June 16, 2006

Baker is the man behind Protect Washington Now and Initiative 946, which would strip illegal immigrants of certain state assistance and penalize state workers who knowingly provide aid.

“I’m for immigration. That’s not what this is about,” says Baker, a retired “Top Gun” Air Force pilot who moved from California three years ago. “We should have an immigration system that brings people into our country and makes them productive members of our society [who] speak English, assimilate, and become nothing more and nothing less than Americans.”

Baker says most of the illegal crossings up north are made by drug smugglers, not people seeking jobs, as thousands do from Mexico each year. They cross into states such as Arizona, where the Minuteman Project and an initiative similar to Baker’s got their start.

Protect Washington Now is a spinoff of Protect America Now, which formed in Arizona after Proposition 200 passed in 2004. PAN’s founder, Kathy McKee, wrote I-946 a check for $200, which was the campaign’s first monetary contribution. But Baker says he doesn’t intend to take any more out-of-state money — something that his opponents at From Hate to Hope, an immigrants advocacy coalition, worry he’ll do at the last minute to help pass I-946 in November.

Between now and then, Baker must gather nearly 225,000 valid signatures by July 7 to get I-946 on the ballot. So far, he says roughly 40,000 signatures have been gathered by an all-volunteer operation of 550 people, all of whom Baker says clamored to get petitions once they heard about the intiative.

Martin Ringhofer, a Moses Lake resident who is working with Baker, failed to get a similar initiative (I-343) on the ballot last year. Through May 10, the state’s Public Disclosure Commission lists a total of only $2,280 in contributions to this year’s initiative, which opponents point out would affect every low-income resident who applies for state assistance by making them show a passport or certified birth certificate to prove citizenship.

Baker says Washington’s Mexican nationals — estimated at more than half a million — have access to $360 million in state benefits. According to the Department of Social and Health Services, the total is around $145 million and goes to programs such as emergency medical aid, pregnancy care, and child care for low-income children.

Baker acknowledges Mexican nationals pay taxes but says it doesn’t cover what they use in services. “They’re being paid a sub-living wage, so the rest of us taxpayers are paying for the rest of their living: their children’s education, their health care [and] babysitting,” he says.

He insists that I-946 is not racist, that it’s merely intended to stop lawbreakers — a label that Paul Lawrence, an attorney working with From Hate to Hope, rejects.

“The whole notion of criminalizing a person because of their immigration status seems terribly wrong,” Lawrence says. “This is just a punitive effort to go after a segment of the population that needs our support.”

Baker says his activism on the issue began after serving six months on a federal grand jury in Los Angeles, where many of the felony cases involved repeat deportations of Mexican nationals.

“I’m talking about armed robbery,” Baker says. “They don’t serve any jail time, they get deported to Mexico to the city of their choice, and they don’t serve any jail time in Mexico. So, literally, the next day they can come back across the border.

“One guy, it was his fifth deportation in about six years,” he says. “He gets up on the stand and he says very arrogantly, ‘Yes, I do not see my family for a while, so I commit a felony so I get to go home for free.’ And I mean, I almost jumped out of the box and strangled him right there on the spot.”