House panel hosts illegal immigration hearing in San Diego

House Republicans, speaking Wednesday at a field hearing aimed at exposing flaws in rival Senate legislation, said illegal immigrants cost taxpayers by straining government services.

Democrats said GOP leaders were stalling to avoid a bruising fight within their party over a sweeping immigration overhaul before November midterm elections.

The House Judiciary Committee met at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in what Republicans billed as a hearing to examine "the tremendous burden" that Senate legislation would impose on taxpayers to pay for health care, education and other services. About 100 people attended the 90-minute hearing.

"If we do not control the costs of illegal immigration we will be shutting the door to legal immigration," said House Judiciary Committee Chair James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who authored legislation approved by the House in December that focuses on tougher enforcement.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich said illegal immigration was a "catastrophic" drain on public schools, hospitals and the criminal justice system, costing the county more than $1 billion a year.

But Wayne Cornelius, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, testified that a guest worker program would allow illegal immigrants to freely go back and forth to their home countries rather than staying in the U.S. permanently, reducing the burden on public coffers.

"These hearings are a con job on the American people," said Rep. Howard Berman, D-North Hollywood, who accused Republicans of avoiding a fight within the party ahead of elections. President Bush supports a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, provisions that were included in Senate legislation passed in May.

"The reason it's a good idea to have them now is that we're at an impasse," Gohmert said."

In July, House Republicans launched the unusual series of summer field hearings, including seven this week. They meet Thursday in Phoenix and Las Cruces, N.M.

Sensenbrenner has repeatedly said that he would reject a compromise that includes what he describes as "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

Before the hearing, Catholic leaders including the Rev. Gilbert Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Diego, gathered on the steps of downtown's St. Joseph Cathedral to denounce the hearings.

"It's time to put an end to these hearings that are asking all the wrong questions," said Rosemary Johnston, a board member of the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

Congress members clash over impacts of immigration

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060802-1751-bn02immig3.html

By Philip J. LaVelle and Karen Kucher

SAN DIEGO – Members of the House Judiciary Committee clashed over the impacts of illegal immigration and the value of even holding a hearing on the matter during a heated meeting Wednesday at a local Marine base.

Meanwhile, at separate locations immigrant advocates and religious leaders criticized the meeting as one-sided and urged support for a comprehensive approach to immigration reform similar to a bill approved by the Senate rather than the House version focused solely on enforcement.

Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said illegal immigrants impose a “huge fiscal drain” on American taxpayers. He predicted ballooning costs if the Senate bill, which includes a guest worker program and a pathway to citizenship, were to become law.
He sought to focus the hearing on the public expense of illegal immigration on education, health care and law enforcement.

But two Democratic members of the committee claimed the hearing at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot – as well as others scheduled by House Republicans – was a sham.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Los Angeles, called the nationwide hearings an election-year maneuver to avoid hammering out differences between divergent House and Senate immigration bills.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, said the hearings are designed to create the “myth” that the Republican-dominated federal government is doing something about illegal immigration.

“The Republicans control the Senate, the House and the White House, but it is due to their infighting that we're here today,” she told the afternoon audience of roughly 100 gathered at a restaurant on the Marine base.

Meantime, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, accused Mexico of threatening America's long tradition of legal immigration because the vast majority of illegal immigrants here come from that nation.

Why, Issa asked, does illegal immigration come “99 percent (from) one country when the Statue of Liberty intended us to look at the downtrodden of the world equally?”

Immigrant-rights advocates staged counter events in the morning to highlight the contributions immigrants make to the economy and humanitarian concerns they have about proposed reforms.

They echoed Berman's contention that the hearings are little more than publicity stunts because they have not allowed advocates for immigrants the opportunity to present testimony.

“(Illegal immigrants) are here in our economy, they are working, they are buying things – you can't just pretend that they don't exist or pretend that we are going to kick them out, because we're not,” Melissa Daar, California policy and field director for People for the American Way, a Democratic-leaning advocacy group, said after a panel discussion at an Old Town hotel.

“We are not going to build a fence high enough to keep them out. So why not bring them in the system and have them pay more taxes, and give them insurance?” she said. “It is more logical, it is more rational.”

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, said the House-passed immigration bill would result in the incarceration of undocumented workers and represents a type of “ethnic cleansing.”

“(This) is about putting people who are undocumented into prisons and building more prisons at the taxpayers' expense. . . . We think it is the prison-industrial complex that is supporting this bill, and the American public needs to know,” she added.

Huerta said the country historically has extended legalization to immigrants who have come to the United States to work. She said the proposed reforms have less to do with border security, and more to do with politics.

A short time later, local Catholic and interfaith leaders gathered on the front steps of St. Joseph's Cathedral downtown and criticized the congressional hearing as being one-sided. They called upon Congress to pursue immigration reform that would respect the rights and dignity of immigrants.

Echoing a position that a coalition of Catholic bishops adopted last fall, speakers said that immigration reform should focus on four key areas:

Policies intended to improve economic conditions in migrants' home countries;

Reunification of families torn apart by immigration;

A guest worker program that protects workers' rights;

And a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Rosemary Johnston, a board member of the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said Wednesday's judiciary committee hearing was skewed because it would examine only the potential negative impacts of illegal immigration, and would ignore basic humanitarian questions.

“We have a different set of questions that drive comprehensive immigration reforms, like how many deaths will it take (until) we know that too many have died along the border with Mexico,” she said.

Earlier, the Most Rev. Gilbert E. Chavez, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of San Diego, released a prepared statement highlighting the toll the nation's current immigration system takes on individuals.

“Every day we see in our parishes the humanitarian consequences of a broken system: families which are separated, migrant workers that are exploited by smugglers and unscrupulous employers, and human beings who die in the desert,” Chavez said.

The criticism was aired just a few hours before the House Judiciary Committee's hearing began at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

The Senate bill, which passed in May, creates a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants. House Republicans routinely refer to the bill as the “Reid-Kennedy bill,” associating it with two Democrats, Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was one of its authors. In the Senate, the measure is known as the McCain-Kennedy bill, because Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona wrote the bill with Kennedy.

A rival bill passed by the House in December focuses on border security and makes it a crime to be in the United States illegally.

Among those who addressed the Judiciary Committee were Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich; Kevin J. Burns, the chief financial officer at University Medical Center in Tucson; Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation; Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca; and Wayne Cornelius, a professor at the University of California San Diego.

House Republicans have said they plan to hold 21 hearings in 13 states on immigration during the month of August.

In a previous hearing in July, held at the Imperial Beach Border Patrol station, congressional Republicans said tough border controls were vital for national security and Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, called for stepped-up law enforcement away from the border where undocumented workers congregate to look for jobs.

The House International Relations subcommittee on international terrorism and nonproliferation met for four hours, attracting demonstrators from both sides of the issue.

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