California’s Immigration Hot Button Awaits GOP Candidates

The grass-roots activists gathered in a school auditorium in suburban Sherman Oaks to condemn the ongoing “invasion” of illegal immigrants. “Half the time I don’t know if I’m even in America anymore,” complained one participant.

But he, like many others, sees salvation in the form of a provocative television panelist turned politician. “Pat Buchanan is the only one talking to us,” the man said, echoing the views of many at the emotion-charged assembly.

California’s March 26 primary election, with a potentially decisive, winner-take-all pool of 165 Republican presidential delegates, is still more than three weeks away. But activists and analysts alike say that immigration, a touchstone theme here since the passage of Proposition 187 two years ago, looms as an important issue.

Already, Buchanan is championing the cause of curbing all immigration, and rival Sen. Bob Dole is being urged to speak out on the issue more forcefully. Candidates Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander are staking out turf as pro-business moderates on immigration.

“Let’s be honest. Illegal immigration, and Mexicans coming across the border, are not big issues in New Hampshire or Iowa, but they are in California,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based Republican political consultant.

Meanwhile, for much of California’s huge immigrant community and their advocates, the prospect of a renewed barrage of photo opportunities featuring GOP candidates talking tough at the border and at schools and clinics bursting with immigrants and their children is a dismaying one.

“I’m afraid immigration is going to be the Willie Horton issue of the California primary,” said Peter Schey of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, referring to the African American convict who committed a rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison and was featured in ads against Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign.

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One issue sure to reemerge is Proposition 187, approved overwhelmingly by state voters in 1994 and now largely tied up in federal court. It seeks to cut off public education, social services and nonemergency health benefits to illegal immigrants.

The Buchanan campaign--chaired here by state Sen. Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia), an initiative co-founder--has attempted to position the commentator as the only major candidate who in 1994 publicly supported the measure.

But California supporters of Dole, leading in state polls, maintain that their man backed Proposition 187 even before Buchanan, and vow to stress what they call the Kansan’s solid record on immigration.

“We don’t think the Dole campaign should back down one bit on this issue and let Buchanan demagogue it,” said Sean Walsh, press secretary to Gov. Pete Wilson, who has long made deft political use of the immigration question and now serves as Dole’s national campaign co-chairman and state general chairman.

Forbes opposed Proposition 187, arguing in his magazine column that denial of education and other benefits was a bad idea; he is also against proposals for a national mirror-image of the California measure. Alexander likewise objects to congressional efforts to create a kind of federal Proposition 187.

Candidates already have zeroed in on border enforcement issues. There is, in fact, broad consensus among all the major candidates--and by the Clinton administration--on the need to bolster security along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The Republicans are all certain to criticize Clinton’s border buildup as ineffective, and all have their own approaches: Buchanan favors a security fence along the Southwestern border and a doubling of the Border Patrol, for instance, while Alexander has called for a separate branch of the military to patrol the zone.

But it is candidates’ differing attitudes toward legal immigration that may best dramatize a major split within the Republican Party at a time when Congress is poised to slash the number of lawful immigrants.

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Buchanan boasts the most hard-line position, favoring a five-year moratorium on most legal immigration, a position long sought by the restrictionist movement led by the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform. Dole favors a “modest, temporary reduction” in legal immigration.

By contrast, Alexander and Forbes are generally opposed to major cuts in legal immigration, echoing the business community’s position that a robust inflow energizes the economy, providing a steady source of labor and entrepreneurship.

Essentially, both are aligned with the GOP’s Jack Kemp/William J. Bennett wing, which calls regulated immigration an engine of economic growth and denounces what the two former GOP Cabinet members call Buchanan’s anti-immigrant scapegoating.

But Buchanan is unapologetic. As his campaign strategy in Arizona made clear, Buchanan fully intends to use immigration in those states--from Florida to Texas to California--where the divisive debate is prominent on the political radar screen. The former television personality has also enthusiastically endorsed a disparate universe of related proposals, such as making English the nation’s official language (also backed by Dole) and barring automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

Although his immigration stance leads opponents to label him a xenophobe, Buchanan’s positions have helped him maintain a core constituency built around immigration and what the candidate and his supporters call related concerns--corporate greed, unfettered free trade, “the cultural breakdown of our nation.”

Yet opponents and independent observers predict that broad support will elude Buchanan because of the degree to which he polarizes the electorate.

Indeed, even in Arizona, where immigration is also a high-profile issue, Buchanan’s forces could not muster better than a third-place finish. And California political analysts question whether he can break much beyond his loyal cadre of one-quarter to one-third of Republican voters, no matter how fierce his oratory.

But the allure of Buchanan’s appeal was clear the other evening at the Voice of Citizens Together monthly session in the San Fernando Valley. Like Buchanan, many here seamlessly linked immigration to broader concerns of declining living standards, the widening income gap and the myriad evils of free trade, while also blaming illegal immigrants for high crime, declining property values and a general sense that their communities are veering out of control.

“Pat Buchanan wants to keep $10-an-hour jobs in America from becoming $10-a-day jobs in Mexico or somewhere else,” said Terry Anderson, an African American contractor from South-Central Los Angeles who was virtually the only nonwhite participant among an audience of more than 200.

The group’s founding president, Glenn Spencer, is also an outspoken Buchanan backer. He led an “Operation Paul Revere” caravan to New Hampshire during last month’s primary in an effort to draw attention to immigration, and he plans a similar effort at the Republican convention in San Diego.

At his meeting last week, Spencer singled out Forbes for censure. “Steve Forbes basically says immigration makes Americans work harder,” said Spencer. “Here’s a guy who inherited all of his money, never had to work for a dollar, and is telling us we have to compete against 4 billion people. Outrageous.”