In my very first column for this paper, I wrote about immigration hard-liner Jim Gilchrist, a founder of the Minutemen running for Congress in Orange County, Calif. This former accountant had gained surprising momentum by taking advantage of an increasingly potent political issue that California’s political establishment hadn’t courageously addressed.
But I predicted Gilchrist would be routed in his final election, because once the protest vote is registered, the anger burned off, people need someone who knows how to govern their municipality. And Gilchrist was defeated. But, six months later, the same scenario has played out in our own region, and it turned out differently. In a few weeks, the protest candidate in the Herndon mayoral race — a gym manager who put his name on the ballot because he was peeved that the town helped build a day-laborer center for immigrants who formerly loitered at 7-Eleven — will take office. And this isn’t good.
The crowning of Herndon mayor-elect Steve DeBenedittis reads like a novel — one of those small-town novels with a dark and absurdiststreak, written by a Thornton Wilder or a Sinclair Lewis. There’s the little town whose demographics have changed tremendously in the past 15 years, its white population dwindling from 78 to 58 percent.
There are the spats within the town’s ruling class: During the campaign, one anti-day-laborer center council member alleged that an opponent on the council chucked a tin of Altoids at her!
There are the worked-up residents, who feel besieged: A Herndon retiree originally running in the race claimed that illegal immigrants “are raping our children.”
And there are the shadowy maneuverings in the campaign: An automated telephone poll asked leading questions on immigration; strange, anonymous postcards ominously warned residents to choose their candidate wisely.
And then there’s the politically unknown, all-American sportsman, swept into office along with an almost entirely new, anti-day-labor center council.
This election, with its even-better-than-fiction storyline, may look like an exciting example of democracy in action: Energized residents successfully threw out their out-of-touch leadership.
But let’s leave aside the fact that captaining a town means handling many other thorny issues besides immigration, like zoning, taxes and funding for development. These will now be managed by a guy who seems very sweet, but whose only major statement on the public record prior to the election, so far as I can tell, was a letter to The Washington Post extolling pickups: “Not a monster 4×4, or a lousy Japanese wannabe truck. A good ole American pickup truck …”
But that aside, what do DeBenedittis’s supporters really believe he’ll be able to do about the immigrants they don’t want living in Herndon? Deport them, and have towns across the country follow suit by deporting the rest of the estimated 12 million illegals already living here, more than double the number rounded up during the Holocaust? Or force them out?
DeBenedittis has given little hint of what he’d do about the day-labor center in office, but simply shuttering the place, and thereby shutting down ways for illegals to obtain job skills, learn English and become citizens, is more likely to force them into real criminal behavior.
The Herndon election shows how the immigration issue can play out on the local level. But our borders are in Texas and Arizona and California, not walling every individual town in America. It’s dangerous to take frustrations with our national approach to the borders out on local politics, because how to treat immigrants at the border and how to treat them once they’ve made it to Virginia are two totally separate propositions.
Immigration is now such a tough and emotional political problem that it may require new leaders specially equipped to reckon with it. But these leaders, if they are to be successful, will not be politically naive protest candidates. They will be, like Lincoln in another fraught era, principled statesmen committed to the kind of compromises reality will demand.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic
