O.C. Group Helps Fuel Anti-Immigrant Furor : Viewpoint: Many of its members believe the nation’s identity is at stake. Critics say rhetoric is divisive.

The testimonials were volunteered as if it were a support group for victims of a tragic loss.

The moderator told of a man in the audience who is dying from cancer and unable to get a possibly lifesaving operation because neither he nor the hospital could afford it. “However, as we all know, there are millions of dollars that have been spent on heart transplants and operations for illegal immigrants,” Barbara Coe told the group.

Another woman offered her story: While applying for a community college course, she was told to present a birth certificate and pay $40. She went on to report, erroneously, that school officials are not allowed to ask illegal immigrants for citizenship documents or to reject anyone unable to pay. “For them, it was free,” she insisted.

“We’ve lost our country without ever firing a shot,” a man said. “And they’ve done it using our money.”

The recent gathering of 70 or so people in this community room at an Orange County shopping mall was for a meeting of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, a one-year-old organization that has sought confrontation and found controversy in its efforts to address a wide array of social problems it attributes to illegal immigration.

The coalition started in Huntington Beach early last year as an umbrella group that now represents almost a dozen local organizations throughout California. In the past year, it has grown into a major grass roots network that claims a statewide mailing list of more than 10,000 people and a schedule of activities that has frequently placed it at the forefront of the immigration debate.

Coalition members have testified at public hearings in Sacramento and at local governments throughout the state, including the Orange County Board of Supervisors. They have also picketed employment stations where immigrants seek work; passed out warnings to restaurants about undocumented worker laws; encouraged boycotts of companies operating in Mexico and they are exploring a possible statewide initiative to pass tougher, anti-immigration laws.

Coe, chairwoman of the organization, said the coalition is also planning a class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of citizens who have been adversely affected by illegal immigrants. To prepare for the court action, she said the group placed the following classified advertisement in the National Review, a conservative political journal:

“Wanted: Testimony from U.S. citizens who have been victims of crimes either financial (welfare, unemployment, food stamps, etc.), educational (overcrowding, forced bilingual classes, etc.) or physical (rape, robbery, assault, infectious disease, etc.) committed by illegal aliens.”

In the spectrum of responses being heard in the growing debate over immigration reform, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform represents the nativist answer. Many of its members believe the problem of illegal immigration goes beyond the economic burdens that Gov. Pete Wilson and other political leaders have complained about. They say the nation’s identity and even its sovereignty are at stake.

“Citizens must be made aware of the danger of the U.S. becoming the next Third World nation,” the group’s literature warns. “. . . Facts and figures repeatedly prove that illegal aliens, first committing a criminal act by violating our borders and then bringing their values and culture into our midst, are major contributors to our mounting financial burdens and moral and social degradation.”

Many in the audience at the Orange County meeting had come to hear the keynote speaker, former Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, a champion of conservative causes and a critic of lax immigration laws. Most of the 70 people in the audience were white seniors and working class.

Coe, 59, the chairwoman of the group, says this is her first foray into organized politics. She formerly worked in the crime analysis unit at the Anaheim Police Department but now is a clerk in the department’s records division--a demotion that she blames in part on her high-profile work on the immigration issue.

Also a member of the group is Howard Garber, a retired eye doctor and well-known community activist who has crusaded for a number of conservative causes, from the death penalty to welfare reform.

Critics of the coalition say they fear the group’s harsh rhetoric is divisive and that by inflaming emotions on both sides of the issue it could extinguish hopes for a constructive debate about possible reforms.

“It’s like when there is a debate and somebody starts making personal attacks,” said Valerie Martinez, an aide to state Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles). “It stops everything; it’s irrelevant. There is a situation being created where two factions are being established and both factions are moving farther and farther apart as this debate goes on.”

John Palacio, Orange County director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, said the coalition and other groups like it are relying on emotion to fuel “the creation of a police state.”

“Everybody wants immigration reform,” he said. “But a lot of the proposals they speak of don’t really address the issue. We need to look at the causes and symptoms as to why people come to this country. They’re making this into an ‘us-versus-them’ debate.”

At the recent coalition meeting in Orange County, Coe made a point of warning against racist views or comments from the audience. She also noted that the group has Latino members, some of whom spoke in favor of banning legal immigration at a recent Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting.

“This is a legal issue, it is not a racial issue,” she said. “Any member or any group that conducts themselves in a way that implies racism is gone. That will not be tolerated.”

She said the group’s activities are not racially divisive because concern about the issue spans all segments of the population.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), an outspoken proponent of anti-immigrant reforms, lauded the coalition’s efforts because they have helped increase political pressure on the issue.

“I think the grass-roots organizations like this are living proof that democracy still works in America,” he said. “. . . Because the politicians were not willing to take any stand on this, the public had to get together and put the pressure on.”

Recent polls have shown a wide consensus among political and ethnic groups that illegal immigration is a problem that needs attention. The surveys have also found, however, that there is sharp division in California over how to solve the problems.

Gov. Wilson recently proposed that illegal immigrants be prohibited from attending public schools and that their access to health and welfare benefits be eliminated. Critics of the governor’s plan say, however, that instead of stemming illegal immigration, those reforms will create a health problem in the United States and a permanent underclass of uneducated workers.

Coe said Wilson’s immigration proposals are a step in the right direction and a reflection that the group’s message is being heard. In addition to those steps, however, the coalition also favors the extinction of any tax-supported program for non-citizens; the deportation of all undocumented residents and a military effort to seal off the international border from further incursions.

The Orange County chapter of the statewide coalition is called Citizens for Action Now. Coe said it has 412 members, about 60% of which she said are active in projects and contributions. She said the group’s operating budget is more than $800 a month, but she declined to provide The Times with the financial documents that nonprofit organizations are required to make public by federal law.

“We have nothing to hide,” she said. “The bottom line is, what’s the need? This has nothing to do with illegal immigration.”

Statewide, Coe said, the coalition’s chapters range in size from about 100 members in Temecula to about 1,200 in San Diego.

Each local organization holds periodic meetings for members to discuss how to pursue their issues as well as to share their experiences and research about the issue. Some of the stories, however, are not always accurate.

In California’s community colleges, for example, state policy requires fees from all students and it does not require birth certificates or other documentation from U.S. citizens, contrary to the story told at Orange County’s recent coalition meeting. Susan Brown, dean of admissions for Orange Coast College, also said that while illegal immigrants can take classes at the school, they are charged out-of-state resident fees of more than $100 per unit.

As for Coe’s statement at the same meeting that illegal immigrants get millions of dollars in heart transplants and other operations, a spokesman for the Hospitals Council of Southern California said that has not been documented.

David Langness, vice president of communications for the hospital council, said the organization recently completed a study of that issue for the White House health care task force and was unable to determine the medical cost of treating illegal immigrants. He also said the hospital council has no evidence of a heart transplant performed on an illegal immigrant.

While Coe insisted that the group is diligent in policing racism within its ranks, it is an issue that frequently arises.

Recently, a member of the Orange County chapter circulated a cartoon ridiculing the 1986 amnesty program for illegal immigrants with pictures of drunk and sloppily dressed Latinos wearing sombreros and inviting all of their relatives in Mexico to move north.

Coe said the flyer drew laughs from several people at a recent meeting, but others denounced it as racist. “That was not initiated by our organization,” she said.

At a recent picket that the group held at the Costa Mesa Job Center, Latino day laborers accused the protesters of racism and implored the group to “leave us alone!”

But Coe was unfazed by the tumult. “We’re trying to focus on the issue of illegal immigration, and that’s what we did,” she said.