LA JOLLA —— Immigration experts and immigrant rights activists Tuesday said immigrants are increasingly becoming "criminalized" by new legislation proposed and implemented in the name of national security since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

They said new laws make it easier to deport immigrants for minor violations, asylum seekers face tougher scrutiny, interior immigration enforcement is tightening up, and traditional migration patterns between the United States and Mexico are becoming increasingly restricted.

The comments came during a round-table discussion Tuesday by experts and advocates at UC San Diego's Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, an immigration research organization on the La Jolla campus.

In particular the group focused on the Real ID Act of 2005, new legislation making its way through the U.S. Congress that aims to keep driver's licenses out of the hands of illegal immigrants, suspend environmental laws to finish a fence along San Diego County's border with Mexico, and raise the requirements for admitting refugees.

Robyn Rodriguez, a visiting research fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, said the purpose of the discussion was to increase awareness about the effect these proposals have on people living in San Diego County.

"We believed it would be important to engage the San Diego community in this changing legislation," Rodriguez said.

The Real ID Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives with overwhelming support from local representatives, who said the changes are needed to better protect the country from would-be terrorists.

"This legislation will undoubtedly make America safer and more secure," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, whose district includes parts of North County. "The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against our nation clearly demonstrated that border security and homeland security are conducive to each other."

Hunter's comment came last week after voting for passage of the bill.

Critics of the proposal have said the plan would not make the country safer because border enforcement build-ups and laws against issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants have been in place since long before the attacks.

Since 1994, the federal government more than tripled funding for the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is now reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, to $5.5 billion in fiscal year 2002, according to INS figures. But in the same decade, the illegal immigrant population had increased to about 7 million by 2001, according to an INS report.

Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and a panelist in the discussion, said he failed to see how increasing the requirements for asylum seekers would make the country safer.

"How is this justified as a security legislation?" he asked. "I don't understand it at all."

Benjamin Prado, an immigrant rights activist with the San Diego office of the American Friends Service Committee, said national security was not the reason behind the legislation.

"The bottom line is it has nothing to do with security," Prado said. "It has to do with restricting the movement of human migration."

Increasing border security through fences and more U.S. Border Patrol personnel is simply making it more difficult for illegal immigrants, who are largely from Mexico, to return home regularly. Instead, they are bringing their families to live permanently in the United States, making the illegal immigrant population swell, not decrease, said Debbie Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at UC San Diego.

The tougher security measures determine "how, when and how often immigrants cross the border," she said. "But they have not prevented Mexican immigrants from crossing the border."

What anti-illegal immigrant laws have achieved is to help fan public anger aimed at illegal immigrants, Prado said.

New laws have also made it easier for immigrants and refugees to be scrutinized by law enforcement, said Nathaniel Goetz, interim director of the Forced Migration Laboratory at UC San Diego, who was a panelist at the event.

"We have eight of 12 ethnic (refugee) groups in San Diego that have had members of their communities targeted in some way … by raids, detentions, arrests or interrogations," Goetz said.

Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at (760) 740-5426 esifuentes@nctimes.com.