The immigration debate, smoldering for years in southern California, has become a live issue even in the Bay Area. As Californians #apple with prolonged recession and a continued population boom, large majorities of the state’s voters now see even legal immigration as a problem–and the unending influx of illegal aliens is, as always, an easy target for voter anger. By one estimate, the state now spends nearly $5 billion a year on an estimated 1.3 million illegal aliens and their children$3.6 billion on schools, and $1.2 billion on jails, welfare and health benefits. “There is immigration which is very legitimate,” says state Sen. William Craven of San Diego County. “What we’re concerned about are the people who come across the border and overload the schools, the hospitals and prisons. . . . My constituency is overwhelmingly in favor of doing something to stop them. We don’t want people going to the border with shotguns, and I don’t underestimate that possibility.”
Catering to the voters’ increasingly surly mood, state legislators have filed nearly two dozen bills designed to address the illegal-immigration problem. Most-including one bill that authorizes the use of National Guard troops to patrol the Mexican border-haven’t even made it out of committee. But the issue is hot, as Bill Clinton discovered last week. Appearing at a townhall meeting in San Diego, the president faced tough questioning about the U.S. immigration policy. Although Clinton said he was “basically in favor of a vibrant, diverse immigrant population,” he added that “there are limits to what [America] can afford to do.” He promised to fill the still-vacant job of INS director and try harder to control illegal immigration. But he also conceded that the United States “does not have the means to enforce its own immigration laws.”
That’s part of the problem. Because the Feds seem powerless to control the border, cities like Los Angeles are swamped with illegal aliens. But the uproar over illegal immigration, says state Assemblyman Richard Polanco, leader of the Latino Caucus in Sacramento, is only a symptom of hard times-and immigrants, legal and otherwise, are the scapegoats for the state’s distress.
