Migrant has tough message to others

As my colleague Anna Gorman reported last week, the San Diego County city has all but declared war on illegal residents, with police checkpoints and an ordinance aimed at discouraging multiple families from sharing a home. An ordinance punishing landlords for renting to illegal immigrants was rescinded for legal reasons, but steadfast city officials are now considering a policy to restrict drivers from picking up day laborers.

I met the councilman at the Starbucks in his neighborhood. Abed had been to a council meeting and was still wearing a suit with a U.S. flag lapel pin. He began telling his story, but the coffee shop was closing, so Abed called his wife to say he was bringing a guest home. The father of two climbed into a Mercedes-Benz van with a HPST DAD license plate and led me to his house in a gated community.

On the walls of Abed's home office are photos of Lebanon, where he grew up in a middle-class family that sent him off to a proper college. Life's been good, Abed admitted, and he's made "a lot of money," first as an IBM software engineer and now as the owner of a gas station and several commercial properties in Escondido.

It was love that paved his way to U.S. citizenship, or at least sped the process. He met his wife, a Lebanese American, while in the U.S. on a visitor's visa in the late 1970s, and marriage made it possible for him to pursue what he repeatedly refers to as the American dream.

"I did it legally," he said, so there's no contradiction in his attitudes about illegal immigration.

Abed and his wife settled in Escondido about 20 years ago because he said it was a good place to raise a family. But the dream lost its luster when illegal immigrants flooded the town, he said, and dragged down the "quality of life." Schools struggled; gang activity increased, he said.

How did Abed know the new residents were illegal?

"It's obvious," he said.

Something's obvious, all right, Abed's critics say.

"It's about brown people," Mike Flores said.

The retired San Diego County assistant sheriff swears that city officials have misrepresented crime stats and exaggerated the number of illegal residents, blaming them for everything without considering their contribution to the local economy