Rational Talk on Immigrants for a Change

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein likes to tell the story of when she first learned how easy it is to enter this country illegally. She was staying at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego during the 1990 gubernatorial campaign when her marathoner husband, Richard Blum, left their room for his morning run.

“He ran down the beach, kept running across the border, ran around the (Tijuana) bullring and ran back across the border and wasn’t stopped by anybody,” she recalls. “He was surprised. He expected someone to have stopped him at some point.”

“Then,” she adds, “I began getting all these complaints--particularly in Southern California--from people who are not prejudiced, but are hard-pressed in tough economic times. They talked about overcrowded schools, the absence of affordable housing, the absence of health care. Judges told me their court calendars are clogged with excessive numbers of illegal aliens.”

Feinstein read a Los Angeles County report that said as many as 4,500 people illegally attempt to enter California from Mexico every night and at least half succeed. The same report estimated the net cost of providing county services and schooling for illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born, citizen children at about $500 million beyond all the taxes they pay.

“There was a time, I think, when Californians would have received these people because our state was not as stressed,” the Democratic senator says. “Today, everything is stressed. . . . Our government has the responsibility to help legal immigrants, but at the same time, it has a responsibility to see that illegal immigration is kept at the lowest possible level.”

Feinstein received a chorus of accolades from Democrats and Republicans alike in Sacramento last week when she warned, during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, that “there is going to be a terrible backlash, an unfortunate backlash, a long backlash” unless the federal government greatly reduces the inflow of illegal immigrants.

And on Wednesday, she sent a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno asking her to help “come to grips with the tremendous financial burden placed on California by undocumented persons.” Among other things, the senator wrote, the Justice Department should make control of the border a top priority; the Border Patrol should be strengthened with more guards and new technology, and any physical abuse by patrolmen of immigrants should be stopped.

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Feinstein’s cool, moderate, but resolute approach is soothing relief from the emotional, oft-childish sniping of some state legislators on this incendiary subject.

Assemblyman Richard L. Mountjoy (R-Arcadia), the leading Capitol crusader against illegal immigration, regularly gets hooted down as a right-wing kook whenever he attempts to advocate one of his proposals on the Assembly floor. True, his measures tend to be drastic, such as the potentially unconstitutional act of cutting off state funds for the education of illegal residents. (Gov. Pete Wilson said he would sign the bill as “a symbolic gesture” against inadequate federal funding of immigrant services.) But Mountjoy’s bills still deserve more civilized debate.

Mountjoy contends that unless this country removes the incentives for illegal immigration--jobs, schooling, health care--no amount of fencing and guards will keep desperate people out. “Don’t just stand by and say, ‘You’re a racist, you’re immigrant-bashing,’ help fix it,” Mountjoy tells his critics.

Of course, Mountjoy’s cause suffers when one of his fellow Republicans, freshman Assemblyman William J. (Pete) Knight of Palmdale, distributes to colleagues a tasteless poem mocking illegal immigrants with bigoted slurs and false stereotypes. Knight later apologized on the Assembly floor.

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Latino legislators say the best way to “fix it” and remove the incentive to migrate north is for the United States to help develop jobs in Mexico, possibly through the North American Free Trade Agreement.

They, too, oppose illegal immigration. “Nobody here’s for open borders,” says Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the legislative Latino Caucus. “When undocumented people are apprehended, they should be sent back to wherever they came from.”

This especially goes for convicted felons, Polanco adds. He and other Latinos object to the state spending $350 million a year imprisoning 17,000 illegal immigrants. The Wilson Administration counters that if these felons were sent back to their homeland, they merely would return to California and become repeat criminals.

But rational, thoughtful discussion of these things within the state Capitol tends to be detoured by the easier course of name-calling. The issue becomes “immigrants” rather than--as Feinstein has made it--”illegal immigration.”