Courting Disorder
A new mayor gets tough, and foolish, with immigrants.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

THINGS ARE starting to get ugly again in Herndon, the little town that last year became a national flashpoint in the debate over illegal immigration. A new mayor and town council, having campaigned on a platform opposing a taxpayer-funded day-laborer center, have moved to adopt measures designed to harass, intimidate and ultimately rid the town of its sizeable population of illegal immigrants. In doing so, they are sacrificing a workable status quo for the sake of an ideological principle and hoping to dislodge generally hardworking newcomers and displace them to some neighboring community.

A little history: Before the day-laborer center opened a year ago, scores of Hispanic workers, most of them illegal immigrants, would jostle for work each morning outside a local 7-Eleven -- a chaotic, unregulated scrum. In the absence of public toilets, some of the workers urinated outdoors; drunkenness, rowdy behavior and catcalls at women were common. The new center changed all that practically overnight, replacing the mayhem at the 7-Eleven with a well-organized facility where employers find orers who draw numbers to determine who gets work. A code of conduct enforced by the workers themselves bans drunkenness, loutish behavior, theft, noise, trash, fighting and drugs.

The calm, orderly procedures were an obvious improvement, and they seemed to quiet the radio talk show loudmouths and anti-immigrant hotheads who had denounced the center as a reward for illegal immigrants. After a while, anti-illegal immigrant vigilantes stopped showing up to harass the workers. Still, the town's divisions didn't heal, and a candidate who opposed the center, Stephen J. DeBenedittis, was elected mayor in May, along with two new council members who defeated pro-day-laborer center incumbents. In addition to tightening rules governing the employment of illegal immigrants and blocking them from getting business licenses, the mayor and council are trying to replace the nonprofit outfit that runs the center with new managers who will bar illegal immigrants -- in other words, throw most of the 100-plus workers out on the street.

Herndon's Hispanic-free leadership is pushing its agenda despite deep divisions there over the immigration issue, despite a Hispanic community that accounts for a quarter to a third of the town's population of 23,000, and despite the local economy's evident demand for immigrant labor, legal and illegal. And to what end? Mr. DeBenedittis seems to think that if he turns the heat up sufficiently, the immigrants will simply disappear. More likely, they'll just play cat-and-mouse with the police or move one town over. A mayor's first priority is to ensure and enhance the public order, not embark on an unwinnable crusade designed to make up for the federal government's failings. By opting for the latter, Mr. DeBenedittis is courting trouble.