It’s Time to Settle This Immigration Issue, Once and for All

Federal agents raid a house in Orange in search of illegal immigrants.

Some demonstrators at a massive pro-immigrant march in Los Angeles wave Mexican flags in a show of nationalism that upsets others and feeds anti-immigration sentiments.

A citizens group wants to give local police the authority to arrest suspected illegal immigrants.

Stories ripped from today’s headlines? Could be, but they also were ripped from headlines in September 1991, October 1994 and January 2001, respectively.

How do you say deja vu in Spanish?

It’s tempting to say the latest spike in immigration controversy is just that -- another pendulum swing that brings this ever-vexing issue back into view before it recedes again.

Let’s resist that temptation and put it this way, instead: When a persistent problem drives a wedge through the American public, elected officials should be locked in a room and required to fix it. Otherwise, what are they good for?

Can’t we all agree that immigration falls into that category? When you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets in support of immigrants at the same time others are talking about building border fences or -- as a recent caller to me suggested -- that agents at the border “shoot anything that moves,” you’ve got a national problem.

Obviously, it’s been around for quite some time, and that’s my point. A decade or so ago, it was fashionable to say that the economic slowdown in California bred resentment and unhappiness over illegal immigration.

But here we are in 2006, and with a study last year from the California Regional Economics Project saying that immigrants have only a small negative economic effect on other workers. But that hasn’t quelled the debate.

That same report indicated that “unauthorized workers” probably account for less than 5% of all U.S. or California workers, but we’re still squabbling. And that California is less likely now than it was in 1990 to be a destination for immigrants. But the arguments rage on locally and shape some of the political debate.

But don’t you get the feeling this is no longer about statistics? Would it matter anymore to the bulk of Californians to know that immigrant parents -- such as a group of them at a Santa Ana elementary school a few years ago -- told school officials their top priority was that their children learn English more proficiently? Or that the report I cited above indicated that 5% of first-generation Latinos used English as their primary language but that 80% of third-generation Latinos did?

Out of that mishmash of statistics, you could make the case that immigrants don’t hurt the job market and are assimilating into the culture. Yes, they’re a drag on social services, but that lessens as they move up the economic ladder.

But those findings don’t soothe all the frayed nerve endings that are part of the overall immigration debate, such as the “lawbreaking” that defines it and the sense that the “cultural identity” of the country is changing.

Whichever side you’re on in the debate, those are the things that divide a country. They’re the things that spawn demonstrations that shut down freeways on one side and civilian border patrollers on the other.

Demographer Mark Baldassare, a former Orange County resident and now research director of the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco, thinks the issue has reached a critical mass. “It seems to me like all sides are at the point where denial doesn’t work anymore,” he says, noting that in the last five years, he’s picked up a sense of the pervasive nature of the immigration debate in the country.

In a functioning society, that would demand a solution. I ask Baldassare if he’s confident it is coming. “It depends on how much presidential politics gets in the way,” he says. “But I think there’s a reasonable chance something will happen this time around.”

In the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers committed themselves to ensuring domestic tranquillity and promoting the general welfare.

I’m tired of writing about immigration. You’re tired of reading about it.

It’s time for our self-professed patriots in Washington D.C. to do their jobs.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.