From - Tue May 29 17:37:38 2001 From: "--=Cochise |=-=| Guardian=--" Newsgroups: alt.politics.immigration,alt.california,az.general,tx.general,alt.mexico Subject: Why the border should be mined Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 10:49:13 -0700 Organization: No More Beaners Lines: 166 Message-ID: Reply-To: jay*--REMOVE--*@adnmail.com NNTP-Posting-Host: a5.79.76.b9 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Server-Date: 29 May 2001 17:46:49 GMT X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.8/32.548 X-No-Archive: yes Path: vienna7.his.com!nntp-new.frontiernet.net!nntp.primenet.com!nntp.gblx.net!newsfeed.cwix.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.mindspring.net!not-for-mail Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.politics.immigration:160884 alt.california:325551 az.general:59845 tx.general:37117 alt.mexico:30625 http://www.dailynews.com/news/articles/0501/29/new06.asp Illegal Immigration 101 By Martin Kuz Staff Writer May 29, 2001 A young Latino man calling himself Albert approached Rene Hernandez and two friends on a street corner in Panorama City. With a ticket scalper's zeal, Albert asked if they needed fake Social Security cards, driver's licenses or work visas -- for $80 a document, he could take care of them. Hernandez's friends, Leticia and Miguel, nodded. After a short car ride during which Albert barked directions, he led the trio through the front door of a clothing store, out the back door, across an alley and into a small, dark room. A Latino man in his mid-30s named John sat at a folding table with a laptop computer, a printer and a laminator. He snapped a photo of Leticia, printed out two sheets of paper and ran them through the laminator. Thirty minutes and $160 later, Leticia walked out with a Social Security card and a California driver's license. "I couldn't believe how easy it was," Hernandez said. "It really was like buying baseball tickets from a scalper." Call it a true-life education in Illegal Immigration 101, a lesson learned by Hernandez and his 11 classmates during professor Roger McGrath's senior seminar history course this spring at California State University, Northridge. It's also a lesson that offered far more relevance to the world outside the ivory tower than most other academic exercises. Indeed, what the dozen history majors in McGrath's class discovered about undocumented aliens in Southern California jibes with broader trends identified by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, immigration advocacy groups and law enforcement. "The manufacturing of fraudulent documents and selling them on the streets -- it's mushrooming," said Paul Smith, head of the fraud section of the Los Angeles INS Office. "You can walk down by McArthur Park and in 15, 20 minutes buy any fraudulent document you want." That's precisely the sort of corroboration of his students' work that revs up McGrath, who instructed them to research illegal immigration beyond books, government reports and other conventional, bound sources. They warmed to the idea, each studying a specific aspect of illegal immigration in Los Angeles, gauging its impact on hospitals, jails, police and schools, among other socioeconomic areas. One student spent time with day laborers along Oxnard Street, while another visited the Mexican-California border to talk to INS officials about immigrant smuggling. "These are all seniors about to graduate," said McGrath, who looks a little like college basketball coach Lute Olson and rasps a lot like actor Marlon Brando. "The last thing I wanted to do is send them over to the library and have them synthesize and summarize information and write a paper about it. They did that in junior high, you know?" Hernandez, 26, never went shopping for fraudulent documents in junior high, nor anytime else -- and he has no desire to ever reprise his midday encounter with Albert and John. "I was seriously scared," he said. "I didn't know if they were going to pull a gun on us or rob us or what. But I'm still glad I got to see for myself what goes on." Hernandez, a Southern California native, said that Leticia -- both her and Miguel's names are aliases -- is an illegal immigrant who plans to use the documents she bought to find work in the Valley. Disregarding his friendship with her, Hernandez said, "A lot more has to be done about illegal immigrants. It's too easy for them to come here and get these papers." The underground market for fake IDs, visas and other residency documents continues to thrive in Los Angeles despite INS countermeasures. Three years ago, an INS sweep dubbed Operation Fine Print led to the seizure of some 2.5 million counterfeit documents and several arrests. But the INS balks at pursuit of the likes of Albert and John, for two primary reasons: cumbersome guidelines, imposed by the U.S. Attorney's Office, for prosecuting small-time document vendors, and a lack of manpower. "Going after some little chump who's selling Social Security cards doesn't really accomplish a lot," Smith said. "He's just a drop in the bucket." A similar sense of illegal immigrants overwhelming the system prevails among Los Angeles County's public and private hospitals, Laurie Sheehan asserted in her research paper. Sheehan analyzed the impact of allowing illegal aliens to access health care at public facilities through a handful of state-funded programs. California law prohibits the turning away of patients based on residency status. The statute enables illegal aliens to pay, for example, $40 for prenatal services, $50 for outpatient visits and $70 for emergency room visits under one state program -- far cheaper rates than those faced by legal residents living above the poverty line, Sheehan noted. Sheehan also quoted the director of a private Valley hospital who told her, "Our hospitals are less crowded and have nicer rooms (than county facilities), so when it comes time for someone who is probably indigent to give birth, they just drive around the parking lot until it's too late for us to turn them away." Sheehan, a 31-year-old dental assistant, favors allowing pregnant mothers who are undocumented residents to receive prenatal care. "(But) I'd rather see an overall improvement in the health-care system so that the rest of us aren't subsidizing programs for illegal immigrants." Monica Benitez, the statewide health care outreach director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, confirmed that undocumented residents crash emergency rooms to receive medical care. Benitez argued, however, that children born to illegal aliens are U.S. citizens who deserve the same level of care as anyone else. "It's less expensive for the state to provide prenatal care than it is to provide services for a child that is born premature or developmentally disabled," she said. Benitez also defended state health-care programs available to illegal immigrants and faulted the INS for stoking false fears that aliens will be deported if they attempt to use the services. "`If we're going to be living alongside people, shouldn't they have the same access to vaccinations and medications so that they're as healthy as everyone else?" she said. Another of McGrath's students, Diane Zakarian, researched crimes committed by illegal aliens, zeroing in on the explosive rise of methamphetamine trafficking by Mexican nationals in Southern California. The highly toxic drugs used to make meth require police to take special precautions when busting an operator, and cleanup costs for a single meth lab can run as high as $100,000, authorities told Zakarian. U.S. drug officials reported last summer that Mexican gangs in California produce 85 percent of the nation's meth supply. Given the amount of tax dollars spent on tracking and cleaning up meth labs run by illegal aliens, border patrols need to be beefed up, Zakarian said. "I think there's more that should be done," said Zakarian, 24, who will begin teaching at a Canoga Park elementary school this fall. "All of these people getting past customs are costing us a lot of money." Detective Richard Gutierrez of the Los Angeles Police Department's clandestine lab unit verified that illegal immigrants dominate the local meth trade. "What we've seen in the Valley and L.A. areas is that the majority of the large-scale suppliers ... have turned out to be Mexican nationals who are in the country illegally," he said. Yet in large part because the chemicals used in meth can be purchased at any home improvement store, squelching the epidemic remains a clouded prospect, Gutierrez said. "It's the drug of choice right now," he said. Less clouded is the new perspective of McGrath's students on the rigors of in-depth research. "Now I know what researchers go through so that I can just look something up at the library," Zakarian said.