Immigration a dividing line in Virginia politics
By DALE EISMAN, The Virginian-Pilot
© November 10, 2007
Last updated: 12:07 AM


PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY

The polls had been closed and his re-election secured for hours late Tuesday, but Corey Stewart, the chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, was still in fighting form.

"We are never going to stop defending our communities from the effects of illegal immigration. Ever!" Stewart yelled into a microphone at the local Republican Party's post-election reception. "This community strongly supported this crackdown on illegal immigration and tonight laid to rest any other idea."

Democrats this week celebrated a resurgence in the Virginia General Assembly and claimed victories for moderation in the emotionally charged debate over illegal immigration.

But here, in a changing suburb where 1 in 5 residents has Hispanic roots, there are ample signs that the issue remains an emerging force in Virginia politics.

Carlos Labiosa, a retired soldier who is vice chairman of Prince William's Human Rights Commission, said he had hoped that after a wrenching summer and fall of nationally publicized struggles over the county's planned ordinance to crack down on illegal immigrants, voters "would have said, 'OK, enough is enough.' "

Instead, Stewart and six other supervisors who voted for the law were resoundingly re-elected. The board's only open seat was claimed by a Democrat who expressed reservations about the initiative but also told one interviewer that "people want something done about illegal immigration, and rightly so when it impacts their neighborhoods or their safety."

The debate in Prince William, Virginia's third-most-populous locality, has been the focus of national attention. The ground-breaking ordinance adds immigration enforcement to the duties of local police and would deny a range of public services to illegal immigrants. A challenge to the law already is under way in federal court in Alexandria.

But crackdowns on illegal immigrants also are being studied in nearby Loudoun and Stafford counties and in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond, among others.

Immigration issues have particular resonance in the Washington suburbs, where the building boom that began in the late 1990s attracted thousands of carpenters, plumbers, painters and other tradesmen, many of them Latino.

Immigrant populations in parts of the region have more than doubled since 2000, according to Census Bureau estimates. The influx has added to the political volatility of a region whose 1.4 million registered voters have helped tip three of the last four statewide elections to the Democrats.





No one knows how many of the new residents - Latino and otherwise - are illegal.

But whatever their status, their presence has swelled already vibrant Hispanic communities in inner suburbs such as Fairfax County and Falls Church. And in outlying localities such as Prince William, where census estimates indicate the Hispanic population has grown by more than 41,000 in just seven years, cultural clashes abound.

"Anybody that's an immigrant is going to be suffering in the county now," Labiosa said. With Stewart claiming a mandate to pursue tough local action against illegal immigrants, he added, the reaction among legal and illegal residents alike is, "How fast can I leave?"

"There's a terrible feeling of division," agreed Annabel Park, an independent movie maker who filmed interviews on immigration with dozens of Prince William residents this fall as part of a series of videos that have become hits on the YouTube Web site.

The videos, mostly three to five minutes long, vividly capture the heat of the local debate.

In one, Robert Duecaster, a Gainesville resident, tells the audience at a packed Prince William County Board of Supervisors meeting: "We are being invaded.... We are going to repel this invasion."

In another, a finger-pointing but later apologetic Ivania C. Castillo of Dumfries invites Stewart to "kiss my ass."

"It's a gut issue as much as anything, " said Del. Thomas Davis Rust, R-Fairfax, a GOP moderate who was re-elected last week in Herndon, where anti-immigrant sentiment first showed its potency last year in a dispute over a shelter for day laborers. "Every community in Northern Virginia has changed."

Herndon closed its day labor center in September, when the charity hired to run it refused to check the legal status of the 100 or so workers it served daily. Dozens of those and other men now gather each morning on a grassy patch of park land near the town's commercial district; it's one of a dozen or more informal day labor pick up sites that have sprung up across the region.

"All the help you want, you find someone here," native Honduran David Albaro said one recent morning as he joined about 20 or so Latino men at the Herndon site.

"Who's going to cut grass at your house, Who's going to clean the bathroom?" he said. "You don't see gringo guys, Indian guys, Korean guys. Only the Latin people."

Immigration activists argue that the day laborers and other immigrant tradesmen across the region have been vital to growth that has made Northern Virginia the state's principal economic engine.

"Study after study has shown that the contributions of undocumented immigrants exceed the cost" of the government services those immigrants claim, said Tim Freilich, legal director of the Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers in Charlottesville.

Freilich said that while local governments are focused on cracking down on illegal immigrants, his office has heard from hundreds of illegal Virginia immigrants who've been hired and then cheated out of their earnings by employers who figure the workers won't pursue the money they're owed.


Meanwhile, immigration crackdown supporters, including John Stirrup, the county supervisor who initiated the Prince William ordinance, argue that illegal immigrants unfairly claim public resources, enjoying police and fire protection, schools and other government services paid for by legal residents.

In an interview, Stirrup said he moved to his home near Haymarket nine years ago in part to escape a wave of immigrants that he believed was fueling crime and driving down property values in his old Arlington neighborhood.

Now, Stirrup said, he and his wife find Latino gang symbols showing up in neighborhood schools, and their neighbors complain of single-family homes that have become boardinghouses for large groups of immigrant workers and families.

Police say gang activity is a problem in the region but that gang-related crime actually has declined in recent years, in part because of a regional law enforcement task force organized in 2000.

But the proliferation of boardinghouses, which stretch if not break zoning regulations in subdivisions set aside for single-family dwellings, is proving a tougher problem, both sides in the immigration debate acknowledge.

In one video posted by Park and her partners, Frank Principi, the Democratic candidate for supervisor in Woodbridge, describes knocking on hundreds of doors across his district this fall and hearing a litany of homeowner complaints about "a home across the street (that) has 10 people living in the basement" or one "that has an upholstery shop operating out of the garage."

Not all the overcrowded homes are occupied by immigrants, of course, but "home-sharing is what all immigrants do," Labiosa said, recalling earlier waves of foreign migration to the United States.

Steven Vallas, a George Mason University researcher, argued that Republicans such as Stirrup and Stewart exploit fears about immigrants and their living arrangements simply to boost their own political fortunes.

A GMU survey Vallas helped conduct earlier this year found that nearly 60 percent of Virginians think that undocumented workers drive down U.S. wages and salaries. And 55 percent say the presence of undocumented residents "hurts American customs and (the) American way of life."

Those sentiments were strongest in outlying communities and rural locales where the immigration issue was hottest this fall, Vallas said.

"You have to meet voters where their concerns are," said Dan Restrepo, an executive at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington. "When people feel their quality of life is challenged, there's a natural impulse to blame the 'other' - and immigrants are the other."


But some analysts argue that the victories of candidates such as George Barker, a Democrat who unseated state Sen. Jay O'Brien in a district that includes part of Prince William, suggest a way candidates can neutralize the issue and appeal to immigrants and longtime residents alike.

While O'Brien built much of his campaign around his unflinching support for cracking down on illegal immigrants, Barker spoke to larger issues such as school crowding and traffic, said veteran pollster Peter Brodnitz, who consulted on the Barker campaign.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato thinks that a strategy focused on attacking immigrants will damage Republicans over time.

Among many voters, "Republicans are already seen as too far to the right and too harsh on matters of race.... They always seem to be the ones that are pointing fingers, whether it's on social issues or race," Sabato said. "Those issues tend to work temporarily and then they backfire.

"There is a self-correcting mechanism" in American politics, Sabato said. "Long-term, a lot of (immigrants) become citizens and voters."

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