Our view: Council's retreat from rental ban a step backward in right direction

We hear much about the "invasion" of illegal immigrants in North County, especially Escondido. On Wednesday night, the Escondido City Council was overrun by common sense.

A majority of council members voted in closed session to abandon the city's effort to turn the city's landlords into immigration inspectors. After the city ordinance to ban renting to illegal immigrants ran into the expensive legal buzz saw that everyone saw coming, the council belatedly admitted the obvious: Enforcing immigration laws is an effort best left to the federal government.

The ordinance would have given landlords found to be harboring illegal immigrants 10 business days to evict the tenants, or face penalties ranging from suspension of their business licenses to fines of up to $1,000 a day and six months in jail.

The statement released by the council Wednesday night read, "Continuing the present policy approach would be unnecessarily costly to the city, and unnecessarily consume the court's time, when other approaches could provide the answers to the problems more efficiently."

Exactly! That's precisely the counsel the council received from this newspaper and many others before Marie Waldron, Ed Gallo and Sam Abed voted Oct. 4 to approve this ordinance.

Forget about the legal costs to the city, which will far exceed the $200,000 estimate floated Wednesday night by City Attorney Jeffrey Epp when city staff time is tallied. The city doesn't have the staff or resources necessary to enforce this boondoggle of a ban, and that tally would've dwarfed the legal fees.

That the ban relied on Escondido gaining access to federal immigration records that it is not now entitled to access also seems to have been neglected in the rush to raise the city's drawbridges.

But the proposed ban was more than a costly, impractical crusade: It was also a nakedly political campaign ploy by Waldron, who rode the anti-illegal immigration revolt to a resounding re-election victory Nov. 7. That Waldron, Gallo, Abed and their supporters also succeeded in splintering their city along racial lines and branding Escondido as an epicenter of intolerance seems to have been, in their calculation, a consequence worth the effort.

And the young U.S. citizens who were threatened with being thrown out in the cold because their parents lack U.S. citizenship by a city that doesn't have an emergency homeless shelter this winter, they appear to have been considered collateral damage.

Escondido residents owe those who sued to stop the rental ban a great deal, for they saved Escondido from itself. These defenders of Escondido taxpayers' wallets include the much-maligned American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, the Fair Housing Council of San Diego, the private law firms Rosner & Mansfield LLP and Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, Escondido landlords Roy and Mary Garrett, and two anonymous illegal immigrants renting in Escondido. That's right: Here's a clear example of illegal immigrants saving the city money.

Of course, the issue of illegal immigration will far outlive Escondido's orphaned rental ban. Hours before the Escondido council voted, a suspected illegal immigrant, Rafael Ramirez Perez, pleaded guilty to murder and drunken-driving charges in a fatal crash in Ramona that claimed the life of Amy Kortlang, 22. Perez had been driving a company work truck on the night of Oct. 10.

Other illegally employed immigrants were swept up Tuesday in a series of raids in meat-processing plants owned by Swift & Co. in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa and Minnesota.

On Thursday, the Golden State Fence Co., with offices in Riverside and Oceanside, was criminally charged with knowingly hiring illegal immigrants to build fences. Among the firm's big projects, to satirists' joy, was a 14-mile section of the border fence near the Otay Mesa border crossing in the late 1990s.

And on the street corners of Vista, day laborers are again returning to the corners from where they were driven by a city law and anti-illegal immigrant protesters.

Hope remains that President Bush can work with a new Congress to craft a sensible, compromise immigration reform that succeeds in securing the border, cracking down on illegal employers and smugglers, and offering a path toward citizenship for the millions of immigrants who are working and contributing to U.S. communities.

For cities like Escondido, there remains far better means to address the complaints about overcrowded houses and degraded quality of life than a poorly conceived and scandalously expensive rental ban.