A Divisive--and Futile--Stirring of the Melting Pot

Harald Martin is an Anaheim police officer who insists on disturbing the peace. Not as a cop. His department says he’s a good one. But as board president of the Anaheim Union High School District, Martin has been behaving like a troublemaker.

He has stirred up angry confrontations at public meetings, provoked protest demonstrations in the streets and exacerbated ethnic divisions in the city where he’s sworn to keep the peace.

And all for a lost cause.

Martin, 44 and prematurely gray, has been beating a caballo muerto since May when he proposed billing Mexico for the education of undocumented immigrants in his district. Realizing that his stunt smacked of discrimination, the board amended the proposal to bill all foreign nations, in case our vigilant public servants ever detect any illegal Gambians in the classroom.

But wait. The hapless trustees then discovered that international law prevents them from filing claims against foreign governments. So they finally settled on strong-arming Uncle Sam, sending “demands and requests” to Janet Reno and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The trustees want the INS to identify all Anaheim students residing illegally near the happiest place on Earth.

That’s where they left the issue two Saturdays ago at a public hearing marked by people shouting and snarling at each other. It was disturbing to see the news photos of men and women with clenched jaws and faces distorted with anger. If this keeps up, someone is sure to get hurt and the board will be forced to weigh its liability for any injuries.

Why? Because they’ve already been told that whatever they do on the immigrant issue will amount to an empty gesture, bereft of tangible benefits to their students.

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It’s mortifying to watch these five fumbling trustees, so poorly prepared and ill-informed they set a bad example for student study habits. So I did some homework for them. I checked with the INS in Laguna Niguel to see how officials would respond to a request from Martin & Co. to prepare a blacklist of illegal pupils.

La Migra’s response: Please leave us out of this.

In fact, it is against INS policy to conduct any enforcement action whatsoever at a school or place of worship, said spokeswoman Virginia Kice. The agency has barely enough resources to focus on its priorities: the border, work sites and jails.

Plus, the INS knows better than to mess with immigrant children. In March, top INS officials in Phoenix had to step in to defuse a community outcry over Border Patrol action near an elementary school in an immigrant neighborhood. They had a hard time convincing angry residents that it was not their intent to round up children and mothers.

“We don’t need to be perceived as the bogeyman more than we already are,” said Janna Evans, INS director of community relations, a division designed to prevent public confrontations. “Children are kind of the innocent bystanders in all of this.”

Martin says he needs the INS to take a pupil head count so the board will know how much to bill, futile as that may be. But INS officials worry that agents forced to identify undocumented students would be obliged to apprehend them or else be derelict in their duty.

Said Evans of the trustees: “I don’t think, frankly, they’ve thought this out.”

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This controversy makes more political than educational sense. Perhaps Officer Martin is using undocumented children as a wedge issue to enhance his future political prospects, a la Pete Wilson. Before introducing his proposal, Martin alerted the state’s most aggressive proponents of immigration control, who have made sure to attend the board hearings. Barbara Coe and her cohorts came all the way from Huntington Beach, Laguna Hills and other places with no direct stake in Anaheim schools--aside from the fact that the Austrian-born Martin is also a member of Coe’s Coalition for Immigration Reform.

In the 1960s, these confrontational partisans would have been condemned as “outside agitators.” They have managed to distract the district from the constructive task of improving education and have made them look like nattering nabobs of negativism, to borrow another phrase from the Nixon era.

By contrast, the school board in Loudoun County, Va., near Washington, recently stopped asking parents about the visa status of students, a procedure used for years to collect tuition from nonresidents. Their decision was based on a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that guarantees children, regardless of immigration status, the right to attend public schools.

Would somebody please send Mr. Martin a copy of that ruling?

You can send me the bill.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesdays. Readers can reach him at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com