San Diego (special) -- Delegates from 13 former Communist bloc nations learned in San Diego that like their countries, the United States also worries about how to maintain friendly relations with a neighboring nation despite such destructive forces as xenophobia, racism and ethnic rivalries.

The delegates, many of whom were described as emerging leaders in their countries, spent several days in San Diego last week under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee and the Friedrich Naumann Siftung (Foundation) of Germany.

To acquaint the delegates with the politics of this border area, San Diego City Councilman Juan Vargas, San Diego School Board President Ron Ottinger and San Diego Chamber of Commerce Vice President Ernest Grijalva participated in a panel led by San Diego Dialogue Chairman Chuck Nathanson. Panel members gave candid appraisals of our country's politics to the visiting Eastern Europeans.

Vargas told a good news-bad news story. The good news was that a committee of San Diegans and Tijuanans recently had agreed that the ambience of the border needs to be improved. 

Right now, "the place where people actually cross is ugly, not inviting, put-offish," Vargas said. "So what we decided in Tijuana and San Diego was that we should build a gateway, a project that would span the border on the Mexican side and the American side and create a beautiful plaza there, with beautiful buildings, lots of commerce, lots of economic opportunity."

The bad news, he said, was that the Mexican federal government in Mexico City announced itself as opposed to the project. "I think a lot of that has to do with the negative notion that they have toward the United States and particularly California because of Proposition 209 affecting illegal immigration."

He referred to the initiative measure which California voters approved, but which the courts have set aside pending judicial review, which would ban any state agency from providing services to a person who cannot prove his or her citizenship.

 "I think immigration will continue whether we like it or not," Vargas said. "It is natural--if you have a country with lots of opportunities and a country that does not have these opportunities--you are going to see immigration," he said. "Whether illegal or legal, depending on how you fashion it, it still is going to happen."

The job for San Diegans and Tijuanans, he said, will be to make people on both sides of the border understand "that we need to work as a region to survive economically and to do well in commerce."

Ottinger said two other ballot measures which voters approved over the last several years are shaping public education. "One of them which passed in the last June election was an anti-bilingual education initiative. This initiative basically said that we should teach all the children who come through our schools in California in the English immersion approach. 

"Many of our schools had taught our students, primarily our Hispanic students, through a transition bilingual approach where they start out becoming literate in their native language and then they transition to English over 3-4 years," Ottinger explained. "That changed dramatically with the ballot proposition this past year.

 "A second major initiative that affects many of our students and their ability to go to college was a proposition that passed a couple of years ago which basically outlaws preferences for students to be able to attend our colleges and universities based on race or ethnicity," Ottinger said. 

"That has caused dramatic drops in the number of African American and Hispanic students in particular who have gained admission to our University of California system.

"So the shaping of our public education policy in California is very much influenced by the politics at the state level," he said. "We have a governor (Pete Wilson) who has basically survived politically by criticizing Mexico, by creating policies that basically have catered mostly to the Anglo voters of the state--the more Conservative voters of the state--and it has made it very difficult for school districts like San Diego City Schools to work more collaboratively and cooperatively with our neighbors to the south."

Grijalva, the Chamber of Commerce vice president, said California politicians tend to focus on three issues--drugs, immigration and the trade deficit--when they think about Mexico. "They see Mexico simply as a country that allows drugs to flow freely through it from Columbia and South America, and some of it originating in Mexico and coming to the United States. And (in the view of the politicians) it is Mexico's fault that we have a drug problem in the United States.

"In Mexico, they say, 'America you claim that you have a drug war. When was the last time that you had a high ranking police officer, or dozens of police officers, generals in the military, assassinated by drug dealers? You don't have a drug war; we have a drug war in Mexico. '" 

Grijalva said even while complaining about drugs, the United States winks or looks the other way when celebrities and athletes are found to be drug users. "We don't say that a person should not be allowed to play American basketball," he told the delegates. "We just ignore it, and we point the finger at Mexico."

Similarly, Grijalva said the United States is hypocritical on the issue of immigration. Most illegal immigrants don't come over the Mexican border; they enter the United States legally then overstay their visas, he said. Further, the reason both kinds of illegal immigrants stay in the United States, "is because they can -- they can because we are giving them jobs," Grijalva said.

 Finally, he added, Americans are wrong about a negative balance of trade with foreign countries being a threat to this country's economy.

 He said "when there is high employment and low unemployment, you will find the United States has a trade deficit. When the U.S. economy is down -with high unemployment--those are the times of trade surpluses. Unemployment isn't caused by a trade deficit; it is the other way around. 

"The trade deficit/ surplus is a trailing indicator of the economy. When we have a strong economy, people have more money and instead of buying just the local cheese maybe they buy the French cheese because they can afford it."

Gary Rotto, regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said his organization was a sponsor of the seminar--held at the Holiday Inn at Mission Valley--because "one of the central elements of the AJC's mission is to promote democratic values and pluralism around the world." 

"That is the best defense against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry," he said.

The non-profit Naumann Foundation--which is the educational arm of the German liberal party-- has partnered for the last seven years with the AJC to expose western thinking to the emerging leaders of Eastern European and central Asian democracies, said Rabbi Andrew Baker, AJC's director of European affairs.

Rainer Willert, head of the Naumann Foundation's Baltic project, said Friedrich Naumann was a German politician who died before World War I who emphasized the need to educate people to participate in the democratic process. The Foundation, created in 1958, took his name to honor his memory.

Delegates came from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia.