When Jerry Brown Tried to Keep Immigrants Out of California

In 1975 the new governor found ‘something a little strange’ about welcoming Vietnamese refugees.

In his last year as California’s governor, Jerry Brown—like his fellow Democrats—has embraced illegal aliens as part of the “resistance” to President Trump. Mr. Brown said Wednesday that the Justice Department was “basically going to war against the state of California.” The department has sued the state over three statutes designed to frustrate the enforcement of immigration laws, including one prohibiting private employers from cooperating with immigration authorities.

But in his first year as governor, Mr. Brown—like his fellow Democrats—strenuously opposed immigrants who received federal approval to come to the U.S. as refugees from their besieged homelands.

When South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to communists in April 1975, Gov. Brown, who had just succeeded Ronald Reagan, fought the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. In the process, Mr. Brown and other Democrats engaged in xenophobic rhetoric.

“There is something a little strange about saying, ‘Let’s bring in 500,000 more people,’ when we can’t take care of the one million out of work,” Mr. Brown said.

Among the Democrats who supported Brown were two U.S. senators, Delaware’s Joe Biden and South Dakota’s George McGovern. New York’s Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman echoed Mr. Brown’s position when she said that “some of her constituents felt that the same assistance and compassion was not being shown to the elderly, unemployed and poor in this country.”

Perhaps they also wanted to prevent the creation of another voting bloc, such as Cuba-Americans in Florida—that would support anticommunist conservatives.

In opposing immigration from Southeast Asia, Mr. Brown and his fellow liberals pitted ethnicity against ethnicity and class against class in a cynical quest for power—as they do today.

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