How can you judge a town by driving through one afternoon and/or working there 25 years ago?! Does she listen to the scanner? Hear the continuous noise complaints? See what's going on in the schools, hospitals? The arrogance is overwhelming...

http://www.waukegan.org/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7682


Waukegan crackdown won't roll back clock

July 23, 2007
BY SUE ONTIVEROS sontiveros@suntimes.com

Oh, c'mon, you don't really believe Waukegan's decision to join up with the feds to root out and deport violent undocumented offenders is an innocent stab at law and order?
Not by a long shot. The supporters of this effort are on an elusive quest for something they're never going to regain. I might even have a little sympathy for them if they weren't so damned mean-spirited.

In the early 1980s, I was a reporter in Waukegan for the News-Sun, so for a time I knew the town pretty well. But from the very beginning there, when I spent many lunch hours just driving up and down the city's streets, I understood what made it tick. The roots of the town were much like my own.

At one time, Waukegan was a thriving blue-collar town. Its eastern border sits on Lake Michigan, but it sacrificed lakefront beauty for something more practical: jobs. These heavy-industry jobs were good-paying ones, often with union benefits, the kind of hard, dirty and sometimes dangerous work that allowed folks to buy modest homes that they kept neat, with carefully mowed -- by the owners, not a service -- lawns. They had no need to shop in downtown Chicago or anywhere else, really; their busy downtown was the one others flocked to.

But by the time I got there in the early 1980s, Waukegan was past its glory days. The industry was all but gone, as were most of the downtown businesses, leaving the place reeling. Waukegan resembled a past-her-prime starlet, befuddled and left to wonder what happened to the good life. Boy, if that town didn't remind me of the Southeast Side of Chicago, the once-thriving Steel Belt of my youth.

So after seeing the throng that descended on the town last week, I decided to drive the streets of Waukegan once again to figure out why emotions are running so high there concerning Latino immigrants.

It's still a tidy town. And quiet on a weeknight. The only place I found with an almost-full parking lot was the off-track betting parlor on the edge of town. Downtown has added businesses, although not much weekday nightlife. The lakefront is fixed up, somewhat.

I finally saw what I know is the real craw in Waukegan's throat concerning its influx of Latino immigrants. Along every commercial strip, particularly on Washington Street, was what wasn't there before in large numbers: Latin businesses. Grocery stories, bakeries, insurance offices, hair salons, furniture and clothing stores, restaurants. And the signs were mostly in Spanish, something that riles the anti-immigrant movement to no end.

In the last 25 years, Waukegan's Latin community has grown a solid economic base. And economic success means one thing, eventually: a shift in political power. So Waukegan, like its tired cousin, Carpentersville, and similar towns across the United States, is going to take every step it can to try to stop that shift to Latino power. You don't see any of these punitive measures happening where there are concentrations of Asian, Polish or African new immigrants, do you? That's because they haven't been declared the fastest-growing minority in the United States.

Make no mistake, when Waukegan gets its officers trained, Latinos are going to be stopped left and right in an effort to weed out anyone not documented. And Waukegan thinks this is going to stop the change.

The tide already has turned. This measure is going to make life miserable for a lot of Latinos up there. But it's not going to stop the inevitable.

Waukegan crackdown won't roll back clock.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/ontiveros/ ... 23.article