Thread: Hazleton gets a jolt it didn't want

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/15544925.htm

Posted on Mon, Sep. 18, 2006

Hazleton gets a jolt it didn't want

By Gaiutra Bahadur
Inquirer Staff Writer

HAZLETON, Pa. - Heaps of slag dot the outskirts of Hazleton. The black hills, now merely obstacles for kids on ATV bikes to jump, date from the city's heyday as a coal-mining hub.

They are reminders of a vanished past in a place lately given to evoking the way things used to be. Before Latinos started to arrive by the thousands five years ago. And before the small city in the Poconos foothills passed a first-of-its-kind ordinance this summer intended to scatter illegal immigrants.

Mayor Louis Barletta says it was a crime - a May 10 killing by two men from the Dominican Republic - that led him to introduce the city's Illegal Immigration Relief Act. A slightly revised version, passed last week, bans hiring or housing illegal immigrants. A related ordinance declares English the city's official language.

The law, which has provoked a court challenge by groups that say it trespasses on federal turf, put Hazleton on the map.

Towns across the country copied it. They could not depend on higher authorities to end problems posed by illegal residents, they said, an accusation bolstered last week when Congress passed on tackling the issue before Election Day.

Carpetbaggers - advocates on both sides of the illegal immigration debate, the media, even Comedy Central's Daily Show - descended.

Residents whose roots go generations deep are wary of their uninvited guests. But many are more troubled by another set of outsiders. They say newcomers, including Dominican immigrants who relocated from New York after Sept. 11, have altered the sleepy remains of the former boomtown beyond recognition.

In a way, the battle Hazleton is waging is as much about nostalgia as it is about the rising crime that officials blame on illegal immigrants.

"Ten years ago, if there was a stabbing, that would have been the headline till the end of the year," said Ed Makuta, the grandson of a coal miner, born and bred in Hazleton. "Not nowadays."

Makuta moved out a decade ago, driven away by fumes from the rowhouses next door. Police told him his Latino neighbors were holding paint-sniffing parties. The father of three said bullets fly and drugs are traded on the playground where he recalls spending a carefree childhood.

Makuta, 35, grew up near St. Gabriel's Church on Wyoming Street. The area, once known as Donegal Hill after the county in Ireland where many of its residents were born, has changed. The church pews are filled at noon on Sundays during a lively Spanish-language Mass, and shops advertise the latest CD by Mexican rockers Maná, the crispy Latin American pork dish called chicharrones, and other products alien to Makuta.

"Half our stores have Spanish signs," he said. "We're not welcome there. I don't even have a clue what they're selling."

Hazleton's population, boosted by immigrant mine and mill workers from Italy and Eastern Europe, peaked at 38,009 in 1940. By 2000, the U.S. Census counted 23,257 residents, 95 percent of them Anglo. The government agency projected more population loss by 2005.

Instead, Hazleton's population has soared to 31,000. City officials estimate that as many as 30 percent are Latinos.

One of them, Jose Luis Lechuga, also misses the way things used to be. The Mexican businessman rues the change in Hazleton since it became a front line in the country's immigration war.

Wyoming Street used to bustle with commerce. Immigrant entrepreneurs had revitalized the faded area, said Lechuga, a legal resident who served more than 100 customers a day at his Mexican eatery.

"This street has become quiet," said barber Mike Matteo, a Wyoming Street homeowner for 14 years. "You could walk from Diamond to Broad Street, and you don't see a single soul."

The Latino butcher down the street has closed shop. Lechuga had to shut down his restaurant. His regulars - greenhouse hands, fruit pickers, and employees at a nearby meat-processing plant - stopped going. They were intimidated by the police parked outside, said Lechuga, who never pried into his customers' immigration status.

A parishioner at St. Gabriel's who mows lawns and renovates houses said dozens of his fellow illegal immigrants had fled the city. Some for Florida. A few back to Mexico.

The 39-year-old parishioner, who declined to give his name, stays on because he needs $1,500 for his mother in Hidalgo, Mexico, to have cataract surgery. With so many laborers gone, he has more work now.

"But it's hard and heavy," he said. "Not everyone wants to do it."

Makuta, a store manager whose father makes bread bags in a factory, knows a few people who might want to do it. Just not at the wages offered to the inheritors of Hazleton's blue-collar legacy.

"You go to any temp agency right now and you get nothing," he said. "In the past, that's where you went, and it paid well... . Not since the immigrants came in."

Makuta disagrees with opponents of the ordinance, such as Catholic Social Services worker Anna Arias, who describe the city's pre-Latino downtown as a "ghost town."

"We don't need this new downtown," he said. "We don't need it, and we don't want it."

It has come with "big-city crimes," he said.

Police describe the Wyoming Street corridor as an artery for drug and gang activity. They recently broke up a drug ring operated out of New York's Finest, a clothing shop run by an illegal Dominican immigrant, Police Chief Robert Ferdinand said.

"For a town our size that previously had very little of that type of activity, it's very frequent," Ferdinand said. "There are an alarming number of [illegal] aliens involved in criminal activity."

"That's certainly not to say all undocumented persons in the city are involved in violent or criminal activity," he said. "There are some very decent, hardworking people in illegal status."

Thefts and drug-related crime rose from 80 incidents in 2001 to 127 in 2005, according to statistics from the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System. Yet rapes, robberies, homicides and assaults have decreased. Even with the population growth, arrests in Hazleton dropped to 1,263 in 2005 from 1,458 in 2000.

Ferdinand says more than a dozen drug-related or violent crimes were committed by illegal immigrants in recent years, but he could not provide an exact number. Nor is it clear how many of the city's Latinos are in the country illegally.

Lechuga, a Hazleton resident since 1991, acknowledges that Wyoming Street is rowdier since the influx from the New York area, and it troubles him that teenagers now have weapons.

But, he said, "in other cities, the same happens when there's an increase in population. Good people come, and bad people come, too."

The street "has gotten a rap for being unsafe," said Matteo, the Anglo barber who lives there. "We've never felt unsafe."

Latino business owners on Wyoming Street said the ordinance had exposed a xenophobia and hostility they never before experienced in the city.

"We feel everything change," said Oscar Rubio, a documented resident from Colombia who owns a gift shop on Wyoming Street. Non-Latinos "look at us, and they think we're illegal. Never before this happens, that they say, 'Go home. Go back to your country.' "

"You see contempt in people's faces," Arias said. "You can see the rejection."

The ordinance - and a similar one in Riverside, N.J., another faded mill town newly transformed by immigrants - has attracted the attention of racists from outside the city.

Organizers of a Labor Day weekend vigil to protest Hazleton's immigration law were advised by the FBI not to march through town, because it might provoke the Ku Klux Klan, said Jose Molina of the Pennsylvania Statewide Latino Coalition. As it turned out, the Klan was busy holding a convention in Gettysburg that day.

Police say white supremacists did visit Riverside, waving Confederate flags at a rally last month and attending council meetings to distribute CD-ROMs with Web links about a so-called Aztec al-Qaeda, Latino radicals bent on taking over the United States.

Despite the interest of hate groups, the Rev. John Ruth says, local support for the Hazleton ordinance is more about the challenge of coping with such a rapid and dramatic break with the past.

"People get concerned when they see the face of their neighborhood change," said Ruth, who ministers to Spanish speakers at St. Gabriel's Church and who opposes the local immigration law.

"Like any American in this day and age, what we're all missing is a simpler time where we could walk without fear," Ruth said. "Our natural fear is being directed at the stranger among us."


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Contact staff writer Gaiutra Bahadur at 215-854-2601 or bahadug@phillynews.com.

Looks like it's working in Hazleton!!

I does look like it is working - hopefully it will.

Have there been any lawsuits.