Recent stories about dual citizenship -- especially Mexican dual citizenship -- are missing something very important -- la reconquista.

Much of the discussion seems to be using a report on dual citizenship written by Stanley A. Renshon and published by the Center for Immigration Studies.

I have been in the middle of the dual citizenship issue for seven years. Voice of Citizens Together ran a full-page ad in the Daily News in 1995, partly because of it.

In response to that ad, I exchanged letters in the Daily News with the Mexican consul general, Angel Pescador Osuna. I caught him in a lie. He said dual citizenship (nationality) had nothing to do with Proposition 187. In my letter, I quote a Christian Science Monitor report that said that, not only was dual citizenship linked to Proposition 187, Angel Pescador Osuna, the Mexican consul general in Los Angeles, was behind it.

Here you have a foreign government interfering in the internal politics of the United States (Zedillo making a deal with Davis to kill 187), lying about the link between 187 and dual citizenship, and encouraging their migrants to "vote in the interests of Mexico" by becoming dual citizens (Jorge Bustamante). Moreover, Osuna went on Los Angeles radio and said that in order for someone to naturalize as a Mexican citizen, you have to be a "Mexican."

The New York Times reported that Osuna told a meeting of the Southwestern School of law
"While I am saying this half serious and half joking, I think we are practicing la reconquista in California." (I provided reporter Verhovick with the tape recording of Osuna's remarks.)

In a letter addressed to me, Osuna says he was joking about la reconquista. "Actually I was referring to a spiritual reconquista." he says. He was not joking, and spirit is oftentimes good enough to get the job done.

So the man behind dual citizenship says Mexico is practicing la reconquista in California and Stanley A. Renson pays no attention to it?

Finally, Renson suggests that the Pope has no real influence over Catholics in the matter of dual citizenship. On October 8, 1998, the Vatican held a world conference on migration at which the Pope urged a world amnesty for illegal immigrants in the year 2000. That would make a lot of dual citizens.

That Renson would fail to mention these things and the link between dual citizenship and Mexico's historic "claim" on the American Southwest, is, quite frankly, stunning.

Glenn Spencer