SANTA ANA : Alien Report Given Some Solid Support

The leader of a Santa Ana citizens advisory group Tuesday defended its recommendation that police cooperate more with immigration authorities to stem the flow of illegal aliens into the city.

But Don Hertel, chairman of the Mayor’s Task Force on Neighborhood Standards and Preservation, agreed with critics who charged that membership of the task force inadequately reflected the population of Santa Ana, where more than half of the city’s 235,000 residents are Latino.

“There was a sense that there was not enough representation in the group,” said Hertel, who is an architect. “We felt that there should have been more Asians and Latinos in the group, but we were not party to who was going to be on the task force.”

Mayor Daniel H. Young, who appointed the committee a year and half ago, said he had selected more representatives from different ethnic groups, but members had gradually dropped out.

“You can’t make people stay on citizen advisory groups if they don’t want to,” Young said.

However, former school board member James A. Richards, who headed the eight-member subcommittee on immigration, said the fact that seven were Anglo and one was black had nothing to do with the panel’s recommendation.

“It’s ignorant to think that a person’s skin color is going to affect what he is going to do on the task force,” Richards said.

Richards defended the task force’s recommendations as being “realistic” for Santa Ana, adding that the report was intended to be “blunt.”

“One of the factors that causes overcrowding is the concentration of illegal aliens,” Richards said. “Santa Ana has become a haven for illegal aliens.”

Hertel added: “We don’t want neighborhood Gestapo tactics in Santa Ana. But the city is carrying the burden of illegal aliens here.”

Young said he expected the task force report to be controversial.

“We don’t want to get into the kind of Costa Mesa debate on what to do with illegal aliens,” Young said, referring to that city’s efforts to discourage aliens from taking up residence there by denying them some services. “But the city has a major problem that it is trying to deal with. We are trying to be fair, and we’re trying to do the right things.”

City Councilman John Acosta, who has criticized the task force for not having more Latinos and Asians, said he believes that some Santa Ana residents are fearful of immigrants in general.

“There are some old-time Anglo residents in our community who are running scared,” Acosta said. “They have told me in some instances that they want the Mexicans to go back to Mexico and they want Asians to get back on the boat and go home.”

The report detailed what it considered to be the city’s five most critical “issues of concern for the 1990s”: neighborhood overcrowding, the impact of the non-English-speaking immigrant population, crime and gang activity, traffic congestion and the environment. It called for the Santa Ana Police Department to cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service “to enforce existing laws and reduce the disproportionate number of undocumented people settling in the Santa Ana area.”