this is what all cities and towns should be doing. My brother in law and his family live near Hazelton and I'm sure this doesn't hurt them any.
Georgie Anne Geyer
PENNSYLVANIA MAYOR LEADS A GROWING CRACKDOWN ON ILLEGALSMayor Barletta, the engaging grandson of Italian immigrants, presides over Hazleton, until recently a prosperous and uniquely civil little city of beautiful old houses and growing industrial zones. It lies 45 miles south of Scranton and has a population of 31,000.
Everything was going well until 2001, he told us, "when I noticed things were changing. The population ballooned from 23,000 to 31,000 in a very short time, and suddenly we were seeing blight in our neighborhoods. We had absentee landlords and tremendous overcrowding; we found nine Mexicans living on the floor, the refrigerator filled with roaches. I found it all so strange -- why had they come to Hazleton?"
Quickly, the little city changed completely. A man was killed after a football game in a drug deal gone bad; another man stabbed his girlfriend and jumped out of the window; last spring, a 14-year-old was arrested for shooting a gun in the playground; gangland graffiti began appearing on the walls of homes; and finally a 29-year-old man was shot between the eyes and killed. The four men arrested in the killing were all illegal aliens. Suddenly it was not uncommon to wait four to five hours in the emergency rooms, schools became miserably overcrowded, and one imaginative illegal was apprehended with five different Social Security cards.
"It was 11:30 p.m., and I remember hanging up the phone in disbelief," he went on. "I couldn't sleep. I realized I'd veritably lost my city. And we only had 31 police officers -- we should have had at least 60. Although crime was up by 10 percent, violent crime had doubled. We'd lost the quality of life of the city I was raised in. Imagine me telling my people, 'Don't worry, I'll tell the federal government -- they're building a wall.'" He paused. "They don't want to hear about Washington and a wall. They expect their local officials to protect them."
And so Mayor Barletta did just that. The problem, of course, was the sudden high number of illegal aliens, almost all from Mexico -- the same problem that towns and cities across the nation are having. Legal Mexican or Hispanic immigrants or citizens enthusiastically supported Barletta and what came next. Last spring, Barletta began "taking our city back, because I didn't have any choice."
Hazleton is doing everything the right, the civil, the legal, the effective way. The city voted in an ordinance, the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which has garnered attention across the country, to suspend the licenses of companies who hire illegals, to hold landlords accountable (a $1,000 fine) for renting to illegals, and (in a separate ordinance) to make English the official language of education and government. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro-immigration groups are suing the city as a "mean-spirited" nest of racists.
But what makes the Hazleton example stand out is that it has no racist component whatsoever; to the contrary, it exemplifies a rational, non-discriminatory philosophy about illegal immigration.
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