California closes its doors.

Chafing under the costs of caring for illegal immigrants, Californians have approved a measure that is probably unconstitutional

For years, legislators and other officials in states around the country have been complaining about unfunded federal mandates. Now that notion has become the unlikely battle cry of California voters, who on Nov. 8 registered a loud message of protest to Washington by passing a ballot initiative that would deny public services to illegal immigrants.

But for the time being, the vote for Proposition 187 will be just that--a message--and no more. A federal court immediately issued a retraining order that stopped the state from implementing the controversial new law. The state superintendent of schools told local districts to do nothing to implement the law until at least Jan. 1, 1995, and a private hospital group urged its members to "maintain the status quo."

If upheld, the ballot measure, approved on a 59 percent to 41 percent vote, would deny education, health and social services to illegal aliens and require local police to report anyone they suspect of being here illegally to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the state Department of Justice.

In an executive order issued even before the election results were official, Governor Pete Wilson told his department heads and agency secretaries to develop emergency regulations to make the statute work.

Wilson's order applied to the state universities, the community colleges and the state Board of Education as well as the highway patrol, the state police, the correctional agency, and the health and welfare agency.

The first casualty of the new law is likely to be a state-funded program that provides prenatal care to poor women as part of Medicaid. Wilson said he would ask the Legislature to take the $84 million that would have been spent annually on those services for illegals and put it into a similar program that provides prenatal care for working poor pregnant wome who are legal residents of California. He said the new money for the residents-only program, which he created, would enable the state to serve an additional 1,000 women each month.

"California has a right to set its own priorities, and to fund them, and not continue as we have been compelled to do, to short-change our own legal residents because of the obligations imposed by federal law to provide services to illegal immigrants," Wilson said.

Proposition 187 grew out of the state's frustration with the increasing cost of serving illegal immigrants in California. With the annual tab for education, emergency health care and prisons now exceeding $2.5 billion, according to state officials, Wilson and legislators from both parties have asserted that California is unfairly being asked to shoulder a burden that rightly belongs to the federal government.

Like Florida and New York, California has sued the federal government to seek reimbursement for these costs. Central to their legal theory is that illegal immigration is tantamount to an "invasion" against which the federal government is required to defend. That failure, California alleges, amounts to a violation of the state's 10th Amendment right to sovereignty because the mandate to provide services to illegals usurps the state's right to fund programs for its own citizens.

But California went further than the other states, first by writing into its budget hundreds of millions of dollars it hoped to extract from Washington. When the money did not arrive, the state simply added the shortfall to its year-end deficit and rolled it over for another 12 months.

Then came Proposition 187.

The ballot initiative was written by two former immigration officials in the Reagan administration and won strong support from a national population control organization. Wilson embraced the measure and made it a part of his re-election campaign, running television commercials that urged Californians to vote for him and for the ballot measure.

Wilson's Democratic opponent, Kathleen Brown, opposed the measure, saying it would make a bad problem worse. Brown said it was foolish to throw more than 300,000 immigrant children out of school and have them at home or in the streets without adult attention. She also said the measure would fan racism by making everyone not of European ancestry a suspected illegal alien. Brown was joined by President Clinton and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, by national conservative leaders William Bennett and Jack Kemp, and by many health and law enforcement officials in California, who said they feared the measure would discourage illegal immigrants from seeking help from their agencies.

But none of the arguments advanced by these people swayed enough voters in this economically depressed state that is home to an estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants.

A Los Angeles Times survey of voters as they left polling places Nov. 8 showed that most of those who voted for Proposition 187 did so to send a message to Washington, hoping to force the federal government to reimburse the state for its costs. Most of those who voted against it said the measure was poorly written. About 40 percent of opponents described the measure as racist.

The vote was polarized along ethnic lines, according to the Times poll. White voters favored the initiative by a 3-to-2 margin while nearly four out of five Latinos voted against it. Blacks and Asian Americans also voted against the measure, but by smaller margins.

Against this backdrop, Wilson moved quickly after the election to issue a call for tolerance, even as he vowed to do everything he could to enforce the law.

"There is no room in California for bigotry or discrimination," he said. "We will continue to condemn intolerance. We will continue to protect individual rights. The issue at hand is simply whether or not an individual has followed the law in coming to this country."

Wilson also sought to clarify the state's interpretation of a key provision that would require authorities to report to the INS anyone they "reasonably suspect" is not a legal resident of the country. Wilson said that term would apply to anyone who could not produce documents to prove his or her legal status, regardless of skin color, surname or principal language. He said everyone seeking public services would be asked to comply.

Attorney General Dan Lungren issued guidelines for local police to follow and forms for them to fill out when reporting a suspected illegal alien to his agency. Lungren said police would question and report only those they encountered in the course of making an arrest. Victims and witnesses, he said, would not be questioned.

"We've got to make it very dear that we're not asking local law enforcement to report people who come to their attention merely because they are victims of crime or they are a witness," Lungren said. "Then you suffer a breakdown" of the criminal justice system.

It was not clear on what grounds opponents would challenge the measure's provisions on health and welfare benefits or on police reporting policies. Congress already has denied general welfare benefits and nonemergency medical care to illegal immigrants, and California's law does not go much further. Emergency health care and state prisons, which account for more than $800 million annually in California, will not be directly affected by the initiative.

The legal battle over education provisions is clearer because both sides have acknowledged that the initiative violates a 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyer vs. Doe, a Texas case in which the Court ruled that states could not deny education to illegal immigrants if they provided it to all other children. That decision was rendered by a narrow, 5-4 majority, and four of those who were in the majority have since left the court. Wilson says he believes that the newly constituted and more conservative court will overturn the decision.

Daniel M. Weintraub covers state government for the Los Angeles Times.