The Immigration Bomb: Bill Simon, Are You Listening?

I can’t bear to watch this any longer. Republican Bill Simon is running against a Democratic governor nobody likes, and the poor soul can’t get out of his own way.

He’s tried passing himself off as an environmentalist while blasting California’s tailpipe emissions legislation, and he’s mugged as a can-do businessman while the IRS investigates a possible tax shelter in his family’s company.

Toss in the fact that Simon’s thimble-full of fresh ideas is running low, and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren is beginning to look like Abe Lincoln.

But it’s still early, and Gray Davis is capable of getting caught shaking down old ladies for bingo winnings. And it just so happens I’ve got an idea that could bring Bill Simon back from the dead.

Now is the time for the challenger to take ownership of one issue that’s on the mind of virtually every resident of California but is taboo as a campaign topic. I refer, of course, to the state’s insane population growth. And, yes, I’m talking about slowing down immigration.

Take just about any problem in California and the chief cause goes unmentioned.

Education is a disaster. Traffic is a nightmare. We’ve got a water supply crisis. The housing shortage is chronic. The health-care system is so overwhelmed ambulances often can’t unload emergency room patients. Our shore is so polluted, Southern California leads the nation in beach closures.

Why? Because 34 million people live here, and we’re growing by one person every minute.

California has been uniquely enriched by immigration in every way. Culturally, economically, socially.

But if we don’t have enough schools today--and many of the existing ones are teaching phonics to high school students, for crying out loud--how big of a black hole will we fall into when the population hits an anticipated 50 million in 2025?

You don’t have to be a right-wing, knuckle-dragging kook to ask such questions.

Diana Hull, president of Californians for Population Stabilization, calls herself an environmentalist, and the 4,000 members of CAPS come in various political stripes. Overpopulation is the world’s problem, says Hull, an anti-sprawl Republican who supports sex education and family planning. But in the United States, it’s mostly California’s problem.

“Forty percent of the country’s 1.5 million immigrants each year, both legal and illegal, come to California,” she says, and virtually all of California’s population growth is from foreign rather than domestic migration.

The reason everyone’s afraid to talk about this, of course, is Proposition 187 and former Gov. Pete Wilson’s ham-handed, anti-immigrant, “They keep coming” TV ads in 1997.

Instead of leading a responsible discussion about population growth and services for immigrants, the Republican governor incited a race war that drew all the bigots out of their cages.

And ever since, Republicans have been in damage control, some of them even learning a few palabras en Espanol and coming frighteningly close to donning sombreros.

But Hull has a news flash.

“I believe Bill Simon and the Republicans are being very dumb on this issue. First of all, they’re never going to get the Hispanic vote. They could stand on their heads and they’re not going to get it. And 187 would pass again today. Every poll in the last six to eight years indicates that people are with us” on slowing immigration.

There is to date no evidence that Bill Simon is capable of finesse. But I talked to a GOP consultant who suggested that Simon frame the argument in terms of preserving the standing of recent immigrants rather than issuing a Pat Buchanan-like call for Mounties to lock and load and ride to the borders.

The shaky economy makes the timing all the better.

The issue isn’t color, but sheer population growth. Hull says working-class Californians of all colors feel threatened by growing competition for their jobs, especially if the competitors, no matter what color, are willing to work for less.

That’s where the issue presents another conflict for the Republicans, who represent agricultural and business interests that can never get enough cheap labor, legal or otherwise. Or, if he wanted to take a different tack, Simon could argue for corralling sprawl, although he might have trouble mustering the courage to alienate developers by arguing that California has already been built out beyond reason.

But it has been built out beyond reason. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses are all coming to California, and we’re swimming in dung off the coast of Orange County, for God’s sake. What better place to talk about it than in a campaign for governor?

I called the Simon campaign to ask that very question, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, if Simon doesn’t seem to have any clue why he’s running for governor, he’s managed by a team of stooges who couldn’t answer him if he asked. They never called back.

“Bill Simon is missing a tremendous opportunity,” says John Gizzy of Human Events, a conservative weekly. Gizzy figures the candidate is fearful of cutting in on President Bush’s courtship dance with Latinos.

Gizzy and Hull say the events of Sept. 11 make it all the more imperative, and all the easier politically, to talk about immigration controls. States can’t provide the services the federal government requires them to, says Hull, so what’s wrong with demanding that we quit the Border Patrol charade and get honest about stopping illegal immigration?

“Every courageous politician has to take the lead on an issue and take a hit,” says Gizzy.

How much courage does it take? I’m talking about doing the responsible thing and initiating an obvious and important conversation.

What’s Bill Simon got to lose?

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.