Wilson’s Border Record--Success or Opportunism? : Immigration: Report that he once employed an undocumented maid has put his long history in spotlight.

As mayor of San Diego, Pete Wilson sent local police to stop thugs from preying on illegal immigrants streaming across the border from Mexico.

As U.S. senator, he insisted on a program that eventually allowed the legal migration of more than 1 million foreign workers.

As gubernatorial candidate, he railed against illegal immigration and rode the Proposition 187 bandwagon to victory.

During the past three decades, few elected officials have steeped themselves so deeply in the immigration issue--or staked so much on it. And now, as a Republican presidential hopeful, Wilson has been thrust on the defensive amid accusations that an undocumented maid was employed in his own home 17 years ago.

Although the governor’s advisers dismiss the hiring as ancient history and of no real consequence, the controversy has put a harsh spotlight on his handling of an issue that is part of the social and economic fabric of the region. And critics have seized on the episode to attack Wilson’s immigration stands as politically opportunistic and hypocritical.

“It’s the classic Republican Party in San Diego,” said California Democratic Party consultant Bob Mulholland. “At home and in their hotels, they have nothing but illegals, but at press conferences they denounce the Democrats and illegals.”

Wilson, still recovering from surgery to remove a nodule from his vocal cords, was not available for comment. But the governor’s aides say he has been unwavering and tough on the immigration issue. “Pete Wilson is viewed as a national leader on illegal immigration and reforming the system,” said Wilson’s communications director, Leslie Goodman.

An examination of his record shows that Wilson has frequently called the federal government to task for its failure to stop the flow of illegal migrants into the country.

Documents and interviews also show that he has long championed the legal importation of low-cost labor, principally Mexican workers considered essential to the agricultural and other business interests that have supported his political career.

For example, when federal action threatened to slow permits for immigrant farm workers in the mid-1980s, then-Sen. Wilson whipped off a letter to the President and prodded officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Wilson also has resisted efforts to penalize the employers who hire undocumented workers, arguing that those efforts are ineffectual and have created a cottage industry in the counterfeiting of documents.

When the INS raided a pair of San Diego resort hotels and arrested 30 suspected illegal immigrants employed there in 1989, Wilson as a senator tried to intervene on behalf of the owners, who were campaign contributors, according to government records.

Yet as a state assemblyman 24 years ago, Wilson was inexplicably absent for the vote on a measure barring California employers from knowingly hiring undocumented workers. That law was still in effect in 1978 when, according to the governor’s office, Wilson and his then-wife, Betty, hired Josefina Klag, a Mexican citizen at the time, to clean their condominium.

The bill was carried by one of Wilson’s closest friends in the Legislature, then-Assemblyman Dixon Arnett (R-Redwood City). Legislative records show that Wilson was present in the Assembly that day, July 29, 1971, and voted on matters both before and after Arnett’s bill was brought up for consideration.

Wilson press secretary Sean Walsh said late last week that the governor does not remember his position on the bill or why he missed the vote, although he may have taken a break to work on his campaign for mayor of San Diego. It was unusual for him not to vote, Walsh added.

Another Wilson aide, Goodman, was asked why the governor’s knowledge of the 1971 law did not prompt him to question the immigration status of Klag when she was hired in the late 1970s. Wilson “was not involved in the hiring of this woman,” Goodman said. “His wife is the person who hired her.”

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Wilson was swept into the San Diego mayor’s office as a reformer in 1971 after a majority of the San Diego City Council was indicted in a taxicab bribery scandal.

He made it a top priority to reach out both to Mexican Americans in San Diego and elected officials south of the border, gestures that are commonplace for politicians now but were innovative at the time.

Wilson led a trade mission to Mexico City and was declared an honorary citizen of Mexico. And he hosted one of the first binational conferences on drug problems along the border.

“I remember Pete saying many times that ‘San Diego’s future is not tied to Los Angeles. It is tied to Baja California,’ ” said Elsa Saxod, who at the time was the director of Fronteras de las Californias, a nonprofit group that promoted business and social ties across the border.

Even when he was mayor, constituents sometimes contacted Wilson for help in immigration matters. In 1972, La Jolla resident and bandleader Bob Crosby, brother of crooner Bing Crosby, sought Wilson’s help in overturning the deportation of a Mexican woman who had worked for the Crosby family for several years. Records show that Wilson assigned the matter to a low-level aide, who checked with the INS and eventually turned over the case to a local congressman.

Of greater concern to the mayor was the increasing crime along the Mexican border. In 1977, Wilson wrote to President Jimmy Carter, saying: “In recent months, we have witnessed both Mexican and American residents--as well as the aliens themselves--become the victims of a growing incidence of robbery, assaults and murders at and around the border.”

He also called for Carter to act to stop “the massive flow of Mexican nationals into the U.S. illegally, not just at San Ysidro but all along the U.S./Mexican border.”

Carter did not respond to Wilson’s letter or a lengthy telegram that followed and snubbed Wilson when he sought a meeting with the President on a trip to Washington, according to the governor’s aides.

Frustrated at the lack of federal response, the San Diego Police Department tried several approaches to curb border crime and prevent the victimization of illegal immigrants as they tried to sneak into the United States under cover of darkness.

“We were probably the only police department in the world to have a task force to protect illegal immigrants sneaking into their country,” said Bill Kolender, then San Diego police chief and now San Diego County sheriff. “That’s what I call a moral commitment, and Pete was with us all the way. He wanted the violence against the illegal aliens stopped.

“A lot of people are just now coming around to the issue of border relations and illegal immigration,” he said. “Not Pete. He’s been with it a long time.”

By the time Wilson ran for the U.S. Senate against then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 1982, state agricultural interests were worried about proposals in Congress to enact some form of employer penalties as a way to address the problem of illegal immigration. The growers feared the sanctions would place cumbersome restrictions on their employment practices and cut off a flexible supply of low-cost labor for harvesting perishable crops.

In a debate with Brown, Wilson declared, “I would not support the employer sanctions, the penalties visited on employers under the proposed . . . legislation. I think that it would very likely produce the kind of discrimination that a number of minority groups, civil rights groups are concerned about. Businessmen, fearful of the impact of the penalty, might simply not hire.”

On the other hand, he argued that there was “a need for a legalized guest worker program in the United States because there is a legitimate market for the labor of Mexican nationals.”

Once elected to the Senate, Wilson battled hard to include a guest worker provision in the final version of the bill that provided amnesty for longtime residents who had entered the country illegally.

He threatened to filibuster if the Senate version did not allow as many as 350,000 foreign laborers into the country. The final compromise legislation, which Wilson voted for, established the Special Agricultural Worker program. This program eventually permitted an estimated 1.3 million undocumented workers to receive permanent residence under a process that former immigration officials now concede was riddled with fraud.

In 1987, a year after President Reagan signed the immigration reform act into law--and before its full impact was known--Wilson’s Senate office boasted of his role in holding out for a program to bring foreign farm workers into California. Without the influx of laborers, the office report argued, “the perishable commodities grown in California and other Western states would rot in the fields.”

But during his 1994 reelection campaign, it became a political liability. Democrats accused Wilson of being the author of a program that opened the floodgates to large numbers of new immigrants, all entitled to public services under the immigration reform bill.

His aides now say Wilson’s guest worker proposal had been hijacked by liberals, altered unconscionably and forced to a vote. They said that Wilson voted for the compromise because it was essential to keep the agricultural workers in the country and to provide more resources for policing the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the law first went into effect, immigration officials insisted that agricultural workers provide proof that they had worked in the United States for at least 90 days in the previous year. But many were stopped at the border because they had no record of their previous work.

When growers began to complain, Wilson wrote President Reagan and met with immigration officials to break the logjam.

Wilson’s efforts to cut through bureaucratic red tape were justified, according to Goodman, his spokeswoman. “Crops are not pickable (only) when a secretary of labor decides they are ready,” she said.

In 1989, INS agents raided the Bahia and Catamaran hotels in San Diego, arresting 30 employees. The resorts hotels were owned by Anne L. Evans and her family, longtime Wilson contributors.

The next morning, Wilson got a call from the owners and sent a letter to the district director of the INS, complaining about “a continuing lack of communication between the interested parties, as evidenced by a surprise raid during an audit.”

Wilson aides point out that the letter asked only for a meeting between the owners and INS officials, and that no special treatment was granted.

The INS eventually deported 29 of the hotel employees and the owners agreed to pay a $70,000 fine.

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Wilson’s concern about farming interests is not surprising in a state where agriculture remains one of the largest industries. And agriculture has generously contributed to his campaigns.

During his Senate years, Wilson sat on the Agriculture Committee, and between 1982 and 1990 he collected $744,188 from agricultural interests, according to a recent Times computer analysis of Federal Election Commission records. The figure represents about 3% of the $22,549,931 he raised in private and political action committee contributions for his federal campaign committee during that period.

Since his first run for governor, agricultural interests have regularly been among the top contributors to his state campaigns as well. The California Farm Bureau Federation, for example, donated more than $60,000 to Wilson’s reelection campaign; Sunkist Growers, almost $40,000.

Wilson continues to back guest worker programs, despite the disaster that befell the 1986 plan. In March, on “This Week With David Brinkley,” Wilson was asked whether he would support bringing in workers from Mexico to work in the fields. “If you’re saying would I favor a guest worker program, a legal guest worker program of the kind that we have had for generations, yes,” he said.

Critics say that Wilson public pronouncements on immigration are politically motivated and were more restrained during the Republican administration of President George Bush than they are today. They note that it was not until Bill Clinton became President--and Wilson himself was preparing to run for reelection as governor--that Wilson took the unprecedented step of suing the federal government to recover more than $4 billion for the costs of providing services for illegal immigrants.

“Both as senator and as governor with Republican Presidents, Wilson has had lots of opportunities to crack down on illegal immigration or seek federal reimbursement for local costs, and he was missing in action for a decade,” said Rick Swartz, founder of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington-based immigrant rights lobbying group.

Wilson aide Goodman countered that Wilson had been critical of Bush on the immigration issue but that the news media paid little attention. The suit against the federal government, she said, was prompted because the cost of providing services has grown to “crisis proportions.”

The governor was late to fully embrace Proposition 187, the initiative that would block public services and education for those in the country illegally, according to some backers of the measure.

They said Wilson kept his distance when money and support were needed to qualify the measure for last November’s ballot, but later endorsed it and sounded its themes in his campaign ads, charging that illegal immigrant children were costing the public schools $1.5 billion a year “and they keep coming.”

Bill King, a former INS official and one of the sponsors of Proposition 187, applauded Wilson for his eventual support but noted, “Pete Wilson is a politician. I think he had to wait to see which way the wind was going to blow.”

Wilson aides said that the governor’s pioneering efforts on the immigration issue helped win support for Proposition 187. And they pointed out that he took considerable political heat for backing it. “Everyone was blaming him for endorsing it,” said communications director Goodman.

Times staff writers Mark Gladstone and Dwight Morris contributed to this article.