Merry Christmas, but not Feliz Navidad

dpt-bellcurve08Costa Mesa Mayor Alan Mansoor is sending out Christmas greetings to his Latino constituents early this year. Under his leadership, the City Council majority will kill the city’s Job Center in a few weeks, and Tuesday night they explored avenues for turning local cops into federal immigration agents.

If you interpret these actions as a holiday message to Latinos that they are not welcome in our community, perish the thought that any of our elected leaders would nurture such an idea. It’s just tough love, Mansoor style. Merry Christmas from the guys on the City Council.

When the Council by a 3-2 vote set the wheels in motion for a plunge -- more tentative than Mansoor’s original proposal -- into the murky waters of empowering municipal police to enforce federal immigration laws, it set a new bar in what supporters see as the fight to reduce illegal immigration and what its opponents see as an unfair and expensive demand on local police and an unjust signal to local Latinos.

It also marked a new phase in Mansoor’s us-against-them approach to local governing in which the Pilot has, in his view, become one of “them.” He made this clear in a recent letter to the Forum page in which he announced, among other grievances, that he has canceled his subscription to the Pilot, apparently out of injured feelings. Whether he approves of the Pilot, it would seem very much in the public interest for him to know and understand and perhaps even weigh local attitudes reflected there.

Many -- indeed most -- of the published letters on the immigration issue have expressed both strong anger at the failure of the federal government to control illegal immigration and a yearning for the good old days when this failure didn’t affect Costa Mesa as it does today.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher poured some gasoline on these flames of anger by saying he supports Mansoor’s position “100%” and that “the impetus for reform is going to have to come from the bottom and not from the top.” And the one-issue candidacy of Jim Gilchrist drew startling support against a hard-rock Republican in Tuesday’s Congressional election.

On the other side, Costa Mesa Police Chief John Hensley, exercising caution as a city employee, still expressed concern over the demands the council action might make on his staff, while his predecessor, Dave Snowden -- now police chief in Beverly Hills -- wrote an impassioned plea in the Pilot denouncing the Mansoor approach as negating many years of effort to build trust in the police and wipe out the fear of racism in the Costa Mesa community. Similar concerns were expressed by Chamber of Commerce president Ed Fawcett, who said that stretching the duties of the police would be “like asking a baseball player to play nine positions at the same time.”

If racism can be eliminated as a factor -- a dubious premise in Costa Mesa today -- this argument can be reduced to simple elements. Virtually everyone would like to get rid of illegal immigration. The issue is how to go about it.

The federal government has a terrible track record.

So the question becomes: Do we work at the federal level to seek a solution, or do we -- as Rohrabacher suggests -- attack it from the bottom up?

Put another way, do we appropriate the necessary money and exert the necessary political muscle in Washington to train and equip sufficient professional force to take control of the border, or do we turn loose armed civilian commandos and strain the duties of local police?

The good old days aren’t coming back. The direction Mansoor and his compatriots are taking us is not the way to the good new days.

*

Dr. Kenneth Litwack, Hoag Hospital’s go-to guy on infectious diseases, and his wife, Louise, came to dinner at our house Sunday and once again couldn’t escape without getting interrogated. Thank God for my wife’s cooking and Kenny Litwack’s patience, which makes such un-hostly behavior possible.

This time, the subject was the avian flu, which is getting almost as much press -- and not nearly as much clarity -- as the USC football team.

You may remember that Litwack, in this space two years ago, cooled the hysteria to get smallpox shots before the bad guys could infect all of us with the disease. Our leader, you may remember, endured the needle to set a brave precedent -- and take advantage of a slam dunk photo op. Now, cynics are saying it is more than coincidence that the avian flu -- which has been followed by the World Health Organization for more than 10 years according to Litwack -- is being touted as the next imminent disaster at a time when the White House would like to divert attention away from its out-to-lunch handling of the disaster in New Orleans.

So, I asked Litwack, is the avian flu another smallpox scare?

“No,” he said. “This is real, and it could be serious. It needs to be addressed. But it also needs to be put into perspective. It is certainly no time to panic. Steps are being taken to deal with it when and if it becomes a real threat.”

And when might that be?

“When it is possible to pass the disease from human to human. Right now it can only be picked up from infected chickens, so the only danger to humans is at poultry farms. But during the 10 years it has been around, the virus has been steadily growing stronger. As that continues, so will the danger that humans can pass it to one another.”

How are we preparing for that contingency?

“We are close to developing a vaccine that would prevent those who are inoculated from getting the disease. It’s quite possible that when you get your flu shot next year, it will be accompanied by the avian vaccine.”

What if I need it sooner than that?

“We’ll let you know,” said the doctor.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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