Immigration hearings to stir pot

WASHINGTON -- Starting with a hearing in San Diego today, House members are launching a summer long sparring match over how best to untangle and reorder the nation's complex thicket of immigration laws.

Alongside that debate, Democrats and Republicans will wage a second struggle -- to see which party can best wring a political advantage from the hearings as the November elections draw closer.

The San Diego hearing will provide House Republicans with a stage to highlight the dangers of cross-border smuggling of people and radiological materials. In doing so, they will try to argue that the Senate immigration bill would not provide adequate protection against either threat.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, will counter the House inquiry by hosting his own hearing, also today, to defend the broad nature of the Senate's immigration bill.

Congressional hearings are usually held to explore an issue and search for solutions. House Republicans have been frank that their hearings, slated for this month and next, will be used as a negotiating tool with two goals: to highlight what they see as flaws in the Senate-passed immigration bill and build public support for their enforcement-only measure.

``Pointing out what I would describe as the inadequacies in the Reid-Kennedy bill will help strengthen our hand as we move toward a compromise with the Senate," said House majority leader John Boehner, Republican of Ohio , who used the names of two Democrats, Senators Harry Reid of Nevada and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, to refer to and deride the bipartisan bill.

Democrats dismissed the House hearings as political theater aimed at rallying core GOP voters with biased witness lists and loaded topic headings. Even so, the minority party is just as enthusiastic to start them.

In San Diego and the three or four other hearings to follow, Democrats plan to ask why Republicans are spending the summer talking about immigration, instead of working on it.

And Democrats say that the hearings are the perfect opportunity to point out that if the border is porous, if agents are underfunded, and if workplace immigration law is rarely enforced, much of that has happened under six years of Republican rule.

Democrats in Congress -- and President Bush -- largely support the Senate bill, which includes enforcement measures along with a guest-worker program and a way for most of the country's illegal immigrants to attain citizenship.

The House bill, closely identified with congressional Republicans, focuses on enforcement, including a 700-mile wall along the southern border and provisions that would make illegal presence in the United States a felony.

Until the hearings are complete, negotiations to reconcile the two bills will not begin, though House and Senate leaders are expected to confer throughout the summer. As they do, the House will hold hearings in California, Texas, and Arizona to examine border vulnerabilities; the use of English as the official US language; enforcement of current immigration law; and the impact of illegal immigration on local, state, and federal governments.

Specter will match those hearings at least once, today, ``to develop a broader, factual, evidentiary record on the need for the comprehensive bill, which is challenged by quite a number of House members," he said.

Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, chairman of the House International Relations subcommittee on international terrorism and nonproliferation, will chair the San Diego hearing and a hearing Friday in Laredo, Texas, which he said ``will focus on the security threat posed by undocumented illegal entry across our borders."

In San Diego, three witness panels will discuss the likelihood of terrorists crossing the border, border crossings by non-Mexicans, and improvements in border security since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But California Representative Brad Sherman, the ranking Democrat on Royce's subcommittee, dismissed the hearing as theater, contending that the subcommittee has no jurisdiction over any border or immigration issue. The panel deals with the State Department, he said, not Homeland Security.

Michael Mellano, a flower grower in Oceanside, Calif., said he is watching the immigration debate warily. He knows some of his workers are illegal immigrants -- he estimates 60 percent of all workers on US farms are illegal and figures the same percentage applies to his 250 employees.

``How can you hide it?" Mellano asks. ``Who are you trying to kid?"

Without them, Mellano's cut-flower business, founded 80 years ago by his immigrant father, probably wouldn't survive. Foreign competition, spurred by relaxed trade barriers and improved shipping methods, has already driven many US flower growers out of business.

But the latest threat is coming from Mellano's own country, in the form of the proposed tightening of immigration laws. The public hearing to be held in San Diego today by the House International Relations Committee is about 60 miles south of his fields.

Mellano, like the vast majority of his colleagues in the business, has declined to participate in a voluntary program to verify employees' Social Security numbers and check them against other federal databases. Bills passed by the House and Senate would require it.

Mellano knows that anything making it harder for him to find or keep workers could shut him down for good.

``If all of a sudden we didn't have 60 percent of our guys, we couldn't operate," he said.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.

(Correction: Because of an editing error, a photo caption in yesterday's Nation pages that accompanied a story on immigration laws used an incorrect title for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.)