As Illegal Workers Hit Suburbs, Politicians Scramble to Respond By PAUL VITELLO New York Times October 06, 2005 Suburban politicians once had to master a small but demanding catalog of local issues. Taxes, garbage, crime and schools were always the big ones. But recently a volatile new issue has been showing up on the local meet-the-candidate circuit, and it is pretty much the opposite of the familiar and the local. It is illegal immigration. Though municipal officials have no statutory control over immigration, a rising population of illegal immigrants in suburban communities - from Farmingville, N.Y., to Danbury, Conn.; Herndon, Va., to suburban South Salt Lake City, <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio ns/utah/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Utah - has prompted some of those officials to attack the problem with the limited means at their disposal. In the process, they have won and lost political support; grappled with issues beyond their usual bailiwicks; and, whether intentionally or not, begun incorporating immigration into the calculus of local politics. Steve Levy, the Democratic county executive in Suffolk County, sent police officers to help shut down single-family houses crammed with 40 and 50 immigrant workers in Farmingville, a hamlet that has become synonymous with the conflict between day laborers and suburban homeowners. His move rankled many Hispanics, some of whom have labeled him as racist, but his popularity in mostly white Suffolk County has risen. Mark Boughton, the moderate Republican mayor of Danbury, Conn., set off a fiery debate this year by calling for state troopers to enforce immigration laws, and now finds himself labeled as anti-immigrant and embraced by some conservative Web sites. Michael O'Reilly, the mayor of Herndon, a Washington suburb, who took a different tack - proposing to open a hiring hall for day laborers in his town - drew such a flood of angry calls from immigration opponents (stoked by a national radio talk show host in Sacramento) that the City Hall switchboard was shut down for four days. "A little community like Herndon, with a part-time mayor - we never signed on to tackle national issues like immigration," Mr. O'Reilly said. "This is way above our pay grade." Some see it as an absence of coherent federal immigration policy in addressing the reality of an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants now living in the <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/un itedstates/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> United States - the majority of them in its suburbs. In that view, something, anything, seems destined to fill the gap. "Immigration has become a local issue because, at least from their perspective, local governments feel there is no federal policy in place," said Audrey Singer, immigration fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. "Local officials don't want to be responsible, but they have to respond to local concerns." The scramble for solutions reflects a major shift in immigration patterns during the last decade, she said. Since 2000, the number of immigrants living in suburbs, legally or illegally, has surpassed the number in cities, 52 percent to 48 percent. Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, another nonpartisan group, said that as the new gateways of immigration, American suburbs "are communities that are having to address a rather sudden and significant influx of newcomers, and they have no experience with this." The illegal newcomers have attracted notice in the high-cost suburbs primarily by overcrowding single-family houses, which neighbors then complain become eyesores, and by assembling for day laborers' jobs in parking lots and on street corners. The local response has been somewhat like the suburbs themselves: decentralized; somewhat haphazard; self-contained; aimed at enforcing a set of "quality of life" standards that are defined differently from place to place. In Silver Spring, Md., local officials support a hiring hall for immigrant workers. In neighboring Langley Park, also home to many immigrants, they do not. Jupiter, Fla., and Ford County, Kan., are known to welcome new immigrant workers. Bowling Green, Ky., and Freehold, N.J., are not. Some towns have cracked down on immigrants obliquely, by enforcing building codes against overcrowding. Others have instituted new codes limiting the square footage of driveway pavement, for example, or forbidding the use of rooms other than bedrooms for sleeping. "How is it going? It's going not well," said Mr. Boughton, the Danbury mayor, whose request for immigration-enforcement powers was denied, but who sends inspectors to count the cars parked in front of the houses in immigrant neighborhoods and issue various summonses. "The federal government continues to avoid this issue, and we can only do so much." The reasons for the perceived paralysis of national immigration policy are many, experts say: post-9/11 antiterror politics; deep conflicts within the ranks of both the Republican and Democratic Parties; and, not least, ambivalence among the general public, which opposes illegal immigration in principle but generally benefits from the low-cost services of those illegal workers - who mow lawns, clear tables, pack meat and dig holes for swimming pools. And immigration-policy experts cite bad luck. Immigration reform was relatively high on President Bush's agenda before Sept. 11. It was overshadowed for the next three and a half years, then seemed to be re-emerging during the first year of Mr. Bush's second term. Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief strategist, was designated earlier this year to coordinate efforts to secure Congressional support of a "guest worker" bill that would ostensibly regulate the flow of otherwise illegal immigrants. "But then comes Katrina," said Ms. Meyers of the Migration Policy Institute. "Rove is now busy with that, I understand." Local and state politics seems to be filling the gap. During a nasty Republican primary last month in the Suffolk County town of Brookhaven, which includes Farmingville, the two candidates for town supervisor vied to be known as the more hard-line anti-illegal-immigrant candidate. One accepted the endorsement of a local organization that has labeled illegal immigrants terrorists. The other mailed a campaign flier that claimed "illegal immigrants are taking over our community" and "eroding our quality of life." The slightly less strident candidate, Edward Hennessey, won that race, but the campaign raised the fear that immigrants will become scapegoats. "It's scary how readily some will attack immigrants, demonizing them, just to get votes," said Nadia Marin-Molina, director of the Workplace Project, a Long Island-based immigrant-advocate group. As a campaign issue, immigration is "an emotional issue," said Mark DiCamillo, a <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio ns/california/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> California pollster. "When politicians are looking for issues that can trump the top issues - education, the economy and the budget - it's usually in the social issue area, like gay marriage, abortion or illegal immigration." It is a highly malleable one, too, he said. At the start of the 1994 California race for governor, for example, illegal immigration ranked low on the list of voters' concerns, Mr. DiCamillo said. But after the Republican candidate, Pete Wilson, tied his campaign closely to his support of Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that would have denied public services to illegal immigrants, Mr. DiCamillo said, "exit polls showed that the No. 1 reason people voted for Wilson was that he would be tough on illegal immigration." Recently, the former <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio ns/virginia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Virginia attorney general, Jerry W. Kilgore, a Republican, injected illegal immigration as an issue into his tightly contested race for governor against Timothy M. Kaine, the Democratic lieutenant governor. Several days after the switchboard at the Herndon Town Hall was flooded by opponents of the proposed hiring hall, Mr. Kilgore announced his opposition to the site, asking: "Will we reward illegal behavior with hard-earned dollars from law-abiding citizens? I say the answer to this question should be an easy one. No." Mr. Kilgore subsequently made controversial remarks linking illegal immigrants, the MS-13 street gang and Al Qaeda. In <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio ns/tennessee/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Tennessee, State Representative Marsha Blackburn of Brentwood, a Nashville suburb, won election to the House of Representatives in 2002 by focusing heavily on the rising cost of social services in her state and her contention that illegal immigrants were the cause. "The debate itself will be contentious and convoluted, and in the end, what people are debating is much more about how they feel than about what they can actually do about illegal immigration," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that generally supports a more-restrictive immigration policy. "What you have as a result is incoherence." In Herndon, meanwhile, since town officials approved the construction of a hiring hall, supervisors in neighboring Loudoun County, Va., have notified them that the proposed site straddles Loudoun's border, and therefore requires its approval and that until further notice the short answer is to be no. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. 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