Where Are All the Liberals When the City Really Needs Them? : Immigrants: Bashing the foreign-born is the hot issue in the mayor’s race, and Latino activists have been strangely silent--and accommodating.

As Los Angeles struggles to stay together, the issue in the city’s mayoral race that seems to have attracted the most voter interest would further divide it.

Since blaming “illegal aliens” for the city’s fiscal woes, mayoral candidate Tom Houston, a former deputy mayor, has expanded his bashing of the foreign-born to the street vendor, the vast majority of whom are Latino. He now wants the Los Angeles Police Department to notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service when illegal aliens (read: street vendors) are arrested on “suspicion” of a misdemeanor.

But more dismaying than a Democrat using xenophobia as a ralling point is the relative silence of the city’s liberal constituencies in the face of Houston’s outburst. The truth is, though, that such bashing is safe--after all, non-citizen immigrants may not vote.

Houston’s xenophobic free ride is also rooted in L.A. history: Latino concerns have never been high on liberal priority lists. This enables Houston to criminalize Mexicans as illegal aliens without drawing liberal protest fire.

Disturbingly, Latino activists have not rushed in to fill the moral vacuum. In their fervor not to offend allies, they have rationalized away the achievements of Bert Corona and other foreign-born activists who successfully struggled to make the term wetback politically--and morally--objectionable. These Latino activists contend that the immigrant question is too complex to generalize, that even people of goodwill can differ on, let’s say, the right of non-citizens to vote in school-board elections, or the propriety of police collaboration with the INS, and not necessarily be against immigrants. Unfortunately, this lazy man’s relativism undercuts the moral authority of Chicanos to represent the interests of the foreign-born.

The proposal by Julian Nava, also a mayoral candidate, to give immigrants limited voting rights is not new, or bold enough. L.A. School Board member Leticia Quezada made a similar proposal several months ago, and was jingoistically jeered. But there are precedents. In New York City, residents only have to be a registered voter or a parent of a child attending public school to vote in school-board elections. Since 1988, non-citizens whose children attend Chicago public schools have had the right to vote in school-council elections. Chicago Alderman Jesus (Chuy) Garcia, now a state senator-elect, says that Latinos have the highest parent-participation rate of any ethnic group. It would only seem logical that a similar voting requirement would encourage parental responsibility in the L.A. school district, which is 64% Latino.

Voting rights, of course, cannot rescue the immigrant street vendor from political disrepute. The pushcart is part of the immigrant lore. I was born in a hospital because my father went door to door fixing sewing machines for extra money during the Great Depression. It must be recognized that severely restricting street vending will, in effect, take away one of the last remaining stepping stones that Latinos use to get enough capital to eat and eventually own their businesses. Which is not to say that unregulated street vending is desirable. Sanitation, for example, is a problem.

The recently released Latino National Political Survey would seem to play into the hands of the city’s Houstons. The survey reported that Latinos are wary of immigrants and that many Latinos want more done to restrict immigration.

These findings, however scholarly, do not give license to xenophobes to beat up on immigrants. Nor can they serve as a rationale to strip undocumented residents of their civil liberties. How quickly do the immigrant-bashers and their supporters forget the contributions of the foreign-born to the city. Recent studies, for example, have credited immigrants with keeping light industry in Los Angeles during the ‘80s, even as the city’s heavy manufacturing fell on hard times.

Latinos should instinctively know that twilight zone between what Houston calls “illegal aliens” and the term wetback , which at one time meant generally anyone who looked Mexican.