Breaking Camps : Government: Encinitas views steady influx of immigrants as crisis to be dealt with.

Marjorie Gaines was talking about maps, pieces of paper she says were discovered among the belongings of Guatemalan migrants in a secluded camp that, until last week, sat down the road from Encinitas City Hall.

The maps, supposedly supplied to the Guatemalans before they left their troubled homeland, contained explicit directions on how to reach the North County coastal town after stealing across the U.S. border, the councilwoman said.

Though neither Gaines nor anyone else around City Hall has seen the maps, the councilwoman has mentioned them during several public meetings and interviews--purported proof, she says, that Encinitas has become a target of Latin American emigres in search of work and a better life.

“There’s no question in my mind that Encinitas has become a real target on the map for people who arrive here illegally,” she said. “I very much doubt that’s the case in the surrounding community. I think we stand alone on that score.”

Since Encinitas incorporated in 1986--and especially over the last 18 months--the city has placed the migrant laborer issue at the top of its political agenda, staging heated public debates on what to do about the workers and the makeshift camps that, many residents insist, have become an eyesore and a public health hazard.

Encinitas recently stole local headlines by creating the county’s first hiring hall for documented workers and earlier this month proposed establishing a city-run camp for migrants and their families.

But not all of its gestures have emanated such goodwill.

Council members have also eyed an anti-loitering ordinance to prohibit employers from hiring migrants on city streets--therefore destroying the impromptu forum through which many documented and undocumented laborers find work.

On Wednesday, Encinitas began 24-hour security patrols, shutting down the Guatemalan encampment on a swampy patch of city-owned land--the very place where the maps where supposedly found.

But, despite its high-profile efforts to solve its migrant crisis, observers wonder if Encinitas really shoulders a larger share of the migrant influx than such North County cities as Carlsbad, Oceanside or San Marcos? Can it claim greater numbers or, congregated along busy city thoroughfares, are the laborers in Encinitas just more visible, and therefore more of a problem?

And maps or no maps, why do so many newly arrived laborers head for the 18-square-mile city known for its flower fields and pristine surfing beaches? Moreover, has the city’s approach to the issue been overly contentious or merely a matter of taking the bull by the horns?

Interviews with more than a dozen immigration experts, migrant supporters and North County public officials have raised several factors that make Encinitas highly convenient turf for migrant laborers.

Indeed, in recent years, the proximity of Encinitas’ camps to Interstate 5 has established it as a convenient drop-off for smugglers--or coyotes--who leave their payload of migrants to scout the San Onofre checkpoint and Oceanside train station, links to points farther north, according to U.S. Border Patrol officials.

In the 1989 fiscal year, agents arrested 60 such smugglers in Encinitas. Also, 13,254--or 31% of the 42,754 deportable aliens captured by the federal agency countywide--were rounded up in Encinitas, said Emmanuel (Dutch) Steenbakker, patrol agent in charge of the U.S. Border Patrol’s El Cajon office, which oversees much of the North County.

Not all migrants, however, reach North County through the smugglers:’ underground railroad. Many find their way on the instructions of a family network, joining the campsites of brothers, cousins or friends who crossed the border before them, immigration officials say.

But Encinitas, at about half the size of both Carlsbad and Oceanside, is quickly running out of the rural stretches of land that once allowed those encampments to go undetected--leaving workers to establish makeshift shelters within a shout of newly built subdivisions and often nearly within sight of City Hall.

“The migrants are just more visible in Encinitas,” Steenbakker said. “Rather than living in far-flung fields as they do in other cities, they live next door to the neighborhood grocery store where they buy their food or within sight of the guy who hires them to do his lawn work.”

Although Carlsbad and Oceanside may have greater numbers of migrant workers within their city limits, officials there acknowledge that those populations exist mainly in the expansive growing fields of their respective eastern reaches, away from the critical eyes of residents.

“Our migrants are hidden,” said Richard Goodman, housing director for Oceanside. “We haven’t had the migrant-related crime that other cities claim, people getting scared to walk their properties or any outcry for a hiring hall. It just hasn’t happened here.”

Gloria Valencia-Cothran, an administrative assistant who handles migrant affairs for County Supervisor John MacDonald, said newly arrived migrants in Encinitas have had to face another very powerful force--the healthy California building market.

“The North County has always had an immigrant population to work in its fields,” she said. “But, as Mexico’s economy has suffered, we’ve seen greater numbers of people coming north.

“But, at the same time, our agricultural land is shrinking Where there was once ample space for the camps to exist unmolested, now there are new housing developments--people who look out their back windows and take umbrage at the very existence of the camps.”

Gloria Carranza, transients issues coordinator for Encinitas, calls it “the new economic migration”--new money is building on the fields of Encinitas, driving migrants onto the streets.

“Our city has reached the saturation point,” she said. “In downtown Encinitas, you see things you don’t see in downtown Carlsbad and Oceanside--large groups of men standing on street corners, looking for work.

“That’s what makes it seem like more of a problem here. People see these migrants day after day. They see their camps--so they call the city to tell them to do something about it. Our council is trying to deal head-on with the problem, not write it off to the county health department like other cities have done.”

As a board member of the High Country Villas homeowners’ association, Diane Fradin has demanded action from the Encinitas City Council on a migrant camp in a ravine owned by the adjacent subdivision.

“We have a disproportionate number of people coming here to get jobs that no longer exist,” she said. “Encinitas is known as the flower-growing capital of the world. But the economy here is changing, there are no more flower jobs.

“But the migrant advocates are setting up shop here anyway, inviting these people to come with the lure of food, clothing and employment promises. And the result is the filthy camps that all the rest of us have to endure. We can’t even safely walk our own property anymore.

“The actions the council has taken aren’t rash. I call it responsible government.”

Added Councilwoman Gaines: “The advocates continue to talk about establishing farm-worker housing in Encinitas. Well, that’s the biggest joke of the century. Because there aren’t any farms here. You have greenhouses with year-round people. They aren’t even hiring day laborers.”

Gaines claims firsthand knowledge of the crime she says the migrants are bringing to her city.

She has seen smugglers deposit their migrant cargoes in grocery-store parking lots just off I-5, she says. And, not long ago, she adds, she caught two migrants trying to break into her rural home in Olivenhain--and chased them into the weeds with a broom.

Gaines says the migrants have begun to spoil the habitat of the Quail Botanical Gardens in Encinitas, spearing fish in the ponds and running quail from their natural haunts.

“Quail Gardens is no longer a habitat for quail,” she says, “it’s a habitat for people.”

And, as the agricultural jobs in Encinitas diminish, she says, tensions are mounting within the migrant community. In the past six months, there were two killings in the Guatemalan camp, before it was closed.

And a suspicious fire at a local convenience store may have been caused by an intoxicated migrant who hours earlier was refused service, she claims. “It’s becoming a lawless community inside a law-abiding community,” Gaines said.

“And you can’t just look the other way. It’s like ignoring the spread of cancer in your body. You can’t afford to do that.”

Despite the lack of jobs, migrant advocates have continued to trumpet Encinitas as some sort of haven, she said. The council’s job, Gaines said, has been to deal with the resulting problems.

As a newer city, Encinitas has aggressively attacked its migrant problems rather than play political volleyball with the issue as other communities have done, she said.

“We’ve approached each issue with vigor and confidence,” she said. “In older cities like Oceanside and Carlsbad, they play political games. There’s council members who don’t want to rock the boat. They throw up their hands and say, ‘We’ve done all we can.’

“That’s because the safest political approach is to sit on the fence. You don’t make enemies that way. In Encinitas, we’ve realized that you have to make some enemies when you’re trying to get things done.”

Migrant advocate Ozvaldo Venzor agrees that the Encinitas council has indeed made some enemies over its migrant stand.

Over the years, the director of “Friends of the Immigrant Workers” has resented what he calls the council’s harsh policy on dealing with migrants, its abject fear of “the browning of Encinitas.”

He said the council has exaggerated facts in the migrant debate to suit its own needs--for example, inflating the number of workers who live in the city and creating the existence of the so-called foolproof maps.

This morning Venzor and other migrant advocates will continue their Easter tradition of distributing food to more than 300 migrants in the area. Although his efforts are humanitarian, he says, they do not attract new workers to Encinitas.

“They come for one reason, not because I give them tennis shoes, a blanket or a taco. They come to work. And, although there’s less work in Encinitas than there used to be, there’s still jobs to be had in the surrounding areas.

“These people are poor but they’re not dumb. Back in Mexico, the standard wage is $25 a week. They know that by working just one day a week here, they can make an entire week’s pay. So they take a chance and come north.”

Meanwhile, a short distance north on I-5, two North County communities are watching Encinitas with an eye toward their futures concerning migrant workers.

In recent weeks, Carlsbad officials have researched the idea of building a rural hiring hall for documented workers. There’s also been talk of creating a city-run camp for eligible laborers.

But unlike Encinitas, discussion has been low-key.

“In Carlsbad, we just don’t have as many NIMBY’s--’Not in My Back-yard’ types,” said Marty Orenyak, community development director. “We haven’t needed to raise hell in the newspapers or with homeowners. The council’s reaction here has been more balanced.”

In the wake of an incident in January in which a migrant worker was abducted by two workers of a rural Carlsbad market, Mayor Bud Lewis acknowledged that more residents are registering their concern over the migrant presence.

“I tell them that it’s the state and federal government’s responsibility to keep undocumented aliens out of the country in the first place,” he said. “But no matter how the housing market grows, 40% of Carlsbad will always be open space.

“So, if the big boys do their part, we won’t have a migrant overcrowding problem here.”

Added Oceanside Housing Director Goodman: “We’re lucky that the problems they have in Encinitas haven’t surfaced here,” he said. “So far, we’re still not on the smugglers’ pipeline. We don’t have people clustered on our downtown street corners.

“And we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”