Liberal Suburbs Don't Avoid Heated Debates On Immigration

The air was stuffy and hot inside a packed hall in Silver Spring during Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett's town hall meeting last month when a lanky man in the back row raised his hand.

What, he asked, is Leggett doing to curb the influx of illegal immigrants to the county?

"Immigration is a local issue," said the man, who gave his name only as Ryan. "Local government needs to respond."

Some people jeered and others applauded as the man elaborated. Uncharacteristically, Leggett lost his cool.

"Shut up and listen for a moment!" he cried, silencing the crowd. "We are not in the business of enforcing immigration issues."

Leggett articulated the stance that leaders in Montgomery and Fairfax County, the two largest suburbs in the Washington region, have taken in recent months: They have no plans to follow the lead of such counties as Prince William and Loudoun by passing legislation that targets illegal immigrants.

Such measures, they say, are unlikely to produce meaningful results, given the limits the courts have set and the limits on federal enforcement resources. "You're raising a public expectation about what you're going to do, but what you're really going to do is a lot less than that expectation," Fairfax Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly said in a recent meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters.

But Connolly and Leggett, both Democrats, acknowledge that the debate over illegal immigration has become more impassioned within their borders, entwined for some constituents with issues such as crowded schools, rising crime and aging neighborhoods.

Help Save Herndon, a group that galvanized the outcry over a day labor center in the Fairfax town, is hosting a meeting today to launch a countywide branch, citing public discontent over a hiring site near a Centreville library. Montgomery's newly created branch of Help Save Maryland had two protests in the past month.

Even in these relatively liberal counties, considered friendly to their foreign-born populations, immigration threatens to become a wedge issue. "I worry that if we're not careful, we could have very long-lasting divisions," Leggett said in an interview.

Such divisions have emerged in many of the counties farther from Washington. This week, Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold (R) issued an executive order declaring that the county would sever contracts with any business caught employing illegal immigrants. The order is largely symbolic -- it includes no enforcement measures -- but underscores the county's growing unease on the issue.

In Loudoun and Prince William, leaders voted last month to mandate studies of what public services might be lawfully denied to undocumented residents.