New Attitude on Immigration Skips an Old Coal Town

From The New York Times:

Before Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, before “self-deportation” became the Republican presidential platform in 2012, there was Hazleton, [Pennsylvania].

This working-class city in the Poconos passed the country’s first law aimed at making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they would pack up and leave.

Hazleton has faded from the national attention it drew with its Illegal Immigration Relief Act in 2006. But as Republicans in Congress advance plans to provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, the city presents a test case of whether the party risks leaving behind a critical part of its core constituency: white working-class voters for whom illegal immigration stirs visceral reactions.

 

 Joanne Ustynoski, who owns a small automotive business with her husband, Mickey, echoed many native residents who said that illegal immigrants in Hazleton received government benefits and were not as committed to hard work as their own forebears from Italy, Poland and Ukraine.

 

The law Hazleton passed in 2006 penalized employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. In 2010, a federal appeals court declared the law unconstitutional. But the next year, the United States Supreme Court upheld a similar Arizona law, and it ordered the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, to review Hazleton’s ordinance.
 

Despite Hazleton’s reputation as one of America’s toughest cities toward illegal immigrants, the Hispanic population there has surged. The 2010 census showed Hispanic residents totaling 37 percent of the population, up from 5 percent in 2000.