You see the road signs just south of here, where the San Diego Freeway runs along desolate stretches near Camp Pendleton. Yellow signs with the silhouettes of a man, followed by a woman who is clutching the hand of a young girl. They have their heads down, and they look like they’re running for their lives.
In almost any other place in the country these would be warning signs for an animal crossing. Drivers beware, deer crossing the road.
In California, they post warning signs for people crossing, illegal immigrants who are smuggled in a truck or a van until they pass the border and the truck darts to the side of the freeway in darkness and they pile out and scatter.
This is something most of the country does not know, immigrants in flight, sprinting across highways.
For most of the country, the debate over immigration can be somewhat academic. In California, it is the issue. Forget taxes, abortion. This is what people talk about in California. This is the state where nearly 2 million illegal immigrants live, where another 150,000 illegal immigrants arrive every year. This is the state where 1,500 people a day are apprehended at the border.
It’s easy to see the crossing of illegal immigrants as a problem, but not a weighty one. It’s easy to take a noble view of immigration, legal or illegal, of upholding the traditions of a nation that has always welcomed newcomers seeking opportunity. This can’t be the generation where America says it is full, where the people who are here have no more room for the people out there who want a better life.
It’s easy to be noble, until you talk to Californians about what is happening here. And then it’s not so easy. This is where the public schools spend $2.5 billion each year to educate the children of illegal immigrants. The cost of that education has more than doubled in eight years. This is where they spend half a billion dollars a year on prisons to hold illegal immigrants.
The Republicans didn’t devote a lot of time during their convention to illegal immigration because they wanted above all else to avoid anything that made them look mean. It looks mean when you talk about kicking children out of school, no matter where the children came from or who their parents are.
But the Republican platform has plenty of tough talk about immigration. It embraces California’s Proposition 187, which would deny almost all public assistance to illegal immigrants. Prop 187 passed by a big margin two years ago but has been stalled in federal court.
The platform calls for a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants who are born in the U.S. It sends a subtle message of support for cutting legal immigration.
It’s easy to say that’s all nonsense. Taking away the chance for a welfare check or schooling won’t stop people from leaving a country where living standards are meager compared to the country just a few miles away. They’ll still take the risk because America is the symbol of reward.
But it’s not so easy to say California just has to live with paying $376 million a year for emergency room treatment of illegal immigrants, a cost that has grown 18-fold in eight years.
It’s not easy to say California has to pay because it’s impractical, short of a Patrick Buchanan wall-off-the-border solution, for the nation to put a halt to illegal crossings.
Sure, the inconsistencies here are obvious. Some Californians gripe about the flood of immigrants, then pay cash to their Mexican gardener and maid and nanny.
Republican delegates adopted that platform Aug. 12, with all that tough stuff on immigration. The rest of the week, thousands of them took the San Diego trolley to Tijuana where they scarfed up dirt-cheap leather handbags and silver jewelry on Avenida Revolucion and skipped back to San Diego in time for dinner. Close the border . . . as soon as we’re done shopping, please.
Inconsistencies, yes. But it’s more an overwhelmingly profound, national ambivalence on immigration.
The Republicans have many divisions in their own party on this. Their border state members in Congress have pushed this year for curbs on legal immigration and tougher penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegals and a national system for verifying work eligibility. And their own members from the East and Midwest joined with Democrats to defeat them. Bob Dole and Jack Kemp have been ambivalent about, and in Kemp’s case even hostile toward, some of the anti-immigration measures in the GOP platform.
As the campaign goes on, though, Dole and Bill Clinton will be compelled to take a harder line on illegal immigration. That is the issue in California, and California is so big that its electoral votes alone could decide who becomes president. Kemp has already done an about-face. Two years ago he denounced Proposition 187. This week he said he thinks most of its provisions are okay.
But there’s always going to be that national ambivalence. It’s the kind of ambivalence no doubt felt by New York Gov. George Pataki, who turned down an offer by the Dole camp to deliver a speech at the convention because the assigned topic was illegal immigration.
Pataki couldn’t do that. His uncle was a German sailor who jumped ship when it docked in the states. His Irish grandmother used her sister’s papers to slip into the U.S. If not for illegal immigration, he wouldn’t have been at the convention, he wouldn’t be governor of New York, he wouldn’t be an American.
