Joseph Turner was fed up with what he saw happening in this community where he has spent all of his 29 years.
“It bothers me that people come into this country and fail to adopt our culture and language,” Turner said, talking about a measure he brought before the City Council in this fast-growing city in California.
There is a “myth that illegals are a benefit to this country,” he said. “We are importing millions of people who are poor and uneducated and then say that this is good for our country.”
So he proposed an ordinance that would make it a felony to rent a house or apartment to an undocumented immigrant. He proposed that anyone who picked up an illegal immigrant at a home improvement store as a day laborer would see his car impounded and be charged with a felony.
The City Council rejected the measure 7-4, but that wasn’t the end of it.
The city’s charter allows residents to bring an ordinance before the council, which if rejected can go to a citywide vote. But the person presenting the measure must gather sufficient signatures to require a vote, the charter says.
Turner collected some 2,200 signatures and thinks voters will approve the measure. But whether there will be a vote is unclear; the council has asked for a judge’s decision on holding an election.
Council members who voted for Turner’s ordinance say they did so to save the city the cost of a special referendum and because they believe the measure would wind up in court to test its constitutionality.
“I voted to adopt it as an ordinance to get it into the courts and avoid a $300,000 election,” said Neil Derry, a councilman in this city of about 200,000 people.
While he said there were parts of Turner’s proposal that he liked, other aspects bothered him.
“Some parts are impossible to enforce,” Derry said. “Our cops don’t have the ability to go out and find out if someone has the right to work or not.”
He also said the city lacks the resources to check the legal status of everyone renting a house or an apartment.
Chas Kelley, another councilman who voted for Turner’s proposal, said he wanted to get the issue before the courts.
He added that he hopes to play down media coverage because it would “drag the city’s good name through the mud.”
Still, like Derry, Kelley found some of Turner’s ideas valid. And he denied suggestions by immigrant-rights groups that the measure was racist.
For his part, Turner contends that the current wave of immigrants is different from the immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th Century and the first part of the 20th Century.
“The nation of immigrants is an old and tired argument,” he said. “Immigrants from previous generations came here to be Americans. We don’t have the same sense of assimilation today.”
Michele Waslin, director of immigration policy research for the National Council of La Raza, a Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic rights organization, called such views misguided.
Saying it is clear the nation has a problem with illegal immigration, she said it is up to the federal government to reform the system and that it is wrong to take out frustrations on the immigrants themselves.
Turner said he has been campaigning against illegal immigration since he was in high school. And he said he has taken to calling the state he lives in Mexifornia.
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vschodolski@tribune.com
