http://ocregister.com/ocregister/new...le_1127332.php

Protestors on same street are miles apart
May 3, 2006
GLDillow@aol.com


Bridgett Hernandez and Andrea Garcia had never met. But they spent part of Monday morning glaring and shouting at each other across a street in downtown Santa Ana.

Bridgett is a Placentia real estate agent and a mother of three who opposes illegal immigration – emphasis on illegal. On Monday morning she was one of about three dozen people who gathered at the corner of Ross Street and Civic Center Drive to provide a counterpoint to the thousands of people marching in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

It was a distressingly small counterpoint, Bridgett admitted. Although a lot of people in Orange County might silently seethe when they turn on the TV and see protesters demanding rights for people who came to this country illegally, few have the inclination to turn out to give the TV news crews another side of the issue to film.

But Bridgett, who was born and raised in Orange County, and who says she has seen the problems caused by unchecked illegal immigration in her old neighborhood – poverty, crime, overcrowding in housing and schools and emergency rooms – felt strongly enough about it to come down to Santa Ana and try to get her point across. Even if she was outnumbered 300-to-1.

"If there's amnesty, it will just get worse," Bridgett, who is not Hispanic but whose husband is a legal immigrant from Cuba, told me. "We have to secure our borders."

Around her, other counter-protesters carried signs saying, "Enforcement Now, Build the Fence" and "American Citizens Respect America's Laws." They shouted slogans – "Hey, hey, ho, ho, all illegals got to go!" – and jeered at protesters carrying Mexican flags: "If you love Mexico so much, why not go back?"

Meanwhile, on the other side of Ross Street, just 50 feet away in physical terms, but a million miles distant in outlook, a crowd of pro-illegal immigration protesters had gathered to shout and jeer at Bridgett and the other counter-protesters – "Go back to Europe!" and so on.

The pro-illegal immigration protesters and their organizers have gotten more politically astute since the earlier protests in March, when the crowds were awash in Mexican flags – this to the anger of many Americans. At Monday's demonstration, American flags were the order of the day, although some protesters were waving Mexican flags.

The aforementioned Andrea Garcia was one of them.

Like Bridgett Hernandez, Andrea was born and raised in Orange County and is also a mother of three; she works for an advertising company in Irvine. As she stood on the other side of Ross Street, she told me that to her the Mexican flag is a cultural symbol, not a nationalistic one, and that she was waving it "to support my people."

But she also admitted that, "Yes, it does make them (the counter-protesters) mad" – and she really didn't care.

"They're ignorant and stupid," Andrea said, and even "racist." And when I asked her if she could ever envision a middle ground between her and the people on the other side of the street, her answer was an emphatic "No!"

She's probably right. I haven't taken any polls on this, but it seems to me that the pro-illegal immigration marches and protests, while remarkably peaceful, have only hardened attitudes, not changed them, on both sides.

The people on Bridgett Hernandez's side of the street – and the people seething in front of their TVs – will never accept the idea that coming to this country illegally should be condoned or rewarded. And they deeply resent the idea of illegal immigrants marching and protesting and demanding changes in American law. To them that's like someone moving into their homes uninvited and then complaining about the accommodations.

And while I'm less personally attuned to the folks on Andrea's side of the street, after watching and talking to many of them on Monday, I doubt they'll ever believe that our national borders are anything more than vague guidelines, no more of a legal barrier than, say, the border between California and Nevada. And even if they get their amnesty now, I suspect that in five or 10 or 20 years they'll be calling for another amnesty, and then another, and another.

Of course, no solution is going to please both sides of the street, which is why the politicians would prefer not to have to come up with one.

But they'd better not wait too long to find a solution.

Because every day that passes without one, the street just gets wider.