Hunting Season (10 page)

Farmingville, a blue-collar hamlet of about fifteen thousand residents, is less than five miles north of Patchogue. In the late 1990s, Mexican laborers from the state of Hidalgo, west of Mexico City, settled there during a construction boom. Farmingville’s geographic location—seventy miles east of Manhattan, in the center of Suffolk County and just off the Long Island Expressway—attracted contractors and others looking for cheap labor from all over the county. Word of the abundant job opportunities spread, and even more immigrants, not all Mexicans, moved there looking for jobs in construction, roofing, masonry, lawn care, and landscaping.
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The day laborers in Farmingville—short and brown-skinned, with dingy worker’s clothing and the general demeanor of rural folks, people who want to be noticed by a
patrón
but ignored by everyone else—became an eyesore to those who looked at them and saw only one side of the story: large groups of desperate men who spoke no English standing outside two neighborhood 7-Eleven convenience stores. In spring and summer there could be as many as eighty men on one corner and forty on another.

Neighbors began to complain. They were also upset because their sleepy town had found its way to the front page of
Newsday
after police officers raided two homes and evicted forty day laborers on the charge of overcrowded housing. For people who are concerned about the value of their property, as most homeowners are, the story was unwelcome, but the raid was necessary. All of a sudden, concerned and angry residents began showing up at meetings of the Farmingville Civic Association, a nonpartisan community organization that dealt with town issues. The meetings often became shouting matches, and in 1998 about forty of the most vociferous and angry residents of Farmingville formed a group called Sachem Quality of Life, named after Farmingville’s
school district.

Members of the group—working-class, nativist, and militant—accused undocumented Latino immigrants not only of harassing young women with catcalls and of urinating and defecating in public but also of being inherently prone to rape, armed robbery, and other violent crimes. They approached the media, demanding that public officials at local and federal levels act immediately. Specifically they wanted to get rid of the one hundred or so men in their midst who were standing on street corners daily in search of work. They organized protest rallies right across the streets from where the laborers waited, harassing and yelling epithets not only at the workers but also at the contractors who approached the pickup sites. Eventually the group even demanded that the US military occupy Farmingville so that immigrants could be effectively rounded up and deported.
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The arrival of the Mexican laborers in Farmingville—and the backlash against them—coincided with a global rising tide of xenophobia. In 1996, Paul J. Smith, director of the Pacific Forum’s project on migrant trafficking, wrote a piece for the
International Herald Tribune,
in which he described how 1995 had been “a critical turning point in an era of growing international migration.” It was the year, he said, “in which the backlash against immigrants, once believed to be a xenophobic reaction limited to rich, industrialized countries, went global.” He cited examples of countries—in Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, and the Americas, as well as western and eastern Europe—where immigrants had become the targets of fierce campaigns to “track, persecute and ultimately drive them away.”

The global backlash, Smith noted, “reflects the emergence of international migration as the most serious social and political crisis of the 1990s, one that is certain to worsen as population pressures, unemployment, and economic disparities between countries become even more acute.”
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If Farmingville were a country, what happened there could have easily bolstered Smith’s point. The members of Sachem
Quality of Life lobbied hard against a bill authorizing the building of a day-laborer hiring center. County executive Bob Gaffney vetoed the bill, the site was never built, and incidents of harassment against immigrants continued, becoming almost daily occurrences. People threw rocks and bottles at the workers, fired BB guns at them, and broke the windows of houses where they suspected immigrants lived. Television cameras captured most of the action.
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With so much press and the potential for more, Farmingville came to the attention of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for immigration control. The federation sent an organizer to step up recruiting efforts, organize street rallies, promote media outreach, and contribute to a propaganda campaign that, among other things, blamed laborers for a nonexistent rise in crimes such as burglary and rape. With the help of the organizer, Sachem gained four hundred members, who began referring to Latino laborers as “invaders” and labeled anyone who helped them as “traitors” to America. Together Sachem Quality of Life and FAIR heavily influenced the way immigrants were perceived in Suffolk County and helped set the tone for public discourse on immigration.
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Sachem Quality of Life also contacted American Patrol, a national nativist group associated with anti-immigrant vigilante activities on the US-Mexico border. With the intervention of outsiders and the heated rhetoric of many of its residents, Farmingville quickly became ground zero for the lingering national debate on immigration.
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All this tension finally culminated in a particularly vicious incident during the early Sunday morning hours of September 17, 2000. Two young men in a silver station wagon approached one of the 7-Eleven corners and picked up a Mexican laborer for a job. The laborer indicated that he already had work for the day, but he directed the men to his house where two friends, Israel Pérez, nineteen, and Magdaleno Escamilla, twenty-eight, were
staying and looking for jobs. The men with the station wagon, Ryan Wagner, eighteen, and Christopher Slavin, twenty-eight, said they needed help repairing a floor and took the workers to an abandoned warehouse in a nearby town.

They were asked to crawl into a basement—presumably the place where the floor needed repair. There Wagner and Slavin attacked the workers with a crowbar and a shovel, and stabbed them with a knife. Pérez and Escamilla fought back, wrestling a shovel from the attackers, who fled the warehouse. In pain and bleeding, the Mexican men stumbled out. They stood on the street, flagging down cars for help until someone stopped and, thinking the men had been in a car accident, called the police.

The police took them to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, where a reporter from the
New York Times
interviewed them. They told the reporter that from the start they’d had an uneasy feeling about the white men who lured them to the abandoned building with the promise of work. Escamilla was treated and released. Pérez had to have surgery for a severed tendon in his left wrist. The attackers were eventually caught, tried, and convicted. Slavin was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, while Wagner got fifteen years.
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The reporter also interviewed Ray Wysolmierski, a leader of Sachem Quality of Life. Wysolmierski rejected the idea that his group had helped to inflame racial hatred in the community. “This was inevitably going to happen whether we existed or not,” he told the reporter. “People wait on the corner for people to hire them. Those who hire them aren’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize. As far as I’m concerned, they are all criminals.”
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It isn’t difficult to imagine how a child might have internalized the events that were happening a few blocks from his home, right outside the local 7-Eleven where his parents stopped to buy Coke, gum, or a lottery ticket. In a child’s imagination, the crimes could easily get confused. Who were the criminals and who were the victims here?

On July 5, 2003, sometime during the night, five white teenagers in Farmingville threw a firebomb at the house of a Mexican family.
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The family escaped but the hatred did not. It stayed in Suffolk County, barely hidden, gathering strength, festering. Five years later all of that hatred would finally culminate in a murder committed by seven teenagers who grew up with the turmoil of Farmingville as background noise.

The rhetoric of groups such as Sachem Quality of Life was not unlike the steady anti-immigration diet the rest of America was receiving, particularly on television programs such as
Lou Dobbs Tonight
on CNN. Dobbs, who boasted of receiving two thousand e-mails a day—not all of them congratulatory—unleashed a campaign against undocumented immigrants, whom he repeatedly and with apparent relish called “illegal aliens,” that lasted more than six years.

Reporters on his show filed stories, such as the one that aired November 4, 2006, highlighting the amount of money “illegal aliens” were costing the government: $12 billion in primary and secondary education, $17 billion for the education of so-called anchor babies—the US-born children of undocumented parents—and $1 billion to reimburse hospitals for the care of undocumented immigrants, they claimed. The report ended with a somber Dobbs stating that the issue of “illegal aliens” was “a problem that is certainly not going to go away.”

On his program he often claimed to be pro-immigration, but against illegal immigration. He advocated for a fence between the United States and Mexico and called the daily arrival of undocumented immigrants “an invasion.” They used “illegal benefits,” he claimed, and undercut jobs that should go to the less-educated US citizens. He blamed undocumented immigrants for crowding schools and using taxpayers’ money to get free health care and education for their children, services that they could not receive in their own countries.

While immigrants do come to the United States for opportunities that are unavailable in their home countries, Dobbs’s tone communicated a sense of urgency and danger: Mexicans were a problem, a nuisance, a pest. Once, he went as far as to link undocumented immigrants to a spike in the number of leprosy cases in the United States. Later a
60 Minutes
piece proved him wrong.
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Dobbs wasn’t alone in his relentless criticism of undocumented immigrants. From his perch at Fox News, Bill O’Reilly expounded nightly on the evils of illegal immigrants, at least once engaging in a shouting match with a guest, veteran television journalist Geraldo Rivera, over whether or not the immigration status of a drunk driver who killed a young woman in Virginia was relevant. While the men sparred, viewers saw text moving slowly through the frame below their images: “Daughter Killed by Illegal Alien.” For Rivera, the issue was about drunk driving. O’Reilly insisted the driver should have never been in the country to begin with. Rivera asked him if he wanted to start a mob scene. “Do you want your viewers to go knocking on people’s doors and ask them, ‘Are you illegal? I want to take you outside and do something to you.’ ” He went on, “History has seen what happens when you single out people like that.”
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On another occasion O’Reilly talked about a man from Houston who had shot and killed two men who were burglarizing his neighbor’s house. The discussion centered on the burglars’ immigration status instead of on the fact that the man had left the safety of his house to hunt down and kill two immigrants who were not endangering his life. “Talking Point says, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” O’Reilly said, looking squarely into the camera.
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In 2006, Patrick J. Buchanan published
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,
which quickly became a
New York Times
best seller. From the prologue on, Buchanan’s book is a frontal attack against immigrants, particularly Hispanics:

In 1960, there were perhaps 5 million Asians and Hispanics in the United States. Today, there are 57 million. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of all Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean peoples have moved into the United States. One to 2 million enter every year and stay, half of them in defiance of America’s laws and disdain for America’s borders. No one knows how many illegal aliens are here. The estimates run from 12 to 20 million.

This is not immigration as America knew it, when men and women made a conscious choice to turn their backs on their native lands and cross the ocean to become Americans. This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history.
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The United States, he went on, was being destroyed by Mexican invaders.

Samuel P. Huntington struck a similar note in
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,
published in 2004. “In the contemporary world,” he wrote, “the greatest threat to the societal security of nations comes from immigration.”
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One solution, he claimed, was to strive for assimilation, but there was a problem. “Assimilation is particularly problematic for Mexicans and other Hispanics,” he declared.
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The word “invasion” became part of the discourse, and the ominous threat of this very visible “invasion” didn’t escape those who had absconded to suburbia behind their proverbial white picket fences. While most of these fences were metaphorical, real white fences had been erected in part to keep strangers away, unless the strangers happened to be mowing the lawn at a really cheap rate.