CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : U.S. SENATE : Candidates Tough on Illegal Immigration

U.S. Sen. John Seymour, in shirt sleeves and standing before a darkened prison, looks squarely into the television camera.

“I say: Deport them!” he proclaims in the 30-second commercial. “Let them serve their time in the country where they came from.”

The ad is one of several that the Republican candidate is using in his underdog battle with Democrat Dianne Feinstein for one of California’s two U.S. Senate seats, and in many ways it sets the tone for the discussion of immigration during this year’s races.

With economic tough times and ethnic tensions fueling an anti-immigrant backlash in California, the four candidates for U.S. Senate are taking hard-line positions on immigration issues--or avoiding the matter.

Seymour, the appointed incumbent, and Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, are competing for a two-year term. In the other contest, Democratic Rep. Barbara Boxer and Republican former television commentator Bruce Herschensohn are fighting to succeed the retiring Sen. Alan Cranston in a full, six-year term.

With regard to the legal influx of immigrants, the candidates have said they generally accept the current numbers of people admitted to the United States, either through family reunification, political refugee status or other lawful programs.

As for illegal immigration, none of the candidates goes so far as to advocate building a wall or ditch along California’s border with Mexico.

But all say they would work to beef up the largely understaffed Border Patrol and better enforce immigration laws.

“Our borders have to mean something,” Feinstein said in an interview. “They can’t continue to be like Swiss cheese like they are (now). California has double-digit unemployment, (deteriorating) infrastructure that is not replenished. . . . We need to enforce our borders.”

Feinstein went a step further in a debate with Seymour this month when she said she favors peacetime deployment of retrained military troops along the border as an adjunct to the Border Patrol.

Seymour, who has especially hit on the illegal immigration theme in his campaign, does not think it is necessary to use the military. Instead, he wants to increase the number of Border Patrol agents by 1,500 people--up to 6,600--and equip them with better electronic surveillance devices.

In news conferences and public appearances, he calls for ridding California jails of “criminal illegal aliens”--either by shipping them home or by placing them in military installations elsewhere in the nation.

Arguing that 20% of the inmates in jails in Los Angeles and San Diego counties are illegal immigrants, Seymour is sponsoring legislation that would require their deportation upon conviction. Ideally, he says, they would then serve out their sentences in their native countries.

“There’s no doubt in my mind criminal aliens are a major reason why we have overcrowded jails and state prisons,” Seymour said. “I think the federal government has the responsibility to take that problem off the back of California taxpayers.”

Seymour’s new television ad, which began airing last week, is the latest trumpeting of this theme.

“It’s incredible,” Seymour says, the front gates of Terminal Island Prison in the background. “There are more police protecting members of Congress than protecting our border from illegal aliens.

“There are nearly 12,000 criminal illegal aliens clogging prisons like this one. I say: Deport them! Let them serve their time in the country where they came from.”

Seymour said in an interview that he realized his “hard-nosed attitude” would lead some groups to label him a racist who is “picking on Hispanics.” But he denied that that was the case, because, he said, his program would result in the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service focusing on “criminal aliens” rather than on a nationality.

For the most part, the issue of immigration--legal or illegal--is rarely interjected into campaign speeches despite the impact that the arrival of millions of foreign-born citizens has had in shaping and remaking California.

When Boxer and Herschensohn were presented with the single question on immigration during a wide-ranging debate in Manhattan Beach last week, both dispensed with their answers in a few seconds and sought to put the rest of their two-minute response time to other use.

And when Feinstein was asked whether she would repeal employer sanctions--the portion of immigration law that fines employers who knowingly hire illegal workers--during a forum sponsored by the Mexican American Political Assn., the candidate apparently did not know what her questioner was talking about.

Despite their deep philosophical differences, liberal Boxer and conservative Herschensohn share some opinions when it comes to illegal immigration. Both emphasize more support for the Border Patrol and better enforcement of laws.

“I consider it very much like defense, that in order for a country to control its own sovereignty, it has to control its borders,” Herschensohn said in an interview. “Illegal immigration is self-defining--it’s illegal. Enforce it.”

While he favors deporting illegal immigrants who commit felonies in the United States, Herschensohn said he opposes using the military on the border to control immigration and “very much opposed” construction of a wall.

“That is not the picture of the United States that I ever want to see on the border, between the U.S. and Mexico, between the U.S. and Canada, ever,” he said. “That isn’t the way the United States operates, and I don’t ever want it to be the way the United States operates.”

Similarly, Boxer does not want to see army troops used to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States from Mexico and Central America.

“Our problem is we have fair immigration laws, and they are not enforced,” Boxer said. “Increase the Border Patrol, give them the resources they need, so that we make sure we enforce the law.”

She also called for the federal government to do a better job in reimbursing California for costs in settling immigrants and refugees. California is receiving a small fraction of the federal money allocated under the state Legalization Impact Assistance Grants program, creating shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars two years in a row, state officials said.

Herschensohn and Seymour are enthusiastic supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement recently negotiated by the Bush Administration with the governments of Mexico and Canada. They see the treaty, which lowers trade barriers on the continent, as a long-term, partial solution to illegal immigration because it is supposed to promote an economic boom in Mexico that--in theory--will keep more Mexicans at home.

Boxer and Feinstein, who conditionally support the treaty based on whether it will protect U.S. jobs and the environment, are less optimistic that the pact can stem illegal immigration.