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Panel: Focus on fixing economy, not blaming illegal immigrants

07:25 PM PDT on Friday, April 24, 2009

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise

Speakers at a Cal State San Bernardino forum on immigration Thursday night warned against a growing scapegoating of illegal immigrants because of the economic crisis.

"People are preying on the economic conditions of middle-class and poor residents" and blaming them on illegal immigrants, said Jose Zapata Calderon, a professor of sociology and Chicano studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.

All six panelists supported large-scale legalization of illegal immigrants, although they differed on approaches.

Armando Navarro, a professor of political science at UC Riverside and coordinator of the Riverside-based National Alliance for Human Rights, said that although he supported legalization, it would not stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border.

Navarro said massive U.S. aid to Mexico -- similar to the Marshall Plan that stabilized Western Europe after World War II -- would help improve the Mexican economy, but it would only be effective if it leads to a more equal distribution of wealth in Mexico and doesn't end up in the hands of the Mexican elite.

Increasing wages for the U.S. middle class and the poor would reduce incentives for businesses to hire illegal immigrants, Navarro said. U.S. employers' "addiction to a source of cheap labor" causes them to rely on illegal immigrants to boost their profits, he said.

Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a Virginia-based group that favors greater restrictions on immigration, said average wages in Mexico are so far behind those in the United States that it would take decades for the Mexican economy to improve enough to remove incentives to emigrate.

"Our only hope of reducing illegal immigration is to turn off the jobs magnet," said Beck, who was not at the forum.

Beck favors mandating that employers verify the immigration status of employees with an online database -- such as the now-voluntary E-verify program does -- and ramping up enforcement against businesses that are caught hiring illegal immigrants.

Beck said illegal immigration is not the cause of the economic crisis. But he said it is not scapegoating to say that, with an estimated 8.3 million jobs held by illegal immigrants, illegal workers increase unemployment among native-born residents.

Forum panelist Angela Sanbrano, president of the Los Angeles-based National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, said the dominance of the recession as a political issue is delaying moves toward legalization.

"The economic crisis has taken the oxygen out of most of the issues important to our communities -- education, health care and of course immigration reform," she said.

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