Protest Aims at Laborer Center

About 100 opponents of illegal immigration lined a road leading to Laguna Beach’s Festival of the Arts on Saturday to protest city funding of a day laborer site with money partly generated by the annual summertime event.

The site helps workers, many of them immigrants, find jobs regardless of their status.

The Laguna Canyon Road protest, which ended shortly after noon without any major incidents or arrests, marked the latest in a string of tense Southland illegal-immigration demonstrations in recent months.

“These rich people in Laguna Beach should be able to pay Americans an American wage,” said Michael Jackson of Long Beach who joined the demonstration. “Illegals depress wages and that’s why Americans aren’t doing these jobs.”

Across the street from the protesters, half a dozen supporters of undocumented immigrants held signs with messages such as “Stop the Hate.”

The protesters “have a hidden agenda that is hate,” said Naui Huitzilopochtli of Westminster. “They are scared of the browning of America.”

At issue was the art festival’s indirect funding of the Laguna Day Worker Center, which is a few miles north of the site of Saturday’s protest.

The festival pays rent for the two months it uses city property. The money goes to Laguna Beach’s general fund, which helps subsidize community groups, including the Cross Cultural Council, which runs the day laborer center.

The center, which opened six years ago, receives about one-third of its $75,000 annual budget from the city, said David Peck, chairman of the Cross Cultural Council.

“It’s a real shame,” center manager Irma Ronses said by telephone earlier in the week of two protests that preceded Saturday’s. “These men are not criminals,” she said. “They want to work.”

About half of the 70 men who come to the center each day find jobs, mostly construction work that pays $10 an hour, Ronses said.

Saturday’s demonstration came two months after a tense face-off in Baldwin Park over a Metrolink art monument that a Ventura-based citizens group said was anti-American.

Ten days later in Garden Grove, foes of James Gilchrist, founder of the citizen border patrol campaign known as the Minuteman Project, clashed with supporters who had come to hear him speak. Five people were arrested. Gilchrist attended the Laguna Beach protest.