Guessing Your Citizenship

So businessman and 7th District City Council candidate Al Dib knows undocumented aliens when he sees them.

Dib “can tell by their faces whether they’re citizens or not.” (“High Noon Strikes For Handful of Candidates,” Times Valley Edition, Feb. 14.)

What an amazing talent! The income possibilities are endless. He could become a circus sideshow performer: “Guess Your Weight, Guess your Citizenship.” Or a private consultant to the Clinton Administration who screens the staffs of presidential appointees.

If he still wants to serve the Southern California community, he could become a Border Patrol agent.

Or anything but a Los Angeles city councilman.

Dib has already decided the select group of people he would serve if elected: he “didn’t bother” to ask Latinos to sign his nomination papers, since he believes that only “one of 100” Latinos are registered voters.

This blatant prejudice is simply not borne out by statistics on the ethnic makeup of the district. In truth, about half of the 7th District’s Latino population are registered voters, a figure repeatedly quoted in The Times and other papers’ coverage of the hotly contested council race.

The fact that Dib does not know this only shows his lack of familiarity with this community as a whole, and his lack of attention to the needs of Latinos, the ethnic majority of the district. I hope that come election day, to use Dib’s logic, only one in 100 of Dib’s supporters “bother” to come to the polls and the other 99 believe it’s safe to stay home.

KEZIA M. JAURON

San Fernando