Migrant has tough message to others

Escondido City Councilman Sam Abed said sure, he’d be happy to meet with me and explain how an immigrant became such an immigration hard-liner.

As my colleague Anna Gorman reported last week, the San Diego County city has all but declared war on illegal residents, with police checkpoints and an ordinance aimed at discouraging multiple families from sharing a home. An ordinance punishing landlords for renting to illegal immigrants was rescinded for legal reasons, but steadfast city officials are now considering a policy to restrict drivers from picking up day laborers.

I met the councilman at the Starbucks in his neighborhood. Abed had been to a council meeting and was still wearing a suit with a U.S. flag lapel pin. He began telling his story, but the coffee shop was closing, so Abed called his wife to say he was bringing a guest home. The father of two climbed into a Mercedes-Benz van with a HPST DAD license plate and led me to his house in a gated community.

On the walls of Abed’s home office are photos of Lebanon, where he grew up in a middle-class family that sent him off to a proper college. Life’s been good, Abed admitted, and he’s made “a lot of money,” first as an IBM software engineer and now as the owner of a gas station and several commercial properties in Escondido.

It was love that paved his way to U.S. citizenship, or at least sped the process. He met his wife, a Lebanese American, while in the U.S. on a visitor’s visa in the late 1970s, and marriage made it possible for him to pursue what he repeatedly refers to as the American dream.

“I did it legally,” he said, so there’s no contradiction in his attitudes about illegal immigration.

Abed and his wife settled in Escondido about 20 years ago because he said it was a good place to raise a family. But the dream lost its luster when illegal immigrants flooded the town, he said, and dragged down the “quality of life.” Schools struggled; gang activity increased, he said.

How did Abed know the new residents were illegal?

“It’s obvious,” he said.

Something’s obvious, all right, Abed’s critics say.

“It’s about brown people,” Mike Flores said.

The retired San Diego County assistant sheriff swears that city officials have misrepresented crime stats and exaggerated the number of illegal residents, blaming them for everything without considering their contribution to the local economy

“I don’t think if the Latino population in Escondido was at 25%, we’d be having this conversation,” Flores said. “It’s now close to 50% and . . . that’s the problem.”

To which Abed says: “I’m brown too.”

When I reminded Abed that immigration is a federal matter, he said the government’s failures have forced Escondido officials to clean up the mess.

Using stats on voter registration and the number of unlicensed drivers stopped at checkpoints, Abed argues that roughly 25% of Escondido’s population is illegal and that the crime rate has surged as a result.

But when Abed handed me a sheet listing 2,615 people arrested in the last six months of 2007, I saw that 646 were illegal residents. Isn’t that roughly 25% of the total arrests, and doesn’t that mean illegals didn’t commit a higher percentage of crimes?

I also questioned whether checkpoint stops were worth the cost, given that only six illegal immigrants were nabbed in six months. Abed said there was no cost to the city; it used hundreds of thousands in state and federal grants. Maybe, but taxpayers pick up that tab too.

We could have quibbled over the numbers until the sun came up, but I’m not one to deny that illegal immigration poses huge costs in this country for hospitals, schools and other institutions. Do the costs outweigh the benefits of strong backs and a limitless desire to succeed? That’s endlessly debatable.

But Abed and I agreed on quite a bit, especially when it came to political cowardice on immigration reform.

“Republicans want the support of business,” which demands cheap labor, Abed said. “And Democrats want Latino votes.”

It’s ludicrous, Abed says, that there isn’t a guest worker program.

“If Escondido needs 1,000 farmworkers temporarily, why can’t we ask for them?”

Good question.

If Abed were in charge, there’d be a tighter border, and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But they’d have to learn English for their own good, and first priority would go to those in other countries who are waiting to come here legally.

Abed said he brought his own brother here 20 years ago on a student visa and paid for his education at San Diego State. After graduation, Abed sent his brother home, telling him to apply for legal reentry rather than stay here illegally.

Finally, 18 years later, his brother’s papers have come through, and he plans to give up his job in the Middle East as a Visa executive to move here next year.

Abed wants to know why it takes so long for highly educated people to come here legally while unskilled laborers crash the borders daily.

If I were poor and desperate in Mexico or elsewhere, I told Abed, and I knew employers craved my services and citizens demanded rock-bottom prices for everything from tomatoes to tube socks, I’d hop the fence too, especially if my kids were hungry.

Escondido’s HPST DAD said he doesn’t have a problem with illegal immigrants who are only trying to survive. As long as they live lawfully, he says, he’s willing to look the other way.

Running people out of shared homes and setting up checkpoints isn’t looking the other way. It’s a way of turning half the town’s residents into suspects and working the yahoos into a lather -- many of the website blog postings on Gorman’s story last week looked like rally cries at a Klan picnic.

But Sam Abed is right in the main: The federal government’s wink-and-nod policy sends mixed signals to illegal immigrants, it sticks states and cities with the costs and it leaves reasonable people wondering when, if ever, the double-talking politicians will fix the problem.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com