Encinitas Forum Seeks Solution to Migrant Woes : The Border: The session, spurred by a city staff report on the problem, draws 150 residents to City Hall.

To make his point about illegal aliens, Gene Bello offered some of the most dramatic testimony that the Encinitas City Council heard Tuesday night.

Bello, 66, dimmed the lights to show a four-minute videotape made in a canyon next to his home in High Country Villas, a senior citizens development.

“We thought it would be a good thing to bring our canyon to you,” he said, “to show you just how much of a health risk the residents of our community are facing.”

Bellows recently used a hand-held video camera to document the filth in the area, which included cigarette packages, food wrappings, human feces, used condoms and toilet paper.

Diane Fradin, vice president of the development’s homeowner association, said sheriff’s deputies had warned residents to be protected when they left their homes. Sweeps of the area by deputies in the past six weeks have led to two arrests for assaults on officers.

The council also got a grim lesson in some of the forces at work outside the city limits that have contributed to the influx of undocumented aliens into North County over the past few years.

Several federal officials--including representatives from the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U. S. Border Patrol--painted a picture of a government trying to react to what has become a porous international border.

Dutch Steenbakker, supervisor of two Border Patrol stations that cover Encinitas, said that city accounted for 35% of the illegal aliens arrested by his agents during the past fiscal year.

“We cover 16 cities in San Diego County, and 35% of our undocumented alien arrests occur here,” he said. “That’s a large representation.”

Steenbakker told city officials that migrants are attracted to Encinitas not only for farm labor, construction and landscaping jobs, but also because the area serves as a way station on their trip north to Las Angeles and beyond.

Also at the meeting were representatives of U. S. Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), U.S. Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad) and county Supervisor John MacDonald.

Together, they listened as homeowners and business owners, politicians and migrant advocates, lawyers and laborers, as well as the merely curious gathered in a packed Encinitas council chamber to discuss the problem of homeless aliens who seek day labor on city streets.

Half a dozen sheriff’s deputies were on hand to handle the overflow of 150 residents, some of whom were escorted into an adjacent room to follow the proceedings as best they could.

One by one, members of the crowd talked about both major problems and minor grievances surrounding the influx of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America to this seaside town of 53,000 residents.

A common topic was the migrant camps, the makeshift communities of wood and cardboard hidden in the brushy hills and canyons throughout the city--communities that often abut gleaming new housing developments.

The city claims to have done its part to handle the problem. Since Encinitas incorporated in 1986, officials say, they have tried to develop programs to meet the needs of migrant laborers, business people and homeowners.

City officials say they have tried not only to help migrants find housing and work, for example, but also to respond to angry business owners who say the migrants drive off customers, and concerned residents who say they have spent a fortune cleaning up after the workers’ unsanitary encampments.

So far, the city’s plan has been to locate and forcibly move the migrant camps--tearing down one while waiting for a complaint about the next to arise from homeowners and businessmen, officials acknowledge.

“Day after day, the telephone at City Hall rings with complaints from residents and business concerns,” Gloria Carranza said Tuesday morning. She is the city’s transients-issues coordinator, a position established two years ago to oversee migrant programs. “And that’s not counting the letters. Everybody wants something done.”

John Weil, a representative from Packard’s office, said Congress may hold hearings into the migrant problem in North County sometime soon.

“Congressman Packard will certainly look into that idea,” he said. “But it might be difficult to convince 434 other members of Congress that there is indeed a problem here.”

Tuesday night, as the City Council gauged public sentiment, Encinitas had a message of its own: The burden of what to do about the migrants lies not on its shoulders alone; the federal government must also begin doing its part.

“When a city decides to deal with a problem head-on, there’s the presumption that we have the resources and wherewithal to solve the problem,” Carranza said. “But we can’t do it alone.”

The message came, in part, through a lengthy city report listing an array of alternatives the council could take to ease growing tensions over the migrant problems, including a ban on curbside hiring and a call for more federal assistance.

The 105-page report also calls for a state of emergency to be declared in the area and suggests that Congress conduct hearings in North County to delve into reasons behind the federal government’s lack of resources to deal with the migrant problem.

“To date, there has been minimal success at every level of government in being responsive to providing opportunities, money or resources at the local level,” the report says. “The city clearly is faced with dealing with a crisis far beyond its ability to respond.”

Three months ago, for example, Encinitas created an employment center in an effort to match employers with documented workers. Recently, due to a slump in area labor markets, only half of the 60 to 70 workers who show up daily at the center on El Camino Real find work.

“The city has taken a lot of heat for its efforts to solve the migrant problem,” said Carranza, who co-wrote the report. “But we’ve largely been doing this alone. Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, there were supposed to be lots of dollars.

“Where are the dollars? Where are the programs and the enforcement personnel?”

Carranza said that at least three of the 26 alternatives listed in the city’s report ask the federal government to “take responsibility” for its role in the migrant problem, including measures such as a migrant culturalization program and a resettlement-sanctuary program for Guatemalans until their immigration status can be resolved.

“There’s a lack of programs to deal with their integration into the community--especially the legalized ones,” Carranza said, referring to all migrants.

“They come and go, come and go. They live in hill camps with no contact with the community other than to buy groceries and look for work.”

Undocumented aliens continue to pose a problem for the city, Carranza said, because by law they are not allowed to use the hiring hall and therefore must congregate on city streets. On a recent tour of popular job-seeking corners, officials said, only 9 of 120 men questioned said they were legally documented.

Besides the get-tough policy of rousting the hooches as a way to fight the problem, the council is considering creating an anti-solicitation ordinance that would focus on employers who stop to pick up laborers. Similar laws passed in at least one Orange County community have been challenged on First Amendment grounds, and local activists have said they would sue if the city attempted such a law here.

However, the council--frustrated by its inability to remove large congregations of men from the streets each day--is prepared to pass the law and then settle the matter in court, one member said.