribly disappointing,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. “At a time when our country has turned away from a history of racism, we have left a racist and anti-immigrant provision in Florida’s Constitution.”
...[The Ballot] simply asked voters if they were willing to delete “provisions authorizing the Legislature to regulate or prohibit the ownership, inheritance, disposition and possession of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship.”
Steve Geller, a former state senator who worked to get the initiative on the ballot, said Florida election rules only allowed a description of 75 words, and required that the language of the old provision — “aliens ineligible for citizenship” — be included. As a result, he said, “a lot of people thought it had to do with illegal aliens, and it had nothing to do with illegal aliens.”
In fact, some organizations opposing illegal immigration latched onto the provision and advised people to vote no. On the Web site of one group, Americans for Legal Immigration, a member wrote that it should be left standing because “ ‘illegal aliens’ should not have ‘rights’ like U.S. citizens have. The only right they should have is deportation!”
...Ms. Tang, 47, who came to the United States from Macao in 1978, said that next time would be different. She said she hoped to put the initiative on the ballot again as soon as possible.
“We’ve learned,” she said. “From here on, we will have to get together to raise some funds to get information to the communities.”
2 comments:
Racism? When did illegal aliens become a race?
The whole point of the article is that the ballot had nothing to do with illegal aliens but was defeated by exactly the sort of ignorance that assumes all immigrants to the United States are illegal.
Further, discrimination against any immigrant - illegal or otherwise - on the basis of their race, most certainly qualifies as racism.
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