Coalition Champions Immigrants : Campaign: Group of labor leaders, academics and clergy says it will focus on education in its battle against election-year rhetoric.

A broad-based coalition that includes activists, academics, clergy and labor leaders has formed to counter negative stereotypes of immigrants in Orange County and wage an educational campaign they hope will stem anti-immigrant rhetoric during this election year.

After more than four months of planning, the Orange County Alliance for Immigrant Rights will have its first public meeting Friday at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, where David E. Hayes-Bautista, director of the Alta California Policy Research Center in Los Angeles, will speak about immigrants and health care.

“Much of the misinformation is fueled by stances public officials have taken on immigration,” said Javier Inda, the group’s media coordinator. “They tend to portray all immigrants as criminal undocumented people who use social services.”

“Very few times do these public officials bring out how immigrants work a lot,” he added. “In Orange County, much of the Latino community is an immigrant community, and studies have shown they do work a lot.”

About 100 people have been attending meetings since February to discuss the group’s goals, said Inda, a Santa Ana resident who is doing his doctoral dissertation on perceptions of immigrants.

Inda said the group has decided not to take positions on policy issues, such as how to handle illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, but rather to focus on education, pointing out what they believe are significant flaws in certain studies and drawing attention to other research they say offers a less negative assessment of immigration.

A guest with a particular area of expertise will speak at each meeting, Inda said, and the public is encouraged to attend.

One target of an alliance letter-writing campaign is Assembly Bill X70, written by state Rep. Mickey Conroy (R-Orange). That bill, which will be heard Tuesday by the Assembly Committee on Public Safety, would make it a felony for any student who cannot show proof of legal status to enroll in any public post-secondary school.

The bill would also make it a felony for anyone to assist a student in enrolling.

The group will track other immigration-related legislation and plans to fight proposed budget cuts that would deny prenatal care to undocumented women, said Irene Martinez, executive director of the 25-year-old Delhi Community Center.

Alliance meetings have drawn a mixed group, including religious leaders, students, attorneys, labor union representatives and a Santa Ana schoolteacher who lives in Newport Beach and says her community is coming down too hard on immigrants.

“I hope that through educating the public at large the alliance can put a brake on this (anti-undocumented immigrant) legislation,” said Mary Erin Crook, a field organizer with the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, who is on the alliance membership committee.

“We work with the immigrant workers. I see the situation they’re in and were in even before all the politicians got on the bandwagon of the backlash against immigrants,” she said.

John Hernandez, assistant dean of student affairs at Cal State Fullerton, who works with a network that provides information to undocumented students attending college, said the alliance will enrich the debate on immigration. It will also help community organizers who are reaching out to immigrants to share information, he said.

The meeting will be from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday in the multipurpose room at 480 S. Batavia St., Orange.