ABSTRACT
Proposition 187 provides that the legislature cannot amend it "except to further its purposes" and then only by a recorded supermajority vote in each house of the legislature or by another voter initiative. Writing for the Plyler majority, Justice William Brennan argued that the Texas law would inevitably harm children. The Texas law might save some money, according to Brennan, but Texas had failed to establish that illegal aliens imposed a significant fiscal burden on state coffers or that their exclusion would improve the quality of education. The legal challenge to Proposition 187 does not rest entirely on the strength of Brennan's opinion. Proposition 187, like the "official English" laws approved in California and elsewhere since the mid-1980s, was a symbolic message to policy elites. Proposition 187 will probably reduce some migration, especially by women and their small children, who constitute a growing fraction of the illegal flow.
