Immigrant Advocates Assail Proposed Review

Immigration law attorneys and immigrant rights advocates across the state Friday denounced a proposed state investigation of all Orange County voters, saying it is unwarranted, potentially costly and politically motivated. Several critics said it could unfairly target new citizens.

“With the major budget problems that this state is confronting overall, and particularly around issues of federal welfare reform, it seems like an enormous waste of resources to be engaged in this sort of fishing expedition,” said Robert Rubin, deputy director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco.

On Friday, Secretary of State Bill Jones asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to help his office in an investigation of all Orange County voters to determine how many were not citizens when they registered to vote. In a letter, he cited “disturbing” results of a far smaller investigation into those who registered to vote through the Latino rights organization Hermandad Mexicana Nacional.

Jones specifically asked the INS to match computerized information on the residency status of immigrants against a list of registered voters in the county.

Several attorneys familiar with the immigration agency said such a search would ultimately prove fruitless because INS citizenship records are unreliable.

“We have countless examples of INS losing records, of INS being unable to locate people’s names in their computer, of never inputting names and of plugging in inaccurate information,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrant rights project in San Francisco. “Time and time again, it has been demonstrated that INS records are notoriously inaccurate and incomplete.”

Guttentag also said the INS is often slow to update its records. He raised the possibility that naturalized citizens would be unfairly implicated because INS failed to note that they had legally become citizens.

He added that the search “smacks of an incredible intrusion of privacy.”

INS records on individuals are protected by the Privacy Act, said Eric Andrus, chief spokesman for the INS in Washington. While noting that the INS has cooperated fully in the investigation to date, Andrus said the request made Friday would have to be reviewed carefully and that the public interest in knowing the information would have to be weighed against the privacy of the individuals involved.

In the investigation regarding voters registered through Hermandad, the INS pored over names provided by state and local investigators and noted which ones were citizens, which ones were in the process of becoming citizens, and which ones were noncitizens but legal residents. The agency does not keep information on citizens who were born in the United States, who would make up the majority of the 1.3 million registered voters in Orange County.

Guttentag said he had never heard of the government checking an entire voter roll against INS records. “I am not aware at any time when someone has simply given a list to INS without cause and asked them to run it through their computer,” he said.

Guttentag and others said that the inaccuracy of INS records could ensnare innocent people. And some feared that the INS would single out people with Latino names.

“I would be extremely concerned that Latino voters would be singled out,” said Cecilia Munoz, deputy vice president for policy at the National Council La Raza, a Latino rights organization in Washington. “You have the potential of discriminating against native-born people.”

Rubin, the immigration attorney, noted that an investigation two years ago into voting by noncitizens, launched by Republican Mike Huffington after his unsuccessful Senate campaign, bore no substantial evidence of fraud.

“People should not forget that Mr. Huffington blamed his defeat on illegal immigrants and noncitizens, and he put a lot of money into that--probably a lot more than Mr. Jones can afford,” said Rubin.

“The immigrant community, particularly in California, is beleaguered and besieged,” Rubin said, “and to suggest that this vulnerable population is actively committing massive acts of fraud is ludicrous. These folks for the most part do everything they can to avoid contact with the government.”

Rubin said he thought the investigation was designed to further the political career of Jones, and predicted it would backfire.

“I would hope it would spur an even greater push toward naturalization, and then voting out of office those officials who seem to have an endless supply of problems that seem to all be the fault of immigrants,” he said.

More Coverage

* JONES PROFILE: California Secretary of State Bill Jones is a veteran officeholder, but he isn’t used to being in the spotlight. A22

* THE BACKGROUND: How the investigation of Hermandad registrations began, what comes next and what it might mean. A22