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Culture clash over immigration hits suburbs: Weymouth man campaigning to get illegals out of country

By MARK FONTECCHIO
The Patriot Ledger

WEYMOUTH - One recent morning at daybreak, a white pickup truck left the Maple Gardens apartments and a passenger snapped a photo of Robert Casimiro.

Casimiro, 67, of Weymouth, stood across the street with a sign that read, ‘‘Illegais Vão Partem!’’

Translation: ‘‘Illegals go leave!’’

Casimiro’s colleague, Ruth Holmes, took a retaliatory photo with her digital camera, and so the two groups captured each other.

On one side were members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a national group that looks for illegal immigrants to report to authorities.

‘‘My motivation is anger,’’ Casimiro said. ‘‘Every day you hear something about illegal immigration. Rather than stew about it, I turn it into action.’’

The other group was the Brazilian immigrants on their way to landscaping, construction and service jobs.

‘‘We do the jobs, the type of jobs they can do but they don’t want to do,’’ said Danielo Vilarino, who lives at Maple Gardens, which is at the corner of Middle and Maple streets in East Weymouth, and said he came here 13 years ago from Brazil on a work visa.

Weymouth’s legal foreign-born population increased almost 19 percent in the 1990s. Brazil was the third-most common country of origin in 2000 in Weymouth, behind only Canada and Ireland.

Casimiro has held the sign at Maple Gardens about a half-dozen times.

He picked this complex because he claims to have a contact on the inside, a resident living at Maple Gardens who knows the demographics.

Although he didn’t know for sure which residents were illegals, Casimiro thought he could make a good guess by seeing if they were Brazilian and driving a beat-up car.

For example, Holmes didn’t snap photos when one Caucasian woman in an older car - ‘‘I am not an illegal,’’ she said smiling - drove out. She also didn’t take a photo when two dark-skinned men drove out in a newer sports utility vehicle.

When dark-skinned men in older cars exited, Holmes pointed and shot.

Casimiro also noted the many apartment balconies with satellite dishes.

‘‘You know what those are for?’’ he said. ‘‘To pick up the Brazilian television stations.’’

‘‘I don’t think it’s fair,’’ Vilarino said. ‘‘The U.S. knows people come from other countries. I’ve been here 13 years. I think that is something the government should deal with, not him.’’

Vilarino, who works at developer J.F. Price Company in Weymouth, said other residents have gotten angry, but he told them to ‘‘be cool and not worry about it.’’

Francisco Olivera, who owns a Brazilian convenience store on Washington Street, came here on a work visa in 1985 and worked in restaurants, washing dishes and eventually cooking. He learned English and opened Brazuca five years ago.

His store is filled with Brazilian music CDs and magazines.

‘‘People come to this country to work,’’ he said. ‘‘All the Brazilians do when they come here is work hard, you know? Two or three jobs.’’

With the growth of Brazilian immigrants have come adjustments.

Mayor David Madden and Health Director Richard Marino are monitoring overcrowding in apartments, but they said it isn’t too serious an issue yet.

Schools are accommodating more children of immigrants, many of whom speak little or no English.

Police Chief James Thomas said his department deals with many immigrants who don’t have valid driver’s licenses. When police pull them over for minor motor vehicle infractions, officers can’t just issue a warning or citation and send them on their way.

Police have to sometimes arrest them and arrange for a court date, which can bog down the system.

‘‘Our research has shown that there are identifiable fiscal costs associated with illegal immigration for state, local and federal governments,’’ said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. The center favors limiting overall immigration and stemming illegal immigration.

Vaughan believes the country should have stricter border control laws and better monitoring of businesses to make sure they’re not hiring illegals.

‘‘No one is saying we should be rounding people up into a Paddy wagon and driving them across the border,’’ she said. ‘‘There are other ways to do this.’’

Thomas said he respects Casimiro’s right to protest, but it isn’t something he supports.

‘‘I myself am second- or third-generation (Irish),’’ he said, ‘‘and I’m not exactly sure how my ancestors got here. You shouldn’t be throwing stones until you’re positive that your own history is clear.’’

It’s a cause Casimiro adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. He began to research illegal immigration. The following year, he started taking classes in Portuguese because he knew there were a lot of Portuguese-speaking Brazilian immigrants in Weymouth.

He hasn’t yet protested locally against other illegal immigrants because he said the Brazilians are ‘‘the ones that have the biggest presence.’’

Casimiro, a retired design engineer, is co-founder and executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform and is part of the Minuteman group.

In October, Casimiro and others patrolled the U.S. border in Vermont. In April, he traveled to Arizona to do the same, a trip made evident by the T-shirt he wore while holding the sign at Maple Gardens.

‘‘Minuteman Project, April 2005,’’ the front of the shirt says, and on the back: ‘‘Undocumented Border Patrol Agent.’’

The state added 27,676 new foreign-born residents in 2004, the seventh highest total in the country and highest in New England.

According to a report in June by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, the state immigration population grew by 35 percent in the 1990s, reaching 773,000 in 2000.

Those numbers, however, are for legal immigrants.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group in Washington, estimates there to be almost 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, with from 200,000 to 250,000 of them in Massachusetts.

Weymouth does have its share of illegals. In October, a Brazilian in Weymouth was indicted in U.S. District Court for passing stolen or forged Social Security cards and resident alien cards, and could face deportation. Also, last December federal agents charged four Brazilians at the Maple Gardens complex with violating deportation orders.

‘‘I’m sure in their minds everything is copasetic,’’ Casimiro said. ‘‘They’re just following a tradition that is accepted.’’

As for Casimiro’s ancestors, they weren’t Pilgrims, but they did land in Plymouth. His paternal grandparents came from the Azores, a group of Atlantic islands owned by Portugal, in 1906, and his father was born in Plymouth in 1912. Ancestry on his mother’s side is French Canadian.

He said they came here legally and immigrants today should do the same.

Vilarino said it shouldn’t be the concern of people like Casimiro.

‘‘If you violate the law in the U.S., yes, they should come get you and send you to Brazil or wherever your home is,’’ he said. ‘‘But if you’re just here working and respecting the law, it shouldn’t be a problem.’’

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