Police aren’t solution

Forty years ago, my father was the plant manager for a large company in Gardena, Calif., that manufactured mirrors. Many of the factories in the area employed people from Mexico and Central America who were here illegally.

In that part of Los Angeles County, hiring illegal immigrants was and still is a common practice.

My father would describe the raids on these plants in great detail. In the mid-1960s, every so often, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would conduct raids on the factories. Officers would run into the factory unannounced and try to grab as many illegal immigrants as they could before they disappeared.

The raids were not unusual, and no one thought about calling the ACLU or any other organization to complain about the practice. Why? Because the people they caught were criminals.

The raids on one factory were so frequent that my father had heard they hired a lookout stationed on the roof to spot immigration officers before they made their move. The lookout was probably an illegal immigrant too.

After one raid that was particularly successful, the owner of the company for which my father worked dispatched someone to work the phones and the human pipeline to let the deported workers know that on a particular day and time, there would be a bus waiting right across the border.

All who worked at the factory could have their jobs back easily if they showed up at the bus that day. Eventually, whether it was that day or a week or so later, all of the workers returned to their jobs.

Sometimes, illegal immigrants would approach the factory at the back door looking for work. If my father was short-handed, he often hired these people. Years later, I asked him why. “They’re hungry,” he would say. “Anyone out there knocking on doors is hungry, and that’s the type of person I want in the shop.”

Back then, the reason for hiring illegal immigrants was different than it is today. Back then, there was no competitive threat from China, Thailand, Vietnam or any of the other countries that have beaten us at our own game.

Back then, companies hired illegal immigrants to maximize profits.

Today, however, the marketplace has changed. Today, the United States is no longer the king of the manufacturing hill. Where the words “Made in Japan” once meant “piece of junk,” they are now the sign of excellent quality.

Today, businesses hire illegal immigrants not to maximize profits but to stay competitive.

Ask the garment manufacturer what would happen if his illegal workers were removed from his payroll forever and you’re likely to hear, “We’d be out of business in a year.”

The Minuteman border patrol, the checkpoint down near Camp Pendleton and all the other Band-Aids we put on the problem are just for show.

The bluster of the Jim Gilchrists and others who believe that the only solution to the illegal immigration problem is to spray a can of Raid over the Westside of Costa Mesa are only making the issue more difficult to solve.

And anyone who is hitching his political wagon to the illegal immigration star had better think twice about the support they will get from the business community, which happens to be one of the crime’s biggest supporters.

Yes, entering illegally is a crime and those who do so are criminals.

But acknowledging that does not mean that the only way to solve the problem is to try to boot every illegal immigrant out of the country.

Yes, I’ve heard all of the numbers on the strain that illegal immigrants are supposed to have placed on our schools and hospitals and other services.

But I’ve also read reliable studies that show that the benefits the illegal immigrants bring to our economy offset their cost by a wide margin.

Go ahead, seal off the borders if you want. Build a mile-high fence. Put a wall around the city limits. Go ahead, get tough. But be careful what you wish for, for one of the results could be to paralyze some large and small businesses.

Don’t expect any businessperson to stand up and support illegal immigration. But if you get them in a one-on-one, in an honest moment, they’ll tell you that the stability of their business depends on this cheap labor.

What the city of Costa Mesa needs now, and in fact what the nation needs now, is for someone to admit that we’re never going to rid ourselves of the people who are here illegally. And as such, we need to rethink our policies.

What we don’t need is to turn the community-relations clock back 10 years to the days when it was “us vs. them.” What we don’t need is the rhetoric we’re hearing from the Costa Mesa City Council -- three guys in particular who do not seem to have taken the time to think this issue through.

And what we really don’t need are amateurish, immature responses to a serious challenge. If the raids didn’t work 40 years ago, there is no way a police presence is going to work today.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident. Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at (714) 966-4664 or send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.

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