Activists See Dire Immigration Threat

SAN DIEGO —  The activists complained of immigrants overwhelming schools and welfare rolls, trashing the environment, voting illegally in U.S. elections--even acting as veritable double agents for Mexico.

If such trends continue, warned Peter Brimelow, a British-born New York author and senior editor at Forbes magazine who has emerged as a hero in immigration control circles, “I don’t think the country will survive it.”

Today’s contentious immigration debate routinely includes such portentous comments directed toward unlawful residents.

But Brimelow and other so-called “restrictionists” attending a conference this weekend in San Diego organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform were also referring to legal immigrants--who outnumber the nation’s 4 million or so illegal immigrants by at least twofold, according to most estimates.

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These days FAIR, based in Washington, D.C., is especially eager to reduce legal immigration, targeting slots reserved for family members of U.S. residents and for workers imported from abroad by U.S. employers. Although the organization has suffered legislative setbacks on this and other issues, even its many critics acknowledge that media-savvy FAIR operatives have been effective in shifting the debate toward the group’s restrictionist views.

“The intellectual battle over illegal immigration has essentially been won, even if we haven’t seen truly effective enforcement yet,” said Ira Mehlman, FAIR’s West Coast representative. “Now attention has to be focused on cuts in legal immigration.”

FAIR’s central message: Today’s near-record levels of immigration are deforming the nation’s character. The inexorable influx, they warn, could have dire long-term consequences: overpopulation, rampant bilingualism, reduced job opportunities for the native-born, and demographic shifts that could result in dangerous ethnic separatism.

Former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm, a longtime FAIR associate and board member who is challenging Ross Perot for the Reform Party presidential nomination, said immigration-driven population increases are overwhelming the nation’s ability to care for its own needy.

“If we have to choose between our ‘huddled masses’ and the rest of the world’s ‘huddled masses,’ I’m going to chose our ‘huddled masses,’ ” Lamm, using a celebrated phrase on the Statue of Liberty, declared Saturday at a news conference. “The price of compassion in the new world is restriction.”

The two-day FAIR conference was purposely held in San Diego on the eve of the GOP convention, though Jack Kemp’s emergence as the party’s vice presidential nominee underscored the deep divisions on immigration among Republicans.

To the consternation of FAIR members, Kemp is firmly planted in the party’s pro-growth, pro-immigration wing, whose members view access to world labor markets as essential to ensuring competitiveness in the global economy. The agribusiness and high-technology sectors, two of California’s most dynamic industries, are especially supportive of legal immigration.

Conference attendees, many of them Republican loyalists, repeatedly recounted what they viewed as Kemp’s transgressions: his refusal in 1990, as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to ban illegal immigrants from receiving federal grant money; his denunciations two years ago of Proposition 187, the California ballot measure that sought to deny illegal immigrants public education and other benefits, and, more recent, his opposition to congressional plans to curb legal immigration levels.

During the conference, called Immigration Reform Awareness Week and held less than a mile from the GOP convention site, sessions focused on themes such as alleged voter fraud by immigrants, overpopulation, “ethnonationalism,” border security issues and “Official Spanish”--a reference to oft-voiced fears that Spanish is supplanting English in California and the Southwest.

Grass-roots immigration control activists, mostly from California, mingled with politicians and movement luminaries such as Brimelow, author of the 1995 book “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” and John H. Tanton, the Michigan physician and population control advocate who founded FAIR and U.S. English, the controversial English-only advocacy group.

FAIR grew out of the environmental and population control movements of the 1970s, and its message has attracted liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. While critics have derided its policies as a kind of camouflaged racism, FAIR officials have portrayed themselves as allies of U.S. workers of all races and ethnic groups. Foreign settlers tend to drive down domestic wages and decrease quality of life, according to FAIR. But others say there is no definitive evidence that immigration deflates salaries.

Many conference participants expressed their belief that assimilation, the process of absorption into mainstream U.S. culture, is being thwarted--although many immigrant advocates contend that assimilation, including the acquisition of English-language skills, is proceeding at a brisk pace.

A related perception among immigration control advocates: The current, massive wave of citizenship sign-ups by legal immigrants is part of a broader “invasion” of both legal and illegal immigrants from south of the border. Part of one session here dealt with the concept of Aztlan, a mythical homeland of the Mexican people and a word that some Latino activists use to refer to the U.S. Southwest. Many noted with alarm the legislative proposals in Mexico that would allow millions of expatriates to retain Mexican nationality even after becoming U.S. citizens and gaining the right to vote here.

“Do we want folks whose first loyalty is to a foreign country to be voting in a United States election?” asked Kitty Hedrick, a teacher from Los Angeles County and Republican Party activist.

At the start of her session, Hedrick flashed a photograph of her two young nieces on a projector and warned: “They could be considered to be subject to Mexican sovereignty,” because of Mexican ancestors going back two generations. Mexican officials call such assertions greatly exaggerated.

* IMMIGRATION SCUFFLE

Backers of Proposition 187 and counterdemonstrators clash. B1