http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn ... 627898.htm

Posted on Thu, Sep. 28, 2006

State Republicans' forum focuses on illegal immigrants
EFFORT MEANT TO HELP BUILD LEGISLATIVE PACKAGE
By Edwin Garcia
MediaNews Sacramento Bureau

THOUSAND OAKS - Under pressure from constituents angry with the state and federal government's failure to curtail illegal immigration, a panel of Republican legislators Wednesday convened the first in a series of town hall meetings to focus attention on the divisive issue.

The panel came to this conservative-leaning bedroom community in Ventura County to ask local activists, residents and elected officials their thoughts on reducing illegal immigration -- and they left with a mixed list of ideas as well as complaints.

Among the complaints: Mexicans shouldn't be allowed to fly their country's flag in the United States, and the rising population of illegal immigrants is bad for the environment because more toilets have to be flushed.

Among the suggestions: Cities should enforce housing laws to ease crowding in neighborhoods, and communities need to clamp down on the things that attract illegal immigrants

``If there's no jobs, no housing, no cars,'' said Steve Frank, a Simi Valley consultant who compiles a conservative blog for more than 200,000 subscribers, ``illegal aliens will go home.''

The forum, sponsored by the California State Assembly's Republican Task Force on Illegal Immigration, comes at a time when statewide public-opinion surveys rank immigration as the top issue facing voters.

Congressional Republicans held similar town halls over the summer in Southern California.

The forum also comes at the end of a two-year legislative session in which Republican lawmakers proposed more than two dozen ways to clamp down on illegal immigrants, only to see their measures struck down by the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

``You get slapped down hard in that Legislature,'' forum co-host Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, said after the meeting. ``It's very disappointing.''

The task force promoted the public meeting, and two others coming up, as ``open and thoughtful forums'' to ``build a stronger California.'' Almost everyone who took to the microphone, from an energetic Minuteman volunteer to an 80-year-old man, was bent on highlighting the problems caused by an estimated 3 million illegal immigrants in California.

The forum was peaceful; if pro-illegal-immigration activists were present, they remained silent.

Bob Haueter, an aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said illegal immigration causes a ``catastrophic'' drain on taxpayers: an estimated $1 billion in public services, not including education, in his county.

``We must not repeat the mistakes of the past,'' Haueter said. ``We need to tighten the borders, increase enforcement, prosecution.''

Santa Clarita City Councilman Cameron Smyth expressed frustration that illegal immigrant day laborers are prone to commit nuisances, such as public intoxication, vandalism and public urination, that scare away shoppers from approaching local stores where the workers loiter.

He said his city attacked the problem in the spring by passing an ordinance barring contractors from doing business with the city if they hire ``people who are not citizens of this country.'' There's no reason, he said, the state can't pass a similar law.

While most speakers were fervently opposed to illegal immigration, two women representing a Catholic-owned health care system sounded more sympathetic, suggesting that immigration relief for those in the country illegally, as has been debated in Congress, would lead to better health care.

``We know that many undocumented parents don't enroll their children, who are citizens, in government-sponsored insurance such as Medicaid or Healthy Families because they are afraid,'' said Maureen Malone, who represented two local hospitals that wrote off $13 million in charity care last year.

The panel, made up of two legislators, Blakeslee and Audra Strickland, the Assemblywoman from nearby Westlake Village, and staff members for other Republican lawmakers, sat at a table on stage and frequently asked questions of speakers, but never injected any opinions.

Strickland, after the meeting, said the forum ``merely scratched the surface of the information that's out there.''

Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, who helped conceive the town halls but did not attend the first one, said in an interview that he expects the forums to provide lawmakers with enough information to build a legislative package the Assembly Republican Caucus can support.

``It's clear,'' he said, ``that immigration is an issue that has great intensity within the California voters.''

The next forums are scheduled for Orange County: Oct. 11 in Tustin and Oct. 12 in Yorba Linda. Plescia said he doesn't expect any forums in Northern California until early next year.


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Contact Edwin Garcia at egarcia@mercurynews.com or (916) 441-4651.