Immigration Center Seeks to Change Latinos’ View of GOP

The Peruvian couple seeking help at a nonprofit center in Santa Ana had no way of knowing they were players in a quiet struggle by Orange County Republicans to change the party’s image as uncaring toward immigrants.

The couple, who didn’t wish to be identified, want to immigrate to Orange County and move their business from Peru, where they manufacture calendars with Indian designs.

For 20 years, they have traveled here on work visas, staying one to six months at a time. They came to the Lincoln Juarez Opportunity Center in downtown Santa Ana after reading an advertisement in a local Spanish-language newspaper.

“They want to extend the amount of time they can stay here on their visas, and that’s really tough to do,” said client mentor Rosa Carrillo, one of the center’s two paid staffers. “What they really want is to establish their business here.”

Open for about 16 months, the center is easily missed in the bustle of 4th Street. It’s on the third floor of a busy merchant building at the intersection of Sycamore Avenue.

Other than a portrait of past U.S. presidents with the title “The Party of Lincoln,” there are no outward displays that the center’s $250,000 budget is provided solely by two Republican clubs -- the Lincoln Club of Orange County and the New Majority -- and an annual fundraiser.

Creating a nonprofit center to help immigrants was a way to take action to show that Republicans aren’t monolithic and anti-Latino, said Dale Dykema, a Santa Ana businessman and longtime GOP activist who began advocating for the center in 1996.

Many immigrants and Latinos -- the latter the state’s fastest-growing population group -- fled the party in 1994 after its endorsement of Proposition 187, a controversial state ballot initiative that authorized drastic spending cuts in healthcare and education for illegal immigrants; it was later declared unconstitutional.

“After 187, it was really bad for Republicans,” Dykema said. “A lot of us supported 187 but we didn’t understand how it came to be characterized as anti-immigrant. We needed to revise the thinking that we weren’t all mean-spirited folks in the Republican Party.”

Republican organizers decided to create a nonprofit center with no official tie to the party other than its appeal to donors. Its goal is to act as a free resource center, referring clients for help with education, immigration, healthcare and employment to local, state, federal and private agencies.

There have been a few surprises since the opening in March 2003, said Carmen Vali-Cave, an Aliso Viejo councilwoman hired as the center’s executive director. Among the surprises: that well-educated immigrants will take menial jobs without holding out for higher-skilled positions, out of fear they won’t get hired for anything.

“What we need now are more people knocking on our door; that’s our greatest need,” she said, adding that the center doesn’t ask anyone about their immigration status.

Democratic Party officials said the effort was well-meaning but wouldn’t go far toward welcoming an ethnic group that continues to be unfairly blamed by Republicans for a host of societal ills.

“It’s the classic case of form over substance,” said Frank Barbaro, chairman of the Orange County Democratic Party.

Such an outreach attempt would be insignificant in the long run, said state Democratic Party political advisor Bob Mulholland, particularly when good deeds like the center’s are too easily erased by hateful comments or campaign stunts directed at Latinos.

Orange County’s large immigrant population, both legal and illegal, well remembers local support for Proposition 187, he said, and the county GOP’s controversial move in 1988 to place uniformed guards at 20 Santa Ana polling places.

The party said it was to ensure that no illegal immigrants voted, but Democrats charged that it was a veiled way to intimidate Latino voters.

If the immigrant aid center is “a legitimate effort to help, we’re all for it, but as a [strategy], it’s irrelevant,” Mulholland said.

Center supporters say their only goal is to help as many people as possible. About 60 people a month seek assistance, not including separate groups given space for adult education classes and a support group for parents of children with Down syndrome.

The center is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, with plans to add Saturday hours when enough money is raised. Staffers eventually hope to serve 1,200 people a month.

Said Chairman John Cruz, an Irvine attorney: “We still have a long way to go.”