I get the feeling that the Courts of this Land would conclude that the law that the San Bernardino City Council has passed to be unconstitutional because the Courts have also said that Prop. 187 was unconstitutional and it passed with over 87% approval. There had to have been some Illegal Immigrants voting for that bill because, there is not that many citizens in California that could have voted, unless every available citizen that could vote, felt compelled to vote on this election. WOW..To good getting a 100% turn out. And you know that there was no way that there was a 100% turn out. Yet still the Court Felt that they were unconstitutional...
I hate being the one that is reporting the law that was passed once again in San Bernardino to put some control on the Illegal Immigration situation and they took will take it away once it is tried to be enforced in the state of California. Well, it is a great try and I hope it holds up for a good long time!!!
BSRancher...
San Bernardino seeking 'relief'
Struggling city's proposal targets illegal immigrants
Sunday, June 11, 2006
San Bernardino -- Few cities have been battered as harshly by shifting policy and economic forces as this working-class suburb 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Despite being in one of the fastest-growing regions of the state, San Bernardino is long on problems -- such as vanishing jobs, gang violence and poor schools -- and desperately short on solutions.
But Chas Kelley, a Republican city councilman and unabashed town booster, says there is one thing even more galling: He hears little English spoken in his supermarket checkout line and, worse, he says, the local Wal-Mart ads seem to turn their back on people like him, showing more Mexican than American flags.
"They're a business, and I understand that they're after market share," Kelley said of Wal-Mart, as he brandished a store advertisement showing a dark-haired family wearing Mexican soccer jerseys as they watch a televised soccer match between Latin American teams. "But at some point in time, when does it stop? When does it become my America?"
That is why Kelley, though proud that he lives on a melting pot of a street here, has become an enthusiastic supporter of what many regard as one of the most discriminatory, anti-illegal-immigrant proposals in the country.
The proposal calls for shutting down day labor centers in the city, banning landlords from renting apartments to undocumented immigrants and lifting permits -- even confiscating property -- from businesses that employ them, whether in the city or elsewhere.
In fact, say advocates unapologetically, it is intended to drive illegal immigrants out of the city. The real hope is that the law will turn into a movement, with other cities adopting the same harsh measures.
"This initiative is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that you're not seeing in the federal government," said Kelley, sitting in his tidy tract home on Varsity Avenue. "If you can't rent apartments here, you can't put your kids in our schools, and that leaves more time for the kids who speak English."
The initiative, known as the City of San Bernardino Illegal Immigrant Relief Act, failed to pass the City Council by a 4-3 vote last month, but it is heading for a special election, probably in September, after proponents gathered the 2,200 required signatures.
The issue is opening deep fissures here, and there is strong opposition from people ranging from the mayor to church officials to business leaders. San Bernardino has almost 200,000 residents, half of whom are Latino, although that is on the low side compared with some other cities in the region.
The surrounding area, known as the Inland Empire, is growing rapidly, but San Bernardino, the county seat, has been largely left out of the advancing prosperity. Average annual income here is $31,000, significantly lower than that of surrounding communities. Poverty is twice the national rate, as is violent crime.
The school district has 57,000 students, similar in size to San Francisco, but as measured by test scores, it is one of the worst-performing major districts in the state, behind troubled cities like Oakland and Los Angeles.
The initiative seems to encapsulate much of the suspicion, anger and confusion of people who have seen their cities buffeted by job losses or stagnant wages and rising crime, and have sought to pin at least some of the blame on heavy inflows of undocumented workers. On its Web site, Save Our State, the organization behind the San Bernardino initiative, says illegal "invaders" are turning the city into "a Third World cesspool."
But there is also ambiguity mixed in with the raw anger, and Kelley, in a long conversation at his dining room table, does not sound like a rabid racist -- as some have charged -- as he seeks to square his harsh views on illegal immigrants with a generally sympathetic attitude toward any working family just trying to get ahead in a fast-changing world.
Kelley is an earnest, 37-year-old electrician at a company that manufactures bingo equipment, a devout Catholic who says he is proud of the diversity in his life. His godmother is Latino and, as he gives a visitor a brief tour of his street, he points out where Iranian, Filipino, Thai, Korean, Latino and African American families live. All the immigrants, he insists, are legal.
He lives with his wife and four children, ages 11 to 16, in a 1,342-square-foot, three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that abuts rolling hills. Kelley says he ran for the part-time City Council (its members are paid $50 a month) to get the city to install a stop sign on his street because people were driving too fast and endangering the kids. (He succeeded.)
But he soon was confronted with more troubling issues, like rising crime, a decaying downtown, and greater use of Spanish in shops and stores where Kelley was used to hearing his native tongue.
"All these things add up to a frustration level," he says.
After wrestling with the issue, and his conscience, he concluded that in a world that sometimes feels like it is spinning out of control, eliminating illegal immigrants would be one way of slowing things down. He has not wavered in that view.
Kelley says he has been an ardent supporter of President Bush, but on the immigration issue -- Bush supports a path toward legalization for undocumented immigrants -- he says the president just doesn't get it.
"I don't think he quite understands what it's like at the market, to stand in line and not to hear your language spoken, to see Mexican flags everywhere," Kelley says.
Explaining his opposition to legalization, Kelley adds: "You almost feel like you're pulling a wagon up a hill and some people are getting a free ride."
To opponents, Kelley and other backers of the initiative are simply using immigrants as punching bags for deeper-seated issues tearing away at this city.
"I look at San Bernardino like a microcosm of all the problems that just about every large city is having to deal with," says Armando Navarro, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside and a coordinator for the National Alliance for Human Rights. "The real issues aren't demographic, they're economic."
Navarro is strongly critical of the initiative's advocates and says they ignore the reality that the immigrants are a source of economic vitality. "What they're doing is not economic, it's racial," Navarro says.
In fact, many groups here are fighting the initiative. Kelley's church condemns the proposal as inhumane. Local business leaders say it would drive away businesses, making a weak economic situation worse.
"They see it as more of an attack on business and more detrimental to business than the immigrants," says Donald Averill, chancellor of the San Bernardino Community College District and head of a number of economic development programs. "It's particularly bad for small businesses. They just don't have the resources or the expertise to check everyone."
Many here attribute the city's ills to a number of factors, starting with the loss of some major employers. The Norton Air Force Base closed a decade ago, a large steel mill in nearby Fontana was shut down, and there have been heavy cutbacks at a Santa Fe rail yard and some nearby aerospace plants.
Some of the jobs have been replaced over time with new warehouses and some industrial plants, and the Stater Bros. supermarket chain is opening a new headquarters here. But San Bernardino has been unable to achieve the growth and prosperity of some neighboring cities, such as Fontana -- where Kelley grew up, near the now-closed Kaiser steel mill -- which is dotted with new, upscale housing developments, and has half the crime and poverty rates of San Bernardino.
Joseph Turner, the author of the initiative and the head of Save Our State, admits that illegal immigrants are far from the only problems San Bernardino faces. The loss of the big employers, he says, started the city's slide, and local politicians have just not been able to cope or chart a revival.
"This city's been in disarray for over a decade," says Turner, 29, who is also an aide to Ray Haynes, a member of the California Assembly from a Riverside County district. "I want to make clear that I'm not saying that this is all due to illegal immigrants. That would be dishonest. It's not the whole problem, but it is some portion of the problem."
Kelley and Turner both say they are in favor of legal immigration, and would like to streamline the cumbersome process legal immigrants have to go through to acquire permanent residence and citizenship. Their concern, they say, are those who skirt the laws.
"If you're here illegally, get the hell out of my country," Turner snaps.
Asked if he thinks undocumented immigrants cost the community more than they pay in taxes, Kelley says he is not sure.
Asked about crime rates, he says his biggest concern is not that the immigrants might be committing crimes in larger numbers than other residents -- he said they probably do not -- but that they are not reporting crimes because of their fear of the police.
He also said that giving more immigrants a path to legal status could be a positive step.
"Doggone it, get them to raise their right hands and swear allegiance to this country and get to be citizens with their allegiances to this country," Kelley says. "They should acclimate to this country and speak English."
Was he not arguing in favor of President Bush's position, which is similar to the version of the immigration bill passed by the U.S. Senate?
Kelley thought about that and admitted it made sense to admit more citizens, giving the immigrants a greater sense of commitment to their communities. But then he restated what he considers a bedrock belief: People who break the law should not be rewarded.
"It's not about being a racist or singling out one segment of society to punish it," he said. "It's about the law. There's no middle ground on that."
Kelley believes the initiative will pass by a large margin. Citizens, he said, are fed up.
"That's where we're at now, to the boiling point," he said.
Opponents insist that it will go down in defeat, and that even if passed it would never survive court challenges, but they say it will still take a toll.
"The truth is we're heading toward a deadlock on this issue," said Navarro of UC Riverside. "There's no sense of common ground or middle ground."
E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.
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