As Herndon prepares to vote Tuesday on whether to designate an official gathering spot for day laborers, what began as a neighborhood quandary is evoking passions far beyond the town's borders.
Mark Williams, a guest host on WMAL-AM, exhorted his audience last week to line up at Tuesday's Town Council meeting, "whether you're from Herndon or Timbuktu," to protest plans to use public money to create a new gathering site for the job seekers, many of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Council members "have absolutely no intention of following the law," Williams boomed on "The Michael Graham Show" on Monday, broadcasting 3,000 miles away from WFBK in Sacramento. "The issue you're trying to solve," he told listeners, "is the fact that the United States has borders, and its citizens demand that they be enforced."
That was not the kind of attention Herndon leaders and residents anticipated when they began debating how to use local zoning and nuisance laws to deal with growing anger at the large groups of often noisy and disruptive men who congregate in parking lots and on sidewalks seeking work every morning.
But as the town of 22,000 near Dulles International Airport decides whether to use public funds to set up an official site, Herndon has become the focal point in a larger national debate over U.S. immigration policy.
The 150 men who gather daily at a 7-Eleven are featured on the Web sites of national groups fighting illegal immigration, including a white supremacist site offering to help organize protests before the vote.
Members of Congress from Colorado and Iowa who advocate stricter border controls have sent aides to testify before the local Planning Commission. Another WMAL host, Chris Core, has devoted 11 shows to the issue since July. Republican Jerry W. Kilgore's campaign for Virginia governor hit the front page last week when he pledged to oppose all publicly funded worker halls such as the one proposed in Herndon.
And Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchor who often denounces undocumented workers on his nightly show, last week featured a state delegate from Prince William County weighing in on an informal day-laborer site in Woodbridge.
"My aide calls out to me, 'Hey boss, Lou Dobbs wants to talk to you about illegal aliens,' " Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter (R) said, recalling with wonder the interest from national television. "This day-laborer thing is symptomatic of a larger problem: Our borders are not secure."
Day laborers are causing tension in communities across the country, the most visible sign of the influx of immigrants pouring across U.S. borders, encouraged by what many perceive as a neglectful federal policy. In Herndon, which has the Washington region's highest concentration of foreign-born residents, pressure from frustrated homeowners catapulted tensions with workers into the news. Media reports then caught the eye of lawmakers and public policymakers.
The current furor stands in contrast to the relative calm in Montgomery and Arlington counties, where similar publicly funded sites have operated for several years.
The debate is "truly the culmination of everything that's been going on after 9/11," said Jose Vanegas, a Colombian immigrant who has worked with the day laborers. "The anti-immigrant sentiment has just been ratcheted up."
