Enforce immigration laws, activist says
By Michael Manekin , STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 08/23/2007 08:31:43 AM PDT

REDWOOD CITY - Art Bush can remember a time when the "Little Mexico" of North Fair Oaks was pretty much all white folks.

The 65-year-old pool cleaner has lived in this working class neighborhood in unincorporated Redwood City since his family moved from Hunter's Point in San Francisco six decades ago. The modest single-family home where he grew up is just two doors down from the modest single-family home that Bush calls home today, and he has witnessed the demographic changes from the vantage of his doorstep.

Standing on the parched grass of his front lawn, Bush points to the house on his left.

"I've got Muslim neighbors from Fiji who I dearly love, and (those in) the house next door are from Mexico," Bush says, pointing now to the house on his right and a tight cluster of tall yellow stalks. "See that corn there? It must be12 feet tall."

Bush doesn't mind these crops in his suburban neighborhood; he loves the sound of the wind blowing through the green husks. And he says he likes Mexican culture. His wife, Socorro, was raised in Mexico, and she regularly cooks him enchiladas and chiles rellenos.

But he hates that his neighborhood has been sliding downhill. At least, that's the way he sees it. The crime, he says, is high; the test scores at the local schools, he says, are low; and neighborhood homes,once proud, have turned "Third World" shabby, he says, or are otherwise barely visible, hidden behind thick wrought-iron gates popular among
Latino immigrants.

Bush blames the influx of people from across the border, and he says hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Redwood City agree.

That's why, last winter, Bush decided to take a stand: He began to assemble the Redwood City Coalition for Immigration Control. The group, says Bush, is an "offshoot" of the Golden Gate Minutemen, a Northern California outpost of the anti-illegal-immigration activists whose tactics include patrolling the border, vigilante-style, in search of those aiming to cross illegally.

The coalition functions as a chapter of the Golden Gate Minutemen, says Charles Birkman, spokesman for the Bay Area-wide Minutemen group.

Members of the Golden Gate Minutemen encouraged Bush to begin a Redwood City chapter as part of a regional campaign to "encircle centers of liberalism in the Bay Area" with groups that take a more conservative view on immigration reform, says Charles Birkman, a spokesman for the Minutemen.

Bush debuted his group shortly after Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted sweeps in Redwood City, concurrent with a big Minutemen rally on El Camino Real. The effort drew more than 70 people — many Redwood City locals — to wave American flags and hold placards with slogans such as "Secure Our Borders."

By May, Bush had a core of 15 to 20 members and was able to rely on about 40 additional sympathizers for a series of rallies, which the group has also staged in Palo Alto.

"We're not trying to physically stop anybody from crossing the border, but we want the laws that are on the books enforced," Bush says. "We're not against immigration — absolutely not. We're against the illegal entry of people without being approved by the government."

Bush is angry that the federal government isn't doing a very good job securing the borders, but he reserves most of his wrath for local law enforcement and politicians.

"We would basically just like the laws to be enforced," Bush says. "People are not obeying the law, and local government is not enforcing the law."

Policing immigration

Redwood City is 31 percent Latino, according to the U.S. Census. The unincorporated neighborhood of North Fair Oaks, where Bush lives, is nearly 70 percent Latino. It is unknown how many are illegal immigrants, but city officials say it is a significant percentage.

Bush says that members of the Redwood City Council, the county's Board of Supervisors and local law enforcement agencies have made the city "an unofficial sanctuary," even though "they won't say it out loud," he says. Indeed, since December 1995, the Redwood City Police Department has operated under a general order which instructs officers not to question residents' immigration status. Police will only run a check on an individual's immigration background if they have been suspected of certain felonies, according to Police Chief Luis Cobarruviaz.

A couple weeks after the February ICE sweeps, Bush attended a community meeting in North Fair Oaks where Cobarruviaz informed about 150 concerned Latino residents of the city's "don't ask" policy, joking in Spanish about their right to refuse to volunteer information about their legal status when confronted by federal agents. The meeting, which was called by city officials and Latino activists to calm the community's fears, infuriated Bush.

"They're breaking federal law is what they're doing," Bush says, calling the Police Department's 1995 mandate an "excuse" to avoid their responsibility to uphold the nation's immigration laws.

Cobarruviaz said the Police Department lacks the capability to do mass checks on residents' immigration status, "and even if we had the resources, I don't believe we could accommodate all the people we would end up arresting at the jail," he says.

"I personally wish the federal government would do what it's mandated to do at the borders, but until they do, it's almost pointless for us to arrest people to have them taken across the border — to have them return again," he says.

Cobarruviaz says the policy helps keep the community safe, because residents who don't fear local police are more likely to report crimes to law enforcement. But Bush can think of a better way to keep the community safe: Check the immigration status of anyone suspected of a crime — from misdemeanors like graffiti to felonies like burglary — and turn them over to federal immigration authorities.

"If someone comes here breaking the law, it's a disregard for the law," Bush says. "When you come to a country, you can't just pick and choose which laws you're going to obey."

Bush estimates that 70 percent of the crime in Redwood City is committed by Latinos, although he admits that the data is "a guess." The Redwood City Police Department doesn't track the ethnicity of those it arrests, but the county jail does divide suspected criminals into ethnic groups. Last month, 41 percent of the detainees at the jail were Hispanic. The Sheriff's Office does not routinely check the immigration status of its prisoners.

Cobarruviaz can't say whether Latinos are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in Redwood City, but said that low-income neighborhoods, such as North Fair Oaks, attract a different sort of crime than more well-to-do communities.

"I will say that socioeconomic problems sometimes lead to gang violence," says Cobarruviaz. "In some cases, they lead to more aggressive types of crimes."

Changing neighborhoods

Sherrie Stark, 65, lives on the same street as Bush. After 43 years in North Fair Oaks, she has concluded that "the Spanish people in the area are just overtaking the neighborhood. They're living in garages, there are so many cars parked in the street.

"I'll tell you, the quality of life has sure gone downhill here," says Stark. "And I think there are a lot of people who think like we do, but either they're afraid to come out and say it, or they're afraid to say it at all."

Stark herself has not yet joined Bush's coalition, but she agrees with Bush's ideas and is grateful that he's speaking out. So is Marnie Palmer, a resident of Redwood City who says "the majority" of residents believe that illegal immigrants are bringing down the community.

"I'm grateful for (Bush)," she says. "He's taken the ball, and he's keeping us moving forward, and he's not going to give up on this fight."

Some members of Bush's coalition say they sympathize with the new arrivals for crossing the border.

"I don't blame them for wanting to be here," says Erin Lucien, 52, of Redwood City. "They just want to better their lives. But I want them to go back and come back in correctly. All these people are cutting in line, and it's not fair."

A city divided

Redwood City Mayor Barbara Pierce, who has spent 30 years in the city, says the coalition's "feelings and expressions are not unique. They've been made in other communities in different periods of time."

The Peninsula is an expensive place to live, she said, and the reason why longtime residents of North Fair Oaks are seeing more immigrants move into the neighborhood is because it's a comparatively less expensive place to live.

The fact that many of the new arrivals in North Fair Oaks are illegal immigrants should not concern the city's police department, Pierce says, because immigration control is the province of the federal government, which she says "has broad and exclusive power to enforce immigration."

The city has deferred to such logic since the ICE sweeps last winter. However, an assortment of immigration activists, united under the moniker of the Redwood City Immigrant Rights Coalition, are currently trying to convince the City Council to take a stronger stand against enforcement of the country's immigration laws by passing a non-binding resolution which would dissuade cooperation with ICE.

The resolution stops short of declaring the city a "sanctuary city," such as San Francisco, which has pledged not to cooperate with federal immigration agents. Nonetheless, Bush views the measure as a threat.

"Our group really needs to get active, to get strong and get in on the political angle," Bush says. "The open-borders crowd hopes that we can be dismissed as bigots and irrelevant. But our goals of a secure border are legitimate and need to be examined and taken seriously."

Health care crunch

How could Bush be considered a bigot, he asks, when his own wife spent the first 18 years of her life in Mexico?

In fact, Socorro Bush, 55, agrees with just about everything her husband has to say about immigration. Socorro, who says she was born in Texas and taken back across the border by her father until she returned to this country when she was 18, gripes that "what really bothers me about illegals is that they get here, bring all their children and they get sick, go to the doctor and they don't have to pay anything."

Socorro Bush says that she recently accompanied her adult son to the county's hospital to sign him up for Medi-Cal, the state's health care program for low-income residents, but was told that enrollment could take between six months and a year.

Meanwhile, she says, she overheard a Spanish-speaking woman who had brought her 3-year-old son to the doctor say that she couldn't afford to pay the $400 doctor bill. When the woman told an administrator that she was illegal, the woman told her that she qualified for the county's low-income health program, which does not discriminate based on an individual's legal status. Since the woman's income was below the federal poverty level, she did not have to pay the bill.

County officials have long argued that if county hospitals do not offer services to illegal immigrants, as required under federal law, the emergency-room bills would impact the budget much more than free and low-cost health care.

That's one of the reasons why the county operates its Mobile Health Clinic, a van staffed with Spanish-speakers that provides free medical services to low-income residents, regardless of legal status.

The green-and-white van makes frequent stops at the North Fair Oaks Community Center and next door to the Arteaga Market, a popular Latino grocery. But the mobile clinic's mere presence in the neighborhood is enough to upset Bush. "You want people to be medically cared for — but Goddamnit, where's the limit?" he says.

The American way

Bush used to buy from the Arteaga Market every now and again, but his last visit was two years ago. He was searching for a Spanish card game, and none of the employees in the front of the store spoke English, he says.

Bush is convinced that the new wave of illegal immigrants are not applying themselves to learning English — a point which he takes pains to drive home while parked in front of the community's public library, which welcomes visitors with a huge sign reading "Biblioteca Fair Oaks."

"Holy Christ, we've got a biblioteca!" said Bush, adding he hasn't visited his community library "because I couldn't read anything." A member of the bilingual staff said the library, which specializes in Spanish-language books, also has many books in English.

Asked about his goals for the Redwood City Coalition for Immigration Control, Bush answered: "We want to maintain the American way of life basically. I'd like people to assimilate to the American way of life while maintaining their roots and their background, because the cultural mix is a good thing.

"But the bad thing is people coming here for 20 years and not learning English. I would like people to come here the legal way and join in the American way of life, with American attitudes and American goals."

"Little Mexico," Bush added, "isn't the American way of life."

Reach Michael Manekin at (650)348-4331 or mmanekin@sanmateocountytimes.com

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