Roybal: Only Part of a Very Long Tradition : Congress always stints on money for immigration ‘reform’

In sports, you keep your eye on the ball or you mess up the play. The analogue in Congress is to keep your eye on the appropriations bill or your state winds up losing its fair share of federal money.

One of California’s most powerful members of Congress, Los Angeles Democrat Edward R. Roybal, messed up recently, and now the state is out about $600 million in aid to newly legalized immigrants. But there’s plenty of blame to go around.

A LONG STORY: First off, Congress, as a whole, has never put enough money into administering this nation’s immigration laws. It’s hard for one congressman to change that pattern in a time of tight budgets without help. Which brings us to the notoriously unorganized California congressional delegation. Where were our 44 other members of the House when Roybal needed a little clout to back him up?

The current flap involves a pool of funds referred to as State Legalization Impact Assistance Grants, or SLIAG in the bureaucratic shorthand used inside the beltway. That pool was created by Congress when it enacted the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. There were two key points in that controversial law: sanctions to keep employers from hiring illegal immigrants and a legalization (or amnesty) program for illegals already living in the United States.

Federal officials knew when the law was passed that certain states, California foremost among them, would feel a heavier social impact when the newly legalized immigrants began to come out of hiding. So part of the deal struck in Congress to get the law enacted was creation of a SLIAG pool of $4 billion, to be disbursed over seven years.

At the time many (including this newspaper) warned that even $4 billion would barely begin to cover the cost of providing education, health care and other social programs for millions of newly legalized residents. Only now is it becoming clear how understated those warnings were. California Gov. Pete Wilson, among others, is worried that spending to help care for the children of immigrants could give this state budget deficits well into the next century unless a solution is found.

To make matters worse, in 1989 federal officials began raiding SLIAG funds to pay for other domestic social programs--promising, of course , to someday restore the money.

In 1990 and ‘91, the Bush Administration took $1.13 billion out of SLIAG funds but didn’t restore the money in its ’92 budget. Roybal tried to get the money back by going to another powerful House member, Rep. William H. Natcher (D-Ky.), and asking him to insert it into the federal budget when it was taken up by a joint House-Senate conference committee.

For reasons still unclear, Natcher didn’t come through. Roybal says he broke his word; Natcher’s aides say his parliamentary maneuver failed due to technical rules that govern conference committee deliberations. Whatever the reason, California won’t get federal aid it badly needs.

THE LATEST TURN: Now Roybal’s colleagues in Congress are second-guessing his strategy. And it does appear that he counted too much on a network of connections built up in almost 30 years on Capitol Hill to come through for him when some elbow grease was called for. But Roybal has promised to try again next year, and one suspects next time he will pay more attention to detail.

And next time all of this state’s representatives in Congress--our two senators in addition to the 45 House members--and perhaps even Gov. Wilson must be on board. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, urban or rural, from the north or the south, one thing that every Californian in Congress can agree on is that immigration has a profound impact on this state.

If they can’t get their act together on that issue, what will it take?