“We want to make this the toughest city in the country for illegal aliens,” Barletta said, attempting to scapegoat undocumented workers as the cause of economic problems facing native-born workers.

The mayor’s proposed “Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance,” states, “Illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, contributes to overcrowded classrooms and failing schools, subjects our hospital to fiscal hardship and legal residents to substandard quality of care, and destroys our neighborhoods and diminishes our overall quality of life.”

The measure would deny a license to do business in the city to any company that “aids and abets” undocumented immigrant workers, including by hiring them. It also makes it illegal for landlords to rent to a worker without proper papers. It declares English to be the official language of Hazleton and bars the use of Spanish on any city forms or documents.

Barletta has been featured on dozens of interviews across the country, including FOX News, CNN, and ABC radio.

A bipartisan group of five state representatives brought Barletta to join them in a press conference in Harrisburg, the state capital, on June 20 to announce the filing of a set of bills to deepen the attacks on undocumented workers. The legislators have dubbed their collections of bills “National Security Begins at Home.”

The population of Hazleton, once an anthracite coalmining center, was projected by the U.S. Census in 2000 to decline. Then a series of industrial parks opened and the area attracted new industry, including a number of meatpacking companies, the largest of which is an Excel packing plant. Thousands of immigrants, many originally from the Dominican Republic, moved to the area in search of work. City officials estimate that the population of Hazleton is now 30 percent immigrant workers.

“The Latino community feels very offended and betrayed,” Anna Arias, president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association, told the Hazleton Standard-Speaker.

A number of young people gathered June 25 at the Sandwiches Cibaeña take-out shop on Wyoming Avenue, the center of the city’s Latino community. They said they were organizing to attend and speak out at the next city council meeting on July 13. The council must approve Barletta’s proposals at three successive meetings to become law.

“We need to organize some protests now,” José Lechuga, who runs a grocery store and restaurant on Wyoming, told the Militant. He has hung two large Mexican flags outside his stores. Lechuga mentioned that there were no organized actions in Hazleton as part of the nationwide wave of demonstrations April 10 and May 1.

“What would Barletta do if he was mayor in Miami or another big city?” asked Jasmin Espinal, a bodega manager on Wyoming. “He’d have to put up with us or move. We ain’t going nowhere.”

“I’m proud to speak Spanish and I’ll die speaking it,” said Hazleton resident Armando Rodríguez.

City officials admit that many of the proposed measures in the ordinance are unenforceable. Barring the use of Spanish in city forms, for example, is illegal.

“The real goal of the anti-immigrant drive is not to drive undocumented workers out of the area or the country, but instead to force them into an underground, semi-legal status that opens the door for superexploitation and attacks against unionization,” Martin Santiago, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in Philadelphia’s 2nd CD, told the media.

“This campaign flies in the face of the massive actions that took place in April and May,” Santiago said, “which inspired undocumented and native-born workers alike.”
 
 
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