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 News from Around the Americas | May 2005 
California State-Run Mexico Border Patrol Proposed
 Jim Christie - Reuters
| | Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has flung himself into the roiling debate over illegal immigration in recent weeks, he had virtually ignored the issue since being elected. |
San Francisco, CA - Saying the U.S. government has failed to secure the border with Mexico, California activists who helped recall former Gov. Gray Davis said on Thursday they would promote a ballot measure calling for the state to fund its own border patrol.
They unveiled the measure, the California Border Police Act, as the Minutemen citizens' group that patrolled Arizona's border with Mexico in April prepares for a similar effort this summer south of San Diego along California's border with Mexico.
"California has been trying to pressure the feds for 20 years to do a better job and they haven't," said Dave Gilliard, the measure's political strategist.
The campaign took its first major step on Wednesday by filing a draft of its measure with California's attorney general with the aim of placing it on the June 2006 ballot.
That step came amid last-minute preparations for Cinco de Mayo festivities. Mexican-Americans each year on May 5 commemorate an 1862 battle in Puebla, Mexico in which Mexican soldiers defeated invading French forces.
Cinco de Mayo is not an official holiday in Mexico or California, but it has become both a popular occasion and celebration of Mexican culture.
The timing of the measure's unveiling a day ahead of Cinco de Mayo was "purely coincidental," Gilliard said, noting he wanted to seize on the attention to illegal immigration generated in recent weeks by the Minutemen.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger raised the profile of the issue of illegal immigration by recently endorsing the Minutemen, raising the ire of Latino elected officials already disappointed by his opposition to granting drivers' licenses for undocumented migrants.
His comments also revived hard feelings from the mid-1990s aroused by former Gov. Pete Wilson's tough stand on illegal immigration and support for a ballot measure aimed at deterring it. Voters backed the measure and he rode it to a second term.
Despite their widespread employment of undocumented workers -- as field hands, gardeners, laborers, domestics and in other jobs -- Californians have chafed at their state serving as a magnet for illegal immigration.
A state border patrol, which would be a first, would cut the costs to taxpayers from an estimated 3 million illegal immigrants in California, Gilliard said: "We estimate it would to save $5 billion to $7 billion (annually). California currently spends $9 billion to $10 billion for services, or for incarceration costs, on illegal immigrants."
The new state police agency, allowed by 1996 federal law, would employ more than 2,000 officers at a cost of $300 million to $400 million annually, Gilliard said. "Because they gave the states the authority to do this, there is no reason California shouldn't do it on its own," he said.
A spokesman for Schwarzenegger said the governor has not taken a stand on the measure. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had described his remarks on the Minutemen as irresponsible, said the measure would be socially divisive and complicate law enforcement along the California-Mexico border.
"Border security is a federal issue and immigration is a federal issue," said Ranjana Natarajan, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California. "The last thing we need is more layers of bureaucracy ... Nothing shows this would improve the effectiveness of border policing." |
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