Boy, am I glad I’m not a local elected official.
Every once in a while I get an itch to consider public service, but then something happens—something like the March 27 Santa Maria City Council meeting—that scratches that itch away. That meeting scratched my itch so hard, I feel like, with God as my witness, I’ll never be itchy again.
There is nothing whatsoever appealing to me about sitting down and getting ready to vote on something serious and finding myself facing more than 1,000 of my constituents, who’ve all showed up to protest the recent decision made by the Planning Commission—a decision that quickly attracted no less than four appeals.
It’s even less appealing to think about that scenario from the point of view of a leader getting ready to vote against the hopes and wishes of that mass of humanity, especially since the city has worked so hard to reagain the Latino community’s trust after the dark days of Danny Macagni.
Now, I could discuss the actual issue itself here. I could dissect Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as how such an office’s presence could impact the city of Santa Maria. I could discuss the idea that fear—even fear countered by assurances and promises and explanations from the people behind a push—is itself a real force. If you buy into the whole “perception is reality” idea, and that presidential quote about the only thing we have to fear being fear itself, then you’d know that the ICE facility alone raised a lot of issues to genuinely worry about, regardless of how its establishment in the city will truly play out.
I’ve heard comments about people already leaving Santa Maria, and while that seems like a rash move to me, I understand the nervousness that would prompt such departures. Regardless of what the ICE facility’s stated purpose is—in this case, as a processing facility for undocumented inmates coming out of the nearby Lompoc Penitentiary, the California Men’s Colony, and the San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbra County jails—some locals see it as a toe in the water that looks mighty frigid to them.
In other words, once ICE is here, it’s here. And from its starting point as a processing facility, perhaps anything goes.
At the meeting, the project’s designer, Bruce Fraser, said “vague fear and conjecture” were driving the claims being made against the proposal. I’m not going to disagree.
But I’m also going to point out that, for many undocumented immigrants, fear and conjecture are facts of the life they’ve chosen to live—chosen, likely, in an attempt to give their families a better chance than they could find elsewhere.
Your stance on that underlying issue likely depends on your stances on a host of other things: taxes, agriculture, food prices, crime, and the like. Farm work in this country—and especially this state—is a big ball of tangled twine made up of countless strands of debate. But even one tug at one loose thread can make at least a part of it start to unravel, as we all saw in the wall of police protection that formed to keep the council members—three of whom voted to uphold the Planning Commission’s decision to usher in the facility—apart from the angry hundreds of their constituents they ignored.
Should our leaders have ignored their constituents’ wishes? Well, again, your take on that certainly depends on your stance on the underlying issues, yada yada, etc.
Me? I do admit that the system in place by which undocumented immigrants come into this country generates its share of problems—some of them very serious, as indicated by the need for a dedicated processing facility—but I also know that this country has to eat, and I don’t exactly see our own citizens rushing to the fields to pick strawberries or budgeting an extra chunk of change each month to pay for more expensive fruits and vegetables.
This is a situation with no easy answers, which is why—as you’ll recall—I wake up every morning and thank my lucky feathers that I’m not on the hook for the ultimate decision. I get to sit in my journalistic tower and waffle vaguely, saying, “This is one way to look at it, but this is another way to look at it.”
I don’t think council members Bob Orach, Willie Green, and Jack Boysen made the right call. But I also sympathize with them, because what are the alternatives?
Problems like this will keep cropping up. And here’s the thing: There is no right call. That’s because the overall system is flawed, and until we get a national policy that sorts out the undocumented mess, sewing up holes in our laws while preserving our fertile bounty, we’re going to see a large portion of our population continuing to live in fear and conjecture as administrative and correctional hands weigh heavier and heavier.
To that end, boy, am I glad I’m not a national elected official.
The Canary feels like a weasel this week. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 3-10, 2014.