The Story of California Proposition 227 (1998): How History, Immigration, and Direct Democracy Shaped the Policy Narratives in the Battle for Bilingual Education

Abstract

In the 1990s, political actors across the United States, such as Ron Unz, seized on simmering tensions against immigrants to push discriminatory policies. In Unz’s case, he created Proposition 227: “English for the Children” in 1998 to end bilingual education in California, the country’s most linguistically and culturally diverse state. He was able to gain success by carefully crafting policy narratives that exploited popular stereotypes and fears related to immigrants, California’s ballot initiative system, and ever-increasing pushback against the gains of the Civil Rights movement. Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and historiographical research methods were used to examine each side of the Prop. 227 debate as it occurred in televised programming, local newspapers, and other primary sources of the period. This theoretical and methodological approach allowed this paper to deeply explore the larger legal, historical, political, and social contexts of the time that made Unz’s particular narrative approach so effective. When the initiative was proposed, it appeared to present a concrete and straightforward solution to a complex systemic problem that had been brought to the attention of many Californians. However, the reality and subtext of the eventual law were much more divisive and discriminatory. The findings of this paper show that policy narratives, in general, have a powerful impact on shaping public opinion, building coalitions, and instituting solutions to social and policy problems. In the case of Proposition 227, policy narratives were operationalized by conservatives to limit access to resources for marginalized groups, force citizenship and immigration debates into the public square by connecting them to a seemingly tangential policy issue, and perpetuate systemic racism and institutionalized inequality.