(Name-mce) ListServ City Vents Anger at Illegal Immigrants

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From: SinghPlant at aol.com [mailto:SinghPlant at aol.com] 
Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 1:53 AM
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Subject: City Vents Anger at Illegal Immigrants

 

Los Angeles Times
July 14, 2006

City Vents Anger at Illegal Immigrants
Hazleton, Pa., creates one of the strictest laws in the U.S., polarizing its
whites and Latinos.
By Ellen Barry

HAZLETON, Pa. - Standing outside City Hall in the gathering dark, Norman
Tarantino felt, for once, that he was lucky to live in Hazleton. Most of his
friends had moved away, over the years, convinced that the old coal city's
best days were behind it. But as of Thursday night, Tarantino said, Hazleton
once again has something to be proud of: It is the most hostile environment
in America for illegal immigrants.

Not 20 feet away stood Daniel Jorge, a Dominican immigrant who moved his
family to Hazleton last year after 25 years in New York City. Jorge, a real
estate agent, was wondering how he would break the news to his wife, who had
been enchanted with the small-town friendliness she found in Hazleton, a
small city in the hills 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

"I'm sad. I loved it here," Jorge said. He gazed at the police officers
lined up in the middle of Church Street, separating crowds of white and
Latino demonstrators. "I never in my wildest dreams thought I would see this
here in this city."

By a vote of 4 to 1, Hazleton's City Council on Thursday approved the
Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which imposes severe penalties on landlords
who rent space to illegal immigrants, suspends the licenses of businesses
that employ them, and declares English the city's official language. The
ordinance has brought celebrity status to Hazleton's mayor, Louis J.
Barletta, and has prompted a ripple of proposed new laws in neighboring
communities.

In Florida, the communities of Avon Park and Palm Bay will vote on similar
laws, as will the city of Escondido in California. The law has also
attracted a legal challenge from the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and
Education Fund, which has promised to sue the city on the grounds that the
ordinance unconstitutionally infringes on federal jurisdiction over
immigration.

Local Latino activists warn that the vote could mark an ugly turning point
in Hazleton, whose Latino minority has grown over the last decade to
constitute about 30% of the population. "What I worry is that this will be a
pretext for people to allow their racist feelings to show," said David
Vaida, an attorney in Allentown, Pa., who signed the legal challenge to
Barletta. "It will allow people to take that deep, dark side of them and let
it come out. It will pit neighbor against neighbor, and then the city will
be worse off."

But the mood in City Hall was upbeat Thursday; white residents exploded into
applause when Barletta strode into the chamber, wearing a bulletproof vest
under his suit jacket. They yelled "Yes!" when a local Latino leader asked
whether they would deport U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, and
cheered again when City Council President Joe Yannuzzi compared illegal
immigrants to burglars.

"If I come home and find someone in my home, is he just an unwanted guest?
Must I keep him there and take care of him?" he asked. "I say he has
committed a crime, and should be treated like a criminal."

Under the new law - which is a modified version of a ballot initiative
proposed in San Bernardino - anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city
will have to apply to the city for a residency license, and submit to an
investigation of citizenship status. Landlords found renting to people
without licenses will be fined $1,000 a day. Business owners found hiring,
renting property to, or providing goods and services to illegal immigrants
will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10
years on a second.

Barletta, whose grandfather hauled coal with a horse and wagon, said
Thursday's vote was the culmination of years of complaints from
constituents. "There's no place for me to hide in a small city," he said. "I
get it in the grocery store, I get it at the lunch counter, when I get my
morning coffee, when I'm pumping gas.

"People are begging me, because we are losing the one asset that this city
has to offer - our quality of life."

Hazleton was a shrinking and mostly white city when Latinos began to arrive.
Older residents reminisce about the miners who emerged every evening from
the "40 shaft" and streamed down Diamond Avenue past the Italian bars -
Andruzzi's, Fidule's, Yannuzzi's - while the smell of meatballs hung in the
air. People lived in tight ethnic clusters - Donegal Hill for the Irish
immigrants and Nanny Goat Hill for the Italians.

The city reached its peak population in the 1940s, at 38,000, then began a
steady decline as mining and textiles work disappeared. The 2000 census
showed a population of 23,000, with a median age of 40.

Immigrants, flowing in from New York and New Jersey, changed that
trajectory, bringing the city's population back up to between 30,000 and
31,000. The influx brought economic growth. Donna Palermo, president of the
Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce, said Latino immigrants built 50 to 60
new businesses in the city's downtown and helped boost the value of some
homes to $90,000 from $40,000. In an October 2005 interview with the
Northeast Pennsylvania Business Journal, Barletta said the population boom
had brought the city's economy to its healthiest state in decades.

But tension surrounded the newcomers from the beginning. Elderly residents
on fixed incomes struggled to catch up with the higher cost of living; a
school built for 1,800 students tried to absorb 2,500. When John Quigley, a
Democratic mayor, lost his reelection bid in 1995, it was amid rumors that
he had rented billboards in New York to recruit Latinos to move to town in
exchange for government payments of $1,000 a head. Quigley called that rumor
"an urban legend . conjured up by some gutter politicians," but many in
Hazleton believe it.

The most persistent complaints center on crime, which most residents
interviewed agreed had become a more serious problem in the last year. "They
try to recruit these children into gangs; we're having graffiti sprayed on
houses now," Barletta said. "This is not the same population I was defending
when they moved in here."

Barletta, 50, said he could put his finger on the exact moment when his
perspective on immigration changed. On May 10, a 29-year-old man, Derek
Kichline, was fatally shot outside his home on East Chestnut Street,
culminating in the arrest of four illegal Dominican immigrants; that same
day, a 14-year-old fired a gun at the Pine Street playground.

Barletta said he stayed awake that whole night, thinking about the city he
grew up in, where "a playground was sacred ground." "I laid there and stared
at the ceiling. I literally prayed. I realized I had to do something drastic
to save the city. If I just let this go and sat back, this wouldn't be a
city that anyone wanted to live in," he said. "I felt almost hopeless at
that point, watching my city being destroyed right before my eyes."

Latino advocates say Barletta has never produced evidence that illegal
immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes. Agapito
Lopez, an eye surgeon originally from Puerto Rico, said the two crimes most
often cited by Barletta - fatal shootings on October 20, 2005, and May 10 -
involved a total of eight illegal immigrants, and should not be applied to a
population of 11,000.

"Crime has been here for a long time. It has been white crime, and now we're
starting to see brown crime," Lopez said.

Statistics compiled by the Pennsylvania State Police Uniform Crime Reporting
System show a reduction in the number of total arrests in Hazleton over the
last five years, from 1,458 in 2000 to 1,263 in 2005. Whereas the number of
thefts and drugrelated crimes has risen from a low point of 80 in 2001 to
127 in 2005, the total number of reported rapes, robberies, homicides and
assaults has decreased since 2000.

Barletta acknowledges that he can't point to data proving that illegal
immigrants are responsible for most of the city's crimes, or even establish
how many illegal immigrants live here. But he said that any time police
spent responding to calls involving illegal immigrants was a waste of city
money, and "we are arresting illegal individuals much more often than we
ever have."

Over the last month - since Barletta introduced his proposed ordinance -
relationships in Hazleton have been remapped, Latinos say. White people feel
free to speak openly about their annoyance with immigrants, said Jessica
Cruz, who waits tables in two local diners.

Cruz sputtered with anger recalling a recent day when she greeted three
friends in Spanish, and a customer looked up from his seat, pointed his
finger at her and told her to speak English. Another customer looked into
the kitchen and said he couldn't wait until Immigration came to take away
the Mexicans.

"Every day, he is eating, and the Mexicans are cooking," said Cruz, 26. It's
the mayor, she said, who "gives support for talking like that."

Kim Resovszky, 35, feels edgy too, but for different reasons. A family that
looks Latino just moved into a house across the street - mother, father, two
kids. They seem nice, she said. But who knows what to expect from the rest
of the summer? "It's scary. Are you going to see more gunfire?" she asked.
"There have been drive-by shootings, for example."

Resovszky said she supported the ordinance, as did virtually all of the
city's white residents. "The only ones who are against it are the
Hispanics," she said, "and that's because it's against them."



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