Legislators hear immigration complaints
Edwin Garcia
MEDIANEWS SACRAMENTO BUREAU
Sep 28, 2006
THOUSAND OAKS - Under pressure from constituents angry with the state and federal governments' inability and unwillingness to curtail illegal immigration, a panel of Republican legislators Wednesday convened the first in a series of town hall meetings to focus attention on the divisive issue.
The panel came to this conservative-leaning bedroom community in Ventura County to ask local activists, residents and elected officials their thoughts on reducing illegal immigration -- and they left with a mixed list of ideas as well as complaints.
Among the complaints: Mexicans shouldn't be allowed to fly their country's flag in the United States, and the rising population of illegal immigrants is bad for the environment because more toilets have to be flushed.
Among the suggestions: Cities should enforce housing laws to ease crowding in neighborhoods, and communities need to clamp down on the factors that attract illegal immigration.
"If there's no jobs, no housing, no cars," said Steve Frank, a Simi Valley consultant who compiles a conservative blog for more than 200,000 subscribers, "illegal aliens will go home."
The forum, sponsored by the state Assembly's Republican Task Force on Illegal Immigration, comes at a time when statewide public opinion surveys rank immigration as the top issue facing voters, despite the scant attention given to the topic by the leading candidates for governor.
Congressional Republicans held similar town halls over the summer in Southern California.
The forum also comes at the end of a two-year legislative session in which Republican lawmakers proposed more than two dozen ways to clamp down on illegal immigrants, only to see their measures struck down by the Democrat-controlled Assembly and Senate.
"You get slapped down hard in that Legislature," Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, the forum co-host, said after the meeting. "It's very disappointing."
