http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-na-trump-immigration-analysis-20160430-story.htmlApril 29, 2016
By Cathleen Decker
Donald Trump's emphasis on illegal immigration has propelled his presidential campaign to the threshold of winning the Republican nomination, but it risks huge collateral damage to a California state party that has worked to distance itself from the immigration wars of two decades ago.
Trump emphatically defended, in a Thursday night speech in Orange County, his proposals to deport those in the country illegally and build a wall to keep others out. His opponents clashed in the streets with police in an eerie reminder of the mass protests in 1994 that greeted the campaign surrounding Proposition187, the measure to bar state services for immigrants here without papers.
Although the proposition passed, the backlash toward those who supported it has been a leading cause of a precipitous decline in the number of Republicans registered in California.
In September, desperate to reverse the slide, the state party changed its platform to omit wording that said allowing such immigrants to stay in the country "undermines respect for the law," and to add that Republicans "hold diverse views" on the subject. That move came six months after the party's first formal embrace of the California chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay GOP voters.
The intent was to remake the party's image before it lost all political heft, if in steps small enough to keep it in tune with the views of the GOP base. But the campaigns being waged by Trump and the second-place Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, have sent illegal immigration roaring back into view.
By deference or whim, Trump barely mentioned it in his Friday speech at the state Republican convention in Burlingame, near San Francisco International Airport. It came up only twice, once when he reiterated his intent to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and once when he joked about the circuitous path he was forced to take around fencing to avoid crowds of angry protesters massed around the hotel.
"It felt like I was crossing the border, actually," he said.
