Tempers Flare Over Illegals in S.D. County

It’s worst on weekend nights. Robert Shade and his wife, Betty, can sit in their boxy mobile home and hear the illegal aliens partying just across the chain-link fence in the backcountry scrub of Encinitas.

Peaceful retirement this is not. Bonfires blaze in the hills, guitars and radios blare, drunken whoops echo through the ravines. Discarded beer bottles roll chink-a-link down the hill. The men march right up to the fence “to do their duty” as though no one is watching, Shade said.

Heck, that’s the least of the worries, he said. Other elderly residents of the mobile-home park tell stories of the migrants strolling brazenly into yards to steal water. And more. In the last few months, half a dozen burglaries have been reported.

It’s not going to happen to Robert Shade. He has aimed powerful floodlights toward the bush, turning night into day. Barbed wire loops along part of the fence. And, if his mobile home is threatened, the retired engineer vows to take decisive action.

“That 12-gauge shotgun at the back door is waiting for them,” said Shade, 66. “I wouldn’t hesitate to use it if they came over the back fence.”

Conflicts Escalating

All across North County, from Oceanside to Escondido, Vista to Poway, angry residents like Robert Shade are losing patience. Long tolerant of the immigrants in their midst, many homeowners now say the myriad conflicts between natives and newcomers in North County have escalated to an unbearable level.

As the suburban frontier in North County spreads and the flood of migrants continues seemingly unabated, the detente of past decades has increasingly given way to open hostilities on the part of residents most directly affected by the alien influx.

Many can offer a laundry list of vexing problems--trash dumped on the edge of proud back yards, acts of public defecation, cook fires that threaten to ignite housing tracts, residential burglaries, nettlesome thefts of everything from lawn chairs to bicycles to Weber barbecues.

“Their presence is pervasive. It’s threatening,” Poway resident Jerry Hargarten said. “When they walk across a person’s yard in groups and take a crap in someone’s back yard, they’re telling that person something, aren’t they?”

Residents in his neighborhood, an upscale subdivision known as Green Valley, grew particularly concerned with the alien issue last year when a man accosted a teen-age girl. The man, who pulled a knife on the girl when she brought a glass of water to him while he was working for her parents, fled when she screamed.

One neighborhood woman has complained about illegal aliens coming up to her windows and peering in, said Hargarten, who serves as community protection chairman for the area homeowners association.

“She’s scared to death,” Hargarten said, “and she’s probably going to move because of it.”

Many Remain Sympathetic

But not everyone sees the migrant population as a menace. Although some North County residents have grown increasingly outspoken about the problems, many remain sympathetic to the plight of illegal aliens.

Michele Tutoli and her husband, Steven, are raising their four children in a comfortable home near a busy Encinitas intersection that has served as a prime gathering spot for aliens looking for work. The family has no gripes--and remains decidedly concerned about the welfare of the men.

“I really see it as a homeless issue rather than one of undocumented workers,” said Tutoli, who operates a tax service out of her home. “The reason the vast majority of them are here is to work. The reason they leave their homeland is there’s no work there. These are men with families to support.

“We have the Statue of Liberty, we say give us your poor, your tired . . . . But the attitude of many residents is, ‘Fine, but not here. Let them go somewhere else.’ ”

Carlsbad resident Dennis Meehan, meanwhile, questions whether an element of racism may be creeping into the debate. Instead of treating undocumented laborers as individuals, the downtrodden immigrants have been lumped together by many homeowners, Meehan contends.

“People are afraid of strangers,” said Meehan, president of the Carlsbad Board of Realtors. “I think that’s true in all suburban cultures--if you don’t look and sound like us, then you’re a danger.

“Sure, some of them are rude, some of them don’t have manners, some of them break the law, some of them are thugs--just like any other portion of society. But, whenever you have that group mentality, that them-against-us kind of thing, that is the core of racism.”

Complaints Come Easy

Nonetheless, the tales of woe, of residents complaining that they are virtually under siege, are easy to find.

Sue Tanner said many homeowners in her rural neighborhood on the northeastern edge of Vista have grown wary of the alien presence, even though migrant workers have been a fixture there for more than a decade.

“It’s gone from them taking a few pieces of fruit to now coming with a bag and practically stripping a tree,” Tanner said. “They’re getting so bold, they come up to a car, bang on the door and say things to your daughter. This is a whole different thing.”

Neighbors down the street caught a migrant sleeping in their van and called sheriff’s deputies to cart him away, Tanner said. But, the next day, the man was back on the street, waving at the homemaker “as if to say, ‘Isn’t this funny?’ ” Tanner said.

“I think people are afraid,” said Heidi Marvin, another neighborhood resident. “They feel like they can’t even leave their houses.”

Marvin said she has thought often of helping the aliens, of taking them some spare jackets or making a Thanksgiving turkey. Then, late last year, her house was burglarized. The thieves turned off the power, then threw an avocado through the window. Glass was everywhere. They made off with the VCR and some other valuables.

“I felt violated when they broke into the house,” Marvin recalls. “Here I was, thinking of helping them out, then they come and break in.”

A common gripe among residents fresh to the region is that the presence of migrant workers in their new neighborhoods took them by surprise.

Nancy Jo Perreira, for instance, said the real estate agent who sold her a new house in Oceanside’s San Luis Rey Valley 18 months ago never gave a hint that a migrant encampment was nestled in a woody thicket nearby. Today, Perreira said, she only hopes that her home will retain its value.

“I’m fed up with it,” Perreira said. “If I went to sell my home and about 10 of them walked through my yard, what would that do to my property value?”

Turning Pro-Growth

Now Perreira is in an unusual position for a resident of slow-growth minded Oceanside--she’s eager for her housing project to be completed so that the fields that serve as a nest for the migrant workers will sprout wood-and-stucco homes.

“I don’t think they would have sold any of these houses if people had known the problems,” said Susan Knox, another neighbor. “It’s not that I want an idealistic world, because I know that won’t happen. I just want my family to be safe and secure.”

One evening last September, Knox and a few neighborhood friends were on the patio facing the grassy fields stretching toward the migrant encampments. An alien came by and asked for money, but was told to leave.

He returned later and asked again, and again was rebuffed, Knox said. Finally, the man came back a third time with a friend. When Knox’s husband, Mark, told them to leave, the aliens began flinging dirt clods onto the house’s roof and stucco walls before they fled, she said.

Then there are the troubles of Edna and Loren Palmer.

The retired couple’s home is perched on the edge of a yawning valley sloping up from busy Encinitas Boulevard. In recent years, the parcel was home to several dozen migrant workers--a veritable condominium complex for illegals, as Loren Palmer puts it.

Virtually every day, Palmer would grab his shovel and go out into the brush to throw dirt over the feces left by the encampment’s residents. “It’s my afternoon’s job,” he said with a grim chuckle.

It wasn’t always that way. Years past, the aliens would camp farther down the valley, out of sight and out of mind. But then the local Roman Catholic church began grading work for a new parish, and the construction job pushed the aliens up the valley toward the Palmers’ place.

Fearing fires and other troubles, Edna Palmer began a fight to get the camp uprooted. She complained to City Hall. She harangued the city’s newly formed task force. She even took down the license numbers of the contractors who picked up the migrants for work and put them in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper.

Eventually, all the fuss got the Border Patrol and local police out. The Encinitas Elementary School District, which owns the undeveloped land in the little valley, sent a maintenance crew into the bush to tear down the camps. Finally, the Palmers say they have some peace--for now.

“We haven’t got a problem,” Loren Palmer said triumphantly. “Our bunch all went south, probably to Cardiff. They’re someone else’s problem. You don’t know how good it feels.”