One of these Cities is not like the others.

A couple of years back the city of Escondido which sets about 20 minutes north of San Diego passed and later dropped a city ordinance that would’ve punished land lords for renting to illegal immigrants. Legal challenges and mounting lawyers’ fees made it untenable. We had serious reservations ourselves about the legality and practicality of forcing landlords to be de-facto immigration authorities.

Unlike San Diego, however, which is a virtual sanctuary city, the police of Escondido do indeed play an active role in immigration enforcement conducting 2 “criminal alien” sweeps this year so far which has netted 31 illegal aliens with criminal records. The illegals are turned over to the feds for deportation.

The city is also combating the increasing ill-effects of hard-working, family-oriented illegal immigrants in the community by taking it on as a quality-of-life or “public nuisance” issue. Escondido has established driver’s license checkpoints because guess which segment of the population does not have driver’s licenses? In responding to critics who complain that these checkpoints target illegals, Police Chief Jim Maher said: "That is absolutely not true. Our checkpoints are for one reason and one reason only: traffic safety.” No way of telling how firm in cheek his tongue was planted. Aside from our gentle ribbing of the Chief though, he is absolutely right: Maher said those checkpoints helped officers find at least 290 unlicensed drivers and helped reduce the city's number of hit-and-run crashes. It is assumed that illegals are more likely to hit-and-run as they are not wont to stick around for questioning by the police.

Obviously, not everyone is happy about the city’s efforts and equally as obvious are the reasons for the city’s efforts according to the same people.

"It's not about immigration," said resident Bill Flores, spokesman for a community organization called El Grupo. "It is about brown people. . . . They are looking for a way to reduce the number of brown people."

And this from .edu-guy Wayne Cornelius who directs something called the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. "It's a pipe dream for nativists, because immigrants living in Escondido have invested too much getting there and starting a new life in the U.S. to be scared out of town by a bunch of new code enforcement practices,"

Again, with the “nativists”. And to clarify, the “immigrants” he is referring to are the same people we here refer to as “illegal immigrants”.

We posted this to show that a decent-sized community (pop. 140,000) that has experienced a rapid influx of illegal immigrants can do something about illegal immigration if it has the will to do so. We applaud the city of Escondido for having the courage and innovation to do what is necessary to address this increasing problem.

Full story here.