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City council goes after Congress on immigration

Mike Cronin
The Arizona RepublicThe Arizona Republic
Oct. 2, 2006 02:30 PM


Mesa City Council members have drafted a scathing letter to Arizona's congressional delegation scolding them for not passing comprehensive immigration reform.

"Your failure to act has only exacerbated the problems," the letter states.

Vice Mayor Claudia Walters, who wrote the letter, said it is time for Congress to stop merely talking.

"We have to comprehensive immigration reform," she said Monday. "We have to allow people to work here with visas."

The council's consideration of the letter occurs against the backdrop of the Senate's approval, 80-19, on Friday of building a 700-mile long fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Estimates say that project will cost billions of dollars. In Arizona, the fence would stretch from the California line to 10 miles east of Douglas.

The council's draft document says, "We are looking for a plan that will both secure our borders and allow for guest workers."

The council has not set a date to discuss the letter.

The draft represents the latest step in Walter's six-year effort to educate Congress and other governmental bodies that illegal immigration is a local issue, not just regional or national.

She cited several examples that demonstrate illegal immigration's local effects, among them:


• The impact day-laborers have on local businesses when they stand on sidewalks soliciting work.


• The cost to police departments, which must deal with the boarding, smuggling and kidnapping of illegal immigrants.


• The lack of an effective verification process that would enable employers to determine who is legal to work.

Walters conveyed the story of one Mesa businessman who sent paperwork about several immigrants he hired to the U.S. Social Security Administration. Six years later, Social Security officials called him and told him those immigrants' paperwork was not valid.

"Six years!" Walters said. "And that gentleman was trying to be a good employer."

Mesa Republican Russell Pearce began advocating for much harsher measures last week.

He called for the reinstatement of a 1954 program named "Operation Wetback." It used police officers and the military to deport 1.3 million undocumented immigrants in less than a year.

Critics have attacked that program, saying it created a sense of a police state, and that it deported legal Mexican-Americans.

Arizona Hispanic leaders have condemned Pearce's support of the program and his use of the derogatory term "wetback" for Mexican undocumented immigrants.

Pearce, who said he used the term to describe the government program, said wetback was just "a cute little term they came up with (in the 1950s), everyone used it."

"Things have changed and nobody cares. I use the term illegal alien. I don't need to use any other term."

Walters, a Republican, said she hated the word "wetback."

"I don't want to be drawn into his argument or be affiliated with it," she said of Pearce's immigration idea.

Councilman Kyle Jones said the draft letter "for the most part" reflects a National League of Cities resolution on immigration reform that he helped write. Jones served on the league's ad hoc committee on immigration reform. The league passed its resolution July 21.

Both documents criticize the federal government for failing to make the United States' borders secure.