A Sign of Controversy Over Immigration

There are 75 of them in Southern California. One towers above my neighborhood Jack- in-the-Box -- which is still called Jack-in-the-Box, and not Pepe-in-the-Box, I’m happy to report. When foreigners invade, the fast-food places are the first to fall.

As I said, there are only 75 of these billboards, but from the hysteria, you’d think they lined the roadways from Long Beach to Long Island. The billboards plug a local Spanish-language news show on Channel 62, with the line “Los Angeles CA,” with the “CA” crossed out and “MEXICO” stamped in its place. A talk-radio station that’s been making hay over this has now hoisted its own billboard: “Los Angeles, CA” and the line “Just to clarify, you are here.”

I must say that Channel 62’s timing stinks, coming less than a month before a mayoral election between a white guy and a brown guy -- which I suspect is why the talk-radio gabblers are making a huge fuss. A couple of them enticed poor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- that’s how I’m starting to think of him, poor stumble- tongued Arnold Schwarzenegger -- into calling the billboard “extremely divisive,” which it certainly has been. But then the governor went wading into the deep end: The ad “promotes illegal aliens to come here.” And I thought they came to work, not to gawk at billboards.

What year is this again? 1994? A decade ago, when thousands of Latino protesters took to the streets against Proposition 187? They carried Mexican flags, which was about as moronic as Proposition 187 was.

Those flags inflamed many moderate California voters just as Pete Wilson’s “they keep coming” TV commercial -- with its fuzzy footage of illegal immigrants dodging cars to cross the U.S. border -- infuriated some Latinos and liberals.

Everybody! Stand down.

This is the most powerful country in the world. What American troops can’t do, Wal-Mart can. The world already eats our food, listens to our music, speaks our language, spends our currency -- and you’re threatened by a billboard? If you want to protest illegal immigration, protest everything about illegal immigration. When the local diner offers a $5.99 gut-buster breakfast, a price made possible by the Mexican busboy in front and the Mexican cook in back, slap down a $20 and say “No! Enough! I will pay $12 for this breakfast and I insist you pay a decent wage to a legal resident to cook it for me!” -- then you’ll have my support.

Illegal immigration leaves us ambivalent -- on both sides of the border. I’ve seen Border Patrol agents spend their own money to buy vending-machine food for hungry immigrants they’ve just detained. The immigrants eat while the agents process the paperwork to send them back where they came from.

One man who’s flabbergasted by what the ad campaign has wrought is its co-creator. Lenard Liberman is vice president and general manager of Channel 62, which recently created its own reality show, “Gana la Verde,” in which contestants ate live beetles or snuggled up with rats to get a shot at a green card. Liberman is first-generation Mexican American; his father moved north from Mexico in 1945. He’s also Jewish (one nasty caller ranted that Americans “should do what Hitler didn’t finish”).

“If,” Liberman told me, “I put up a sign that had Big Ben in the middle of the L.A. skyline and put my newscasters in tweed jackets and said ‘the best British news on the market,’ nobody would think I’m telling people the British are coming.”

I did point out that there aren’t 5 or 6 million Britons living in Los Angeles -- and God help us if there were, because the food here would be terrible, unless they brought their own immigrants from India to open restaurants.

OK, he acknowledged, maybe that wasn’t the best example. Yet “when it was just Maria is your nanny and Jesus is your gardener, people were cool with that. But the minute [Latinos] become lawyers and doctors and working for their rights, people get a little threatened.”

Liberman’s company owns TV and radio stations from here to Texas, and Texas -- adopted home state of George W. Bush, who thinks the militia volunteers recently patrolling the border are vigilantes -- wouldn’t react like this, he believes. “I think there’s a certain acceptance in Texas. I thought it would have existed here, but I’m surprised it doesn’t.” Yeow, shown up by Texas. That hurts.

I had one more question for Liberman, one of surpassing importance: After all this, have the ratings gone up?

Yes, he said, they have.

How American can you get?