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Immigration issue polarizes suburban America

Chicago Tribune  - MANASSAS 

It's patrol day for Maureen Wood and Allison Kipp. Armed with a notebook and cell phone, the two friends set off in a minivan in search of changes they don't like in their hometown.

Hispanic men gather at a 7-Eleven. Graffiti sprouts on a back fence. The women catalog it all, planning to take up each item with local authorities.

"This isn't who we are," says Kipp, disgust clouding her face. "This isn't what we want our community to be like."

Ask Kipp and Wood what they're mad about, and the lifelong area residents are explicit: Unchecked immigration lies at the heart of their town's troubles.

It's a sense of unrest familiar in small towns and suburbs across America. Immigrants have flooded the country in great numbers in the past. What's different now is where they're settling--far from the border states and big cities that long absorbed the huddled masses.

Their integration into small-town America is marked in Manassas, as elsewhere, by a language of fear, resentment and anger. Under pressure from longtime residents, local officials have cracked down, ordering police to dramatically increase the amount of time spent checking people's immigration status.

Those authorities say they're targeting illegality. Others say they're simply going after brown people.

If we're due a national conversation about the changing complexion of America, though, it's not happening in the 2008 presidential campaign.

In Manassas, some old-timers watch their home changing and fight the newcomers. Others fight that backlash.

For all of them, it's a battle for their very identity.

For most of our history, immigrants settled largely in the Northeast and the Midwest. In 1920, nine out of 10 immigrants lived in cities of more than 100,000. The quintessential immigrant destination was Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Now the decline of traditional manufacturing is redirecting immigrants to agricultural centers in the South, tourist centers in the West, smaller cities all over. The Census Bureau first picked up on this dispersion in the 1980s, but the proportion of immigrants in small towns really took off in the mid-1990s.

In Prince William County, where Manassas sits, whites went from 65 percent of the population in 2000 to 52 percent in 2006. Hispanics increased--from 10 percent to 20 percent, roughly--in the same period.

Maureen Wood liked the diversity at first. The students at the high school where she is a substitute teacher taught her Spanish words.

Then the school district put up mobile classrooms.

A friend's son couldn't get work as a landscaper when he came home from college for the summer. The company owner said he only hired native Spanish speakers, to make it easier for his crew and foreman.

LAWYER AIDS IMMIGRANTS

Lisa Johnson-Firth and her law partner hung out their shingle in picturesque Manassas last year. Since word got around that they were taking immigration cases, they've been flooded with work.

Some days, she feels like she's standing on an endless beach, Johnson-Firth says, throwing starfish back into the ocean one at a time.

After a recent morning spent on asylum and detention cases, she was heading out for lunch when a Pakistani woman came in with her young son, a plump boy who spent the next half-hour singing and laughing as his mother talked with Johnson-Firth about her green card application. She wanted permission to stay in the U.S. on her own, independent of her abusive husband.

When Johnson-Firth went out to grab a chicken wrap, she passed a local landmark called The Sign. It appeared last fall in a yard near downtown Manassas' cobbled streets. On the makeshift billboard, a family--U.S. citizens born in Mexico--pleaded for kinder treatment of Latino residents.

"Stop your racism to Hispanics," it read, in squared black letters.

What's happening in her town saddens Johnson-Firth. "I wouldn't say it's racism, though there's some of that," she says. "It's more like people have so much, and they don't want to share."

The country's founders "set out a way for very different people to live together," she adds, "and we have strayed so far from these ideas."

creator of 'the sign'

The man who erected the sign fears the same thing. Gaudencio Fernandez moved in the 1970s from Mexico to upstate New York. When violence in his neighborhood spiked, he moved to Virginia. "Manassas had low crime, good schools, good pay for home improvement," he says.

In recent years, though, things changed, to the point that he sometimes feels like his family is a target. He notices the minivans on patrol. He's hurt by the angry tirades at public meetings.

"For our kids to go to the park," he says, "they need to take a birth certificate or a passport."

A few weeks ago, the furious complaints about the message on his sign exacted its toll. He took it down.

"I thought, 'Maybe the good people will speak for us,'" he says, voice quavering. "Maybe they'll see the sign and say, 'Those people of color are like us. They laugh, they cry.'"

He's not sure if anyone did, but he hopes so.