Why Local Government Cannot Handle Immigration

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Laborers, Loitering And Land Use: Why Local Government Cannot Handle Immigration
By Carl F. Horowitz

[Recently by Carl F. Horowitz: Housing ‘Shortages’: The Immigration Dimension]

“All politics is local.� Yet in real life the reverse also is true, especially in an environment where opposing Third World mass immigration can brand someone as a hatemonger. Almost any local event, however seemingly insignificant, has the capacity to burst into national prominence.

In the Fairfax County, Va. suburban town of Herndon, with a current estimated population of around 22,000, 38 percent foreign-born, this has come to pass. I can say I saw it happening years ago.

Before Wachovia Bank built a branch within walking distance of my home in Ashburn (Loudoun County), Va., I often would do my banking in Herndon. Each time I parked my car at the bank, without fail, about two to four dozen Hispanic men would be milling about across the street, right next to the 7-Eleven convenience store. Sometimes they would accost motorists and pedestrians. Often, they would litter the area.

Nobody knew how to deal with them. Herndon had no anti-loitering ordinance. And even if it did, where were these guys going to be moved? Arlington? Washington, D.C.?

The men congregating at the corner of Elden and Alabama, I learned from a bank teller, were “day laborers.� Lacking a steady job, they took whatever work was available that day. They’d wait for hours in the hopes a contractor would drive by and offer them some manual job.

It was common knowledge that many of these laborers were here in the U.S. illegally. Of course, that didn’t seem to bother the contractors who hired themâ€â€