EDITORIAL UNDERGROUND BUS LINE LOCAL GOVERNMENT TURNS A BLIND EYE TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.

OF course Golden State Transportation, which has been charged with the largest human smuggling racket of its kind, was based in Los Angeles.

Where else?

Where else but in L.A. could hundreds of immigrants be bused around like some kind of commodity every day for five years without being noticed?

Where else but in L.A. would civil authorities - the police, the tax collectors, the regulators - never spot a sham of a corporation, a faux travel company that's actually a West Coast immigrant distribution network?

Los Angeles is the perfect place to stage this sort of an operation, thanks to its combination of unresponsive government agencies and thoughtless immigration policies.

For more than 20 years, the philosophy of L.A. government has been to turn a blind eye to the problems of illegal immigration. After looking past obvious law-breaking and exploitation for so long, it's no wonder that local officials would miss such a shameful enterprise operating on their watch.

This is the city that since 1979 has observed Special Order 40, which bars the police from cooperating with federal immigration officials. The intention of the special order was to eliminate any fear that illegal aliens might have had about calling police when they needed help, but the effect has been to make L.A. an asylum for illegal aliens, a place where all could come to escape the law.

The result is that L.A. has the largest concentration of illegal aliens in all of the U.S., and so it faces a disproportionate share of the burden.

Our roads are jammed with unlicensed motorists driving uninsured cars. Our public health, education and other services are overburdened with needy people whose needs are so great we can't afford to meet them. Our poorest workers find their chances at employment compromised by competition willing to work below the minimum wage. Sweatshops and other illegal working conditions are tolerated as if we lived in a Third World country.

But rather than creating some sort of haven for illegal aliens, the city's reckless approach has made L.A. a place where they are all the more at risk for exploitation and abuse.

For years, City Hall has thought it was doing poor Angelenos, its illegal aliens among them, a favor by not cracking down on housing laws. That way, everyone would have a place to live in Los Angeles - even if it's a garage firetrap without plumbing or a vermin-infested tenement shared by 20 men sleeping in shifts.

Under Special Order 40, law enforcement has been less able to monitor criminal schemes that target illegal aliens, whether it's sweatshops or human-smuggling outfits like Golden State Transportation.

No wonder the underground bus line went unnoticed or unreported for so long. In L.A., dozens of illegal aliens being herded aboard a bus in the middle of the night draws no attention.

Until City Hall gets serious about L.A.'s unique immigration problems, those problems will continue to compound - some noticed, many more not - to the detriment of everyone.