Here’s Wilson’s Chance to Come Clean : Immigration: With an illegal immigrant in his own closet, he has to distance his presidential ambitions from Prop. 187.

So it turns out that Gov. Pete Wilson once employed an illegal immigrant as a maid. So much for the Scourge of Illegal Aliens, who was counting on that reputation to boost his presidential ambitions, just as it helped him win reelection last year.

I’ll be the first to admit there is no great sin in the fact that, while serving as mayor in San Diego in 1978, Wilson and his wife at the time employed a Mexican woman, who was apparently an illegal immigrant, as a housemaid for $25 a day. Employing illegal immigrants was against California law at the time, but that law was never aggressively enforced. And while the Wilsons also violated federal laws by not withholding the housekeeper’s Social Security taxes, Wilson’s former wife has taken the blame for that oversight, and Wilson has agreed to pay any back taxes and penalties he owes.

But similar excuses have been offered by other candidates for high public office who got hoisted on the immigration petard. Two capable women President Clinton nominated for attorney general, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, had to withdraw when it was learned they had employed illegal immigrants. And what’s sauce for Democratic geese is sauce for Republican ganders, as former GOP Rep. Michael Huffington found out in last year’s U.S. Senate race against Dianne Feinstein. Revelations that his wife had hired an illegal immigrant nanny may have cost Huffington a close election.

Wilson is trying hard to defuse “Maidgate,” as San Diego Chicano activist Herman Baca, a longtime Wilson critic, dubbed this flap (with more relish than imagination). The governor’s spinmeisters are claiming the story was leaked by Wilson’s GOP rivals to undermine his soon-to-be-announced presidential campaign. And Wilson himself insists he will continue to pound away on the immigration issue. But such bravado rings hollow, for Wilson’s political integrity has been badly undermined.

It’s not just because having hired an illegal immigrant proves the hypocrisy of Wilson’s hard-line stance. Most voters probably assume a certain hypocrisy in the positions taken by most politicians. Wilson’s problem is more complicated. Now, from New Hampshire to Iowa, he will have to explain, ad nauseam, how he came to hire an illegal immigrant. And in the process he will have to acknowledge, however indirectly, that there is nuance to this country’s immigration problems--shades of gray that Wilson has not discussed much for fear of weakening the gut-level appeal of his “hot button” issue.

Illegal immigrants are so fundamental to California’s economy, working everywhere from farms to restaurants to car washes, that it’s highly unlikely anyone in this state has not benefited from their labor at one time or another. Certainly, some of Wilson’s biggest backers in, say, California agribusiness or San Diego’s tourism industry, profit from cheap immigrant labor. Wilson knows this and, not surprisingly, he can discuss the complexities of the immigration issue quite knowledgeably. But why bother when you can get more mileage out of scary commercials that show illegals running across the border? Or when you can win easy votes by lending the legitimacy of your high office to misguided efforts like Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that purported to solve California’s immigration problems by depriving illegal immigrants of education and health care--as if social services rather than jobs lure them here.

Large numbers of illegal immigrants in California pose a real challenge for this state. And until recently, we got precious little help from Washington in dealing with the challenge. But all those hard-working immigrants are nowhere near the threat that the overblown rhetoric of Proposition 187’s backers and ambitious pols like Wilson makes them out to be.

Maidgate just might push Wilson out of the simplistic and hypocritical stance he has taken on immigration by forcing him to explain the seeming contradiction in his public and private approaches to the issue. And we may not have heard all there is to Maidgate. There are reports in Spanish-language newspapers that Wilson employed at least two other Mexicans whose immigration status was questionable.

As long as there might be another illegal immigrant out there who remembers working for “Senor Wilson,” the governor had best shelve the myths he and other restrictionists have tried to sell to the American public and discuss this “hot button” issue in all its daunting complexity. That would be quite a change for the political leader who has done as much as anyone to demonize illegal immigrants in the public mind.