Citizenship Law Snares Viet Fishermen : Courts: A judge upholds the enforcement of a 200-year-old statute that threatens to put many resident aliens out of work.

A federal judge on Monday allowed the Coast Guard to resume enforcing a 200-year-old citizenship requirement against Vietnamese owners and pilots of commercial fishing boats in U.S. waters.

U.S. District Judge William Schwarzer said he had reluctantly concluded that a group of legal resident aliens from Vietnam, who obtained a restraining order against the law Sept. 27, had no chance of ultimately proving it unconstitutional.

“They have been poaching,” he said.

The judge said Congress, out of concern for national security and domestic commerce, had the power to require commercial fishing boat owners and captains to be U.S. citizens.

Alan Sparer, a lawyer for the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Assn. and six individual fishermen who challenged the citizenship law, said he would file an emergency appeal in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“These fishermen will in fact be out of work” under Schwarzer’s ruling, Sparer told reporters. He said between 30 and 100 boat owners in Northern California would be affected, and many crewmen would be unable to find work on boats owned by non-Vietnamese. There are a lesser number of Vietnamese fishermen based in San Pedro.

The Vietnamese are refugees who have been granted permanent residence in the United States while applying for citizenship, a process that can take seven years. They fish for rockfish and hackfish and insist that they compete very little with the rest of the fishing industry.

The Vietnamese said many were forced to stop fishing and some were threatened with confiscation of their boats when the Coast Guard, after years of non-enforcement, started enforcing the law last November and fining them up to $500.

The lawsuit said the citizenship requirement, passed in the post-Revolutionary War period to protect the fledgling U.S. fishing fleet, discriminated unconstitutionally against resident aliens and deprived them of their right to pursue their occupation without due process of law.

Schwarzer, describing himself as troubled by the case, said he had “tried very hard to arrange an armistice” to give the Vietnamese time to ask Congress to change the law. But Sparer said the government had agreed to only a 30-day delay, a period he said was too short for congressional action.

Ruling from the bench, Schwarzer said the ownership of commercial fishing fleets was an area in which Congress traditionally had “great power to regulate.” The Supreme Court has interpreted that power broadly, he said, citing a ruling that upheld the denial of Medicaid benefits to certain categories of aliens.