O.C. Reaction: Strong Praise, Condemnation

Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposals to quell the rising cost of illegal immigration drew plaudits Monday from some Orange County leaders who have long complained about the problem, but immigrants’ rights groups characterized the plan as a brazen attack on minorities.

“I applaud him for trying, but it’s really an uphill fight,” said Tom Dalton, a former Orange County grand juror who has studied the immigration issue.

The governor is relying on “the politics of racial polarization” to win votes for his reelection next year, complained Zeke Hernandez of Santa Ana, a local board member and past state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “He’s adding fuel to the fire in terms of the big wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that we’ve seen in this country.”

Wilson, at a press conference on Monday, unveiled a set of proposals aimed at reversing the growing strain of providing government services for those who enter the country illegally.

Among his most controversial proposals was an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Wilson also said he wants the federal government to repeal health, education and other benefits for illegal immigrants and to create tamper-proof identification cards for use by legal residents.

“He’s got the right idea, but he’s fighting a hell of a battle to try and get something like this done,” said Dalton of Anaheim, who in June headed an Orange County Grand Jury committee that authored a controversial report on the problem of illegal immigrants.

That report, calling on the federal government to impose a three-year moratorium on legal and illegal immigration to this country, set off a firestorm of debate in Orange County. And activists said Wilson’s proposals seem certain to intensify the debate in weeks to come.

Dalton said Wilson proved willing Monday to tackle an issue--the citizenship of immigrants’ children--that the grand jury had deemed too controversial to address.

“It really is very inflammatory, and we tried to stay away from it,” Dalton said. “But it’s a good idea. We’re ridiculous to grant citizenship to (the children of) people who have come in this country illegally. You’re really forcing the parents to stay in this country because you’re not going to kick them or the kid out. So you’re stuck with three people.”

Danielle Elliott, who handles Orange County immigration issues for the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, also applauded Wilson’s plan, saying she was “delighted to see the governor is beginning to deal with this issue.”

It is not known how many illegal immigrants live in Orange County. The minority population in the county has grown dramatically in recent years, with Latinos accounting for 23.4% of all residents and Asians for 10%, according to the 1990 U.S. Census. Those figures include illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens. In the decade between 1980-1990, the number of naturalized citizens in Orange County doubled to more than 174,000, the census found.

But proponents of immigration policy reform maintain that illegal immigrants also account for a substantial portion of the area’s new residents and represent a growing drain on county resources--$200 million a year, according to one estimate furnished by the grand jury.

But officials acknowledge their inability to produce firm statistics on the issue, and critics in the Latino community maintain that those studies that are available repeatedly underestimate or ignore the contributions that immigrants make in the community.

Businessman Amin David, a Latino rights leader in Anaheim, said Wilson’s proposals will only exacerbate the problem.

“I think Gov. Wilson is now falling into that radical thinking of many other anti-immigrant groups that blame the immigrant for our economic ills, and we say to him that he is misguided in that,” David said. “He’s given rise to xenophobia, the fear of strangers. He’s searching for the solutions in the wrong arena. . . . This is un-American.”

Mai Cong, president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., a private group that works on immigration and other issues, said she was bothered by the idea of requiring citizens to show identification cards to receive government services.

“Our country is not a police state. Even in the thick of the Cold War, we did not have that,” she said. “The recommendations to me are too extreme. . . . As citizens, we should all be worried about this--whether you’re Vietnamese or Latino. This goes against tradition.”

Beyond the politics of the issue, Wilson’s proposals could pose legal and ethical problems.

Fran Tardiff, a spokeswoman at UCI Medical Center in Orange, which treats more Medi-Cal and low-income patients than any hospital in the county, said Wilson’s proposals raise the question of whether it is proper to link citizenship to essential medical services.

Under a new federal policy set down in April, hospitals can no longer receive federal reimbursement for some follow-up procedures provided for illegal immigrants, Tardiff said. That alone has presented some doctors with “a huge ethical dilemma,” and Wilson’s ideas could pose more problems for the medical community, she said.

“It would be very hard not to offer emergency services to illegal immigrants, just cut it off. When someone comes in the emergency room, we treat them without regard to what their legal status is. We have to,” she said.

Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Harriett M. Wieder has been a strong backer of expanded health care for low-income patients, but she refused comment Monday on the implications of Wilson’s proposals for local residents. An aide said Wieder plans to direct the county staff to assess the impact of the governor’s plan in the weeks ahead.