This makes both houses of the state government:

The California Senate passed a bill on Thursday that seeks to shield illegal immigrants from status checks by local police and challenges Republican-backed immigration crackdowns in Arizona and other U.S. states.

The Democrat-led state Senate voted 21 to 13 to approve the California Trust Act, dubbed by supporters as the “anti-Arizona” bill. It blocks local police from referring a detainee to immigration officials for deportation unless that person has been convicted of a violent or serious felony.

This more or less makes sense to me. My basic stance is basically amnesty for those here illegally, plus increasing legal immigration by a lot. More immigrants means more workers, more consumers, more productivity. What’s not to like? I also wonder what percentage of illegals are here because of our own dumb drug war unleashing hellish violence throughout Mexico–I bet if you end it and do the other two things, illegal immigration will rapidly become something nobody has to worry about. The problem of illegal immigration is that people are being constrained in their ability to participate fully in American life, not that they somehow cheapen citizenship or whatever. So I support this concept, because why have local governments spend so much time and money deporting lesser offenders?

In a political sense, too, I like to see this. Democrats frequently fall into the trap of taking the base for granted, because who else are they going to vote for? Obama was definitely guilty of this with his deportation policy, which was supposed to I think make comprehensive reform more politically viable while not losing Hispanic support. Neither happened. To be fair, Obama eventually reversed himself on that, and rightly so. But actually delivering for your base is, shockingly, something you need to do to keep them excited. For California to go so far as to codify as a civil right in state law that you don’t have to carry your immigration papers with you at all times seems like forward-looking political practice to me, which is not exactly the case here very often. Sure, this sort of thing is only going to add to the fire that people like Jan Brewer live to stoke, but in ten years not only will Jan Brewer be gone, but nobody remotely like her will be running a state in the West. This is a law for that day, I think. The only thing I wonder is if we’ll see a Prop. 8-style campaign to try to overturn it.