Businesses Vow to Fight Crackdown

Prince William Policies Split Latino Community

Latino business owners agreed yesterday that new Prince William County policies aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants are costing them customers, but they were sharply divided on the best way to deal with it.

One group, led by some of the Salvadoran community's wealthiest business owners, announced plans to "play by the rules" and launch a vigorous lobbying campaign to have the policies repealed. An hour later, about 15 other business owners said they supported a call by the group Mexicans Without Borders for a general strike and a boycott of merchants who decline to support their cause.

At issue is a resolution approved unanimously last month by county supervisors who want to deny county services to illegal immigrants and step up police enforcement. Although the policies have yet to be finalized and implemented, the business owners said they have scared away customers who fear discrimination and deportation.

"It's amazing," said Ruben Andrade, owner of the nightclub East Coast Cafe and three other businesses. "Everybody is so scared that a lot of my customers are afraid to go out. They're moving out of town."

Andrade was one of the business owners who gathered to denounce the policies at a Woodbridge shopping plaza at an event organized by Mexicans Without Borders. They said their restaurants, markets and computer firms had lost as much as 50 percent of their customers.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the county at a Tex-Mex restaurant near Manassas, another group of businessmen said they also were losing customers and were prepared to answer the community's call for leadership. They said they had raised $100,000 to lobby county supervisors to repeal the proposals and to fund an economic study that would spell out the contributions of immigrants to Virginia.

The group included Carlos Castro, owner of Todos Supermarket in Woodbridge; Northern Virginia Realtor and radio operator Jose Luis Semidey; and Elmer Arias, president of the U.S. Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce in Alexandria.

Castro, who opened his supermarket 17 years ago, declined to support the boycott and said he had tried three times to meet with Mexicans Without Borders and its general coordinator, Ricardo Juarez, but his calls were not returned. Castro said he was booed and denounced as "racist" when he showed up at a recent community meeting organized by Mexicans Without Borders and in appearances on local Spanish-language radio, where much of the political debate has played out over what to do about the new county policies.

"Instead of fighting among each other, we need to get together and we need to work together," Castro said. "Those small laws that have been passed by some localities are only drops when you consider the flood that is coming toward us."

The two groups have fundamentally different approaches. The Salvadoran coalition's event was organized by Ayuda, a nonprofit group in the District that has pledged to provide coalition members with staff and legal and lobbying expertise. To many in the activist immigrant community, Ayuda's business group represents the old guard. Indeed, the older businessmen said they want to work within the political system, not buck it.

"We want to sit down and try to persuade the people with power," Semidey said. A boycott "would probably antagonize people who may support us in the community." he said. "We are not in Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela or Panama. We have to play by the rules here."

Semidey said he was an illegal immigrant two decades ago, but since then he and the other business owners have built relationships with local political officials. The Prince William lobbying effort is the first test of their burgeoning political power, but division in the Latino community could dilute the message.

Members of the coalition said they were not aware until yesterday that their news conference would compete with the one in Woodbridge. That group, organized by Mexicans Without Borders, made no mention of the meeting going on in Manassas.

Similar fractures in Prince William's Hispanic community have emerged in the past over the presence of day laborers and during a 2006 walkout by high school students protesting tougher federal immigration laws.

While the group in Manassas pledged to flex its financial power, the business owners in Woodbridge affirmed their support for the action plan pushed by Mexicans Without Borders, including a Sept. 2 protest march, an Oct. 9 general strike and a countywide boycott Aug. 27 to Sept. 3.

The boycott was initially intended to affect all non-Latino businesses in the county; now, only stores that fail to display supportive placards issued by Mexicans Without Borders will be targeted, according to a written statement read by the business group.

Juarez said the tactics were agreed upon during a series of recent community meetings hosted by his organization that drew thousands of Hispanic residents looking for guidance and information about the new county measures.

"We've been pushed into a corner by these racist policies, and we need to be heard," Juarez said.