Thread: On Lucille Avenue, the Immigration Debate

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/nyreg ... r=homepage

June 26, 2006
On Lucille Avenue, the Immigration Debate
By NINA BERNSTEIN
ELMONT, N.Y. — The streets where Patrick Nicolosi sees America unraveling still have the look of the 1950's. Single-family homes sit side by side, their lawns weed-whacked into submission to the same suburban dream that Mr. Nicolosi's Italian-American parents embraced 40 years ago when they moved to this working-class community on Long Island.

But when a school bus stops at the white Cape Cod opposite his house, two children seem to pop up from beneath the earth. Emerging from an illegal basement apartment that successive homeowners have rented to a Mexican family of illegal immigrants, they head off to another day of public schooling at taxpayer expense.

This is a neighborhood in the twilight zone of illegal immigration, and wherever Mr. Nicolosi looks, the hidden costs of cheap labor hit home.

There is the gas station a dozen blocks away where more than 100 immigrant day laborers gather, leaving garbage and distress along a residential side street — and undercutting wages for miles, contends Mr. Nicolosi, 49, a third-generation union man and former Wonder Bread truck driver who retired after a back injury. There are the schools and hospitals filled with children from illegal apartments like the basement dwelling, which Mr. Nicolosi calls "a little dungeon, windowless."

"Two children are in school, and one is handicapped — that's $10,000 for elementary school, $100,000 a year for special education," he said. "Why am I paying taxes to support that house?"

One man's frustration over a family in a basement goes a long way toward explaining the grass-roots anger over immigration policy that many members of Congress say they keep hearing in their districts. And it also illustrates the unsettling consequences such anger can set in motion.

It is the economics of class, not the politics of culture or race, that fires Mr. Nicolosi's resentment about what he sees in Elmont, which is probably as diverse a suburb as exists in the United States. Like many working-class Americans who live close to illegal immigrants, he worries that they are yet another force undermining the way of life and the social contract that generations of workers strived so hard to achieve.

"The rich, they're totally oblivious to this situation — what the illegal immigration, the illegal housing, the day labor is doing to us," he said. "Everyone's exploiting these people — the landlords, the contractors. And now we can't afford to pay taxes. People like me who want to live the suburban dream, we're being pushed out unless we join the illegality."

Instead, unlike most people, Mr. Nicolosi joins the civic fray. A self-appointed watchdog, he tries to get local officials to investigate houses that he and his allies suspect of violations, and to crack down on day laborers spilling into front yards.

But this spring, as the immigration debate ignited nationally, the results of his crusade unfolded like a parable about being careful what you wish for — leaving the Mexican family uprooted, neighbors unhappy, and Mr. Nicolosi himself more frustrated than ever.

Elmont, just over the Nassau County line from Queens, has always drawn immigrants or their children. In the decades since Mr. Nicolosi's father, a bus driver, moved his family here from the city, families from every continent have joined the Italian and Central European generations who settled the first subdivisions. Its population of 33,000 is about 46 percent white, 35 percent black and 9 percent Asian, and 14 percent of its residents are Hispanic.

Mr. Nicolosi, a compact, animated man, says he is fighting to save the modest suburban lifestyle that these families seek, regardless of ethnicity.

In the last four years, Elmont raised school taxes by 57 percent and added 40 elementary school classrooms — partly filled, district officials agree, by families in illegal rentals, both immigrant and native-born. In response, Mr. Nicolosi ran for the school board three times, losing yet again in May. As president of the Elmont East End Civic Association, he prods the police to enforce laws against loitering, and in letters to newspapers laments the erosion of suburbia with examples uncomfortably close to home.

Recently, for example, to the dismay of his wife, a police crossing guard, he publicly cited their children — a doctor, a teacher and a law school applicant — as examples of a generation that is being priced out of Long Island by soaring property taxes.

The Cape Cod across Lucille Avenue from Mr. Nicolosi's home is among hundreds of houses that he and his associates have turned in to officials since 2002, he said, based on anonymous complaints collected by a local weekly. They checked the addresses for telltale signs like multiple electric meters — with no regard, he insisted, to the occupants' ethnicity or citizenship.

But even among those who echoed Mr. Nicolosi's concerns, many called him a busybody and a troublemaker. There was sympathy for the family in the basement, and for their landlords, the Cervonis, a young couple with a baby and a construction business who bought the house from an absentee landlord in 2004 and moved in.

"What could we do, throw them out?" asked Luciana Cervoni, who called the tenants hard-working and quiet. "They've lived here for six, seven years now."

In a dungeon?

"If that were the case, we would have moved a long time ago," said the mother in the basement, Ariana O., 30, allowing a glimpse of its two-bedroom finished interior that showed how homey the couple had made it for their three children: a boy of 10, a developmentally disabled girl of about 6, and a year-old baby — the last two born in the United States.

Ms. O. and her husband, Placido, a mason, asked that their last name be withheld, for fear of immigration authorities. They were aware of past housing-code citations generated by Mr. Nicolosi's complaints. Nothing had come of those, so they were not too worried.

But as the national debate flared, so did Mr. Nicolosi's frustration at what he saw in his neighborhood. Those clipped front lawns? Mowed by underpaid Latino workers. Those tidy homes? Contractors hired immigrants off the books to repair roofs and replace pipes, Mr. Nicolosi said, instead of training, and decently compensating, someone like the 20-year-old American up the block who needed a job.

"They're telling us Americans don't want to do these jobs," Mr. Nicolosi said. "That's a lie. The business owners don't want to pay. I know what my grandparents fought for: fair wages and days off. Now we're doing it in reverse."

Trying not to feed the cycle, Mr. Nicolosi said, he had paid a premium to use nationally known home-improvement chains when he renovated his house. But by now he knew that was no guarantee that the people who did the work were legal, let alone fairly paid, he said.

"It's either a country of law and order and what my parents fought for, or we just turn it over to big business," he went on, working himself into a speech that connected many dots.

He pointed to American companies in Mexico that paid wages too low to keep Mexicans from streaming north to sell their labor on American streets. He angrily denied bigotry and avowed pity for the immigrants, squeezed by low wages and high rents.

"They will never, ever better themselves," he said of the Mexican family.

And as he drove his black S.U.V. through a neighborhood where garden shrines outnumber basketball hoops, his world view darkened what he saw. Passing a small house, he shared his suspicion that it illegally harbored multiple immigrant families, because a dozen children regularly played out front.

But the homeowners later set the record straight. "We're a family here — we're no immigrants," declared Fanny Echeverria, 40, quickly adding, "What makes him better than immigrants?"

She and her husband, George, have five children between them, and their yard is a magnet for neighbors' children. Ms. Echeverria is a native New Yorker of Greek and Dominican heritage, her husband a naturalized United States citizen born in Chile. And they own one of Long Island's most highly rated French restaurants, Soigné, in Woodmere.

Indeed, Mr. Echeverria's biography served as a counterpoint to Mr. Nicolosi's pessimism. He was 10 when his family came to America in 1979, and he was an illegal immigrant himself until the 1986 amnesty.

Still, he echoed Mr. Nicolosi's concerns about immigrants in unsafe basement apartments. "They cannot get a steady job because they are here illegally, so they cannot pay for housing," he said.

On the other hand, they avoid middle-class tax burdens, Mr. Nicolosi contends, sounding almost envious. He and a neighbor often joke that they should move to Mexico and return illegally: "Then we don't have to worry about health care, don't have to worry about paying taxes. And if I worked for $100 a day I'd be better off. After I pay taxes I don't even have $100 a day."

From the basement, what struck the Mexican couple, however, was that Mr. Nicolosi did not work.

"The man has nothing to do except look," the wife said in Spanish as her husband cooked dinner. Recalling the Latino workers she saw renovating his house, she added, "If we weren't here, who would do the work?"

In Guanajuato, Mexico, Mr. O.'s best option was a job at General Motors that at the time paid $10 a day, he said. Like everyone, he added, "we came for a better life for our children."

What of the union battles of Mr. Nicolosi's grandparents? "That's what we're doing now," Ms. O. said. Taxes? "We all consume," Mr. O. argued, with a gesture that took in the dining table, the television and a picture of the Last Supper. "I'm paying the rent, so I'm paying the homeowner's taxes."

But upstairs that day, their landlords were deciding to evict the family. An official had called, alerting them to a new complaint by Mr. Nicolosi, the Cervonis said. This time, with heightened public attention, it would lead to hefty fines unless the basement was vacated.

Joseph Cervoni broke the news to the tenants the night President Bush spoke to the nation about immigration. As word spread, neighbors blamed Mr. Nicolosi. Carolyn Gilbert, a retired secretary who advocates an electrified fence at the Mexican border, said he had no conscience. "People forget the human dimension," she said.

Louise Cerullo, 84, a registered Republican like Mr. Nicolosi, protested: "They're human beings. If they can work and pay their rent, what's wrong with that?"

The talk reached Mr. Nicolosi soon after his school board defeat. He denied complaining, then threatened to sue local officials for identifying him, and questioned the timing of the crackdown.

"They did it now to shut me up," he said.

On the first Saturday in June, the Mexican family moved out. Watching from next door, Ms. Gilbert worried about the children's schooling, and wondered where they could go. Probably, she said, to another basement apartment.

"For every problem, there's a solution," she added. "For every solution there's another problem."

This government canNOT run without our Tax $$$---it would come to a screeching halt.

Somebody needs to open a "crying towel" factory!

On second thought, No, don't - it would end destroyed by CAFTA.
How many of these "esteemed journalists" are on the payroll
of Communist La Raza?