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Saturday, October 22, 2005
Butler Co. talks tough on illegal immigrants
Officials want state law to keep them out of Ohio

By Sheila McLaughlin
Enquirer staff writer

HISPANIC POPULATION ON THE RISE, BY COUNTY
The number of Hispanics is increasing dramatically. Of the seven local counties in Ohio and Kentucky, the smallest increase in the Hispanic population in the past five years is 14.7 percent. Here are the increases in Hispanic population of those seven counties:

Percent
County 2000 2004 increase
Hamilton 9,614 11,844 23.20%
Clermont 1,550 1,985 28.06%
Warren 1,652 2,558 54.84%
Butler 4,796 6,891 43.68%
Campbell 761 873 14.72%
Kenton 1,665 2,176 30.69%
Boone 1,721 2,461 43.00%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau


HAMILTON - Officials in this county with one of the region's fastest growing Hispanic populations are taking extreme measures to clamp down on undocumented immigrants.

Saying the federal government isn't doing enough to stop people from living in the country illegally, the sheriff, a county commissioner and a state representative, all from Butler County, are pushing to create a state trespassing law aimed at deporting people who have entered the country without permission.

County Commissioner Mike Fox said the measure is not targeting Hispanics but noted that 90 percent of the illegal immigrants in the United States are from Mexico.

The Hispanic population in Hamilton, the Butler County seat, has grown by 500 percent from 1990, to about 4,000.

"This is not about an ethnic group. This is about national security. This is about the federal government's failure to act," Fox said Friday.

He said the government is too "politically correct" in dealing with immigration issues and alluded to a recent civil rights action against a Mason bar that posted a sign saying "For Service Speak English."

"My theory is that if you're too stupid to learn how to say 'I want a beer' in English, you're too stupid to drink to begin with," Fox said.

State Rep. Courtney Combs, R-Fairfield, who earlier this year introduced legislation to make English the official language in Ohio, said he intends to propose the law at the state level by year's end.

His staff is researching the issue to make the sure the bill would pass constitutional muster.

South Carolina legislators are considering a similar proposal that was introduced in April. Police in New Hampshire ran into trouble in August when a judge threw out criminal trespass charges against seven illegal immigrants, saying the law could only be applied to private property.

"The illegal aliens need to be rounded up and need to be deported," Combs said. "They can follow the law. They can get (permits) and come back in legally but pay taxes so United States citizens do not pay the price for this so-called cheap labor."

The proposal would call for people who are arrested for crimes or stopped for traffic infractions to be charged with trespass and order them to be deported instead of waiting for the federal government to make that decision, Sheriff Rick Jones said.

"Right now, I cannot arrest anybody for being in the country illegally," he said. "The federal government has to pick and choose. They are doing the best they can. The officers who work for Immigration & Customs Enforcement don't have the people to do it...so we have to start dealing with it ourselves."

Greg Palmore, spokesman for the agency's operations in Ohio and Michigan, said his agency responds to reports of undocumented immigrants, but ultimately, judges at the federal level are the only authority to decide whether a person is deported. He denied that the agency's resources are stretched so thin locally that they ignore requests for action.

"If they are brought to our attention, and they don't have a qualified right to be here, they will go through the deportation process," Palmore said.

Jones plans next week to institute a symbolic protest against the federal government's immigration policies by adding a charge of falsification against inmates who lie about their citizenship when they are booked into the jail on a crime.

Jones said he will then demand that the immigration agents take the inmate into federal custody immediately to begin deportation proceedings or he'll charge the federal government $70 a day to keep them incarcerated in Butler County. Jones conceded that the government isn't obligated to pay.

Jones said undocumented immigrants are costing the county money because many of them keep getting arrested on other crimes after the federal government chooses not to deport them, allowing their release back into the community. He said 885 foreign-born inmates have been booked into the already-crowded jail in the past year, costing Butler County taxpayers $302,400 to incarcerate them.

"I'm bulging at the seams here, and I know of no other way to deal with it," Jones said.

The reaction from some in the Hispanic community was less than favorable.

Lourdes Ward, a Hispanic woman who operates Reach Out Lakota food pantry in West Chester Township, said such a measure will destroy the trust and good will that police have been trying to build with the local Hispanic population, which have been taught to fear police in their home countries.

It also would have ramifications in the work force because Hispanics, who will accept a lower salary and no benefits, will be less likely to come to Ohio for jobs, she said.

"There's going to be a lot of jobs that depend on them, like landscaping and construction that they are not going to be able to fill because nobody is going to be willing to take $3 or $4 less an hour to do the same job," Ward said.

The notion that Hispanics bleed the social service system is a fallacy, she said. The most common complaint she said she hears from Hispanics who visit the food pantry is they can't find a second or third job to support their families.

"It's not like they are coming here and thinking, 'I'm going to live off the system and stay home and fit the stereotype of nothing but sitting around outside my apartment and drink beer all day,'" Ward said.

Michael Florez, chairman of the Ohio Commission on Hispanic-Latino Affairs, said he understands the economic issues involving immigration but thinks that Butler County's approach is misguided.

"It is an emotional, polarizing issue. I don't think that local enforcement of trespass cases is the way to handle it," said Florez, who also is a Cincinnati lawyer. "It has to be a federal response, a 50-state federal response, and it has to come from our Congress. Otherwise, it's a patchwork approach."

He compared the Butler County idea to "squeezing a balloon" that will force illegal immigrants to simply move to other states to avoid deportation in Ohio.

But Jones says he doesn't care about that.

"The only balloon I'm concerned about is the balloon in Ohio," he said.