City torn by immigration proposal

FREMONT, Neb. — In some ways, this city seems an unlikely place for a dispute about illegal immigration.

Its older neighborhoods have a Norman Rockwell flavor, with Victorian-era homes and old-fashioned front porches, some adorned with American flag buntings. Its downtown district is dominated by antique stores and little shops with names like “Grama's China Closet,” “The Yankee Peddler” and “Country Traditions.”

Many of its 25,000 residents commute down U.S. 275 to jobs in Omaha.

Increasingly, though, stores with names like “Epicentro,” and “Supermercado” and “La Tapatio” have cropped up among the downtown businesses.

Two meatpacking plants just outside the city rely on immigrant workers. The Hormel Foods Corp. pork processing plant is the community's biggest employer. At Fremont Beef, 17 workers were arrested in March on federal charges of identity theft, document fraud and false claims of U.S. citizenship.

Dramatic growth in Fremont's foreign-born population and citizen concerns about illegal immigration's costs culminated in July 2008 with the City Council narrowly defeating a proposed ordinance aimed at clearing Fremont of undocumented workers.

Now that ordinance is back before voters June 21.

With the election less than two weeks away, there are few outward signs of campaigns on either side of the issue, though one opposition group reported Wednesday that it had raised $8,000. A trip up and down Main Street reveals a community still torn by the issue and reluctant to discuss it.

Supporters of the ordinance remain angry over the problems they say are caused by illegal immigration and over the government's failure to take action. Hispanic residents — most of whom are citizens or legal residents of the U.S. — said they feel singled out and vulnerable.

Some business people said they were uncertain how the ordinance would affect them, and many didn't want to talk about it for fear of alienating customers over the touchy subject.

“Most of Fremont wants this election to be over with,” said Kristin Ostrom, a pro-immigration volunteer who is helping to organize a campaign against the ordinance.

A leader of the petition drive to get the ordinance on the ballot, Jerry Hart, said people already have their minds made up one way or another.

“The main thing is to get people out to vote.” said Hart, 62, a retired accountant who worked 30 years for the Internal Revenue Service.

Much has happened in the two years since the mayor cast a tie-breaking vote to reject the ordinance.

A mayor's task force proposed non-legislative policies to curb illegal immigration, but city officials never implemented those ideas. A pro-immigrant group launched a series of events to be more welcoming toward immigrants. City officials and citizen petitioners battled to the Nebraska Supreme Court over whether the public vote should happen.

The same day the Nebraska court ordered the Fremont election to proceed, Arizona's governor signed a law compelling local police to ask for proof of residency from people they suspect of being illegal immigrants, stepping up the debate over immigration nationally. Former Fremont City Councilman Charlie Janssen, who voted for the ordinance, now is a state senator who has said he plans to offer similar legislation for Nebraska.

Fremont historically has been 98 percent white, according to U.S. Census data, but today there are about 2,000 Hispanic people who live in Fremont — eight times more than the 1990 population. About 1,100 foreign-born residents, mostly from Latin America and Asia, live in Fremont.

Authorities don't know how many undocumented immigrants might be working in Fremont. Ordinance opponents, extrapolating estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, estimate fewer than 350 people. Ordinance supporters think the problem is far more widespread and costly.

Former City Councilman Bob Warner said he is suspicious of the number of adults in Fremont who seem to have no knowledge of English.

Warner, 82, said that during his 32-year career as a supervisor with Hawkins Construction in Omaha, he often worked with Mexican laborers on his construction crews. He said he introduced the ordinance in 2008 because of citizen complaints about unpaid hospital bills at the Fremont hospital and about growing numbers of Spanish-speaking students enrolled in Fremont schools.

Hart said he joined the petition drive because Fremont residents were growing more concerned about the changes they were seeing in Fremont.

He said when he worked out at the YMCA, he heard people griping about visitors struggling with the weight machines who didn't speak English. At the Fremont Wal-mart, he heard other customers speaking in Spanish.

And, increasingly, his friends and neighbors were voicing anger that illegal immigrants were using the hospital system without paying; overtaxing the school system with English classes for their children; and committing crimes.

“We've got gangs in Fremont now, which we never used to have,” Hart said. “There's both financial costs and social concerns. When you've got people coming here illegally, they've already broken the law. Is that the only law they're going to break?”

Opponents of the ordinance, however, say the concerns are misplaced and exaggerated, and the ordinance isn't a solution, anyway.

“The supporters of this ordinance are alarmed by a significant increase in the Hispanic population,” said Scott Jensen, 45, a hospital chaplain who represents Fremont-area church ministers. “They're different from us, and the perception is that they must be here illegally.”

Jensen said it is low-income U.S. citizens who generate most unpaid bills at the Fremont Area Medical Center, while most students being taught English at the Fremont schools are legal residents of the U.S.

Mike Marty, secretary-treasurer for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 22 at the Hormel plant, said jobs there pay between $13 to $20 an hour and include benefits. He said 98 percent of the plant's workers get health insurance coverage — meaning they're not contributing to the unpaid bills at the hospital.

Hispanic residents said they find the community more intimidating than before.

“It's all about stereotypes, singling Hispanics out,” said Susana Patino, a factory worker who has lived in Fremont 10 years. She is a U.S. citizen from Texas, and she and her husband own their home and have two small children.

When she and her mother recently visited a nail parlor, the other women started talking about the proposed ordinance. Patino said she got the message.

“I think it's just rude,” she said. “I'm not going to go flash my ID to prove I'm legal at a nail parlor.”

Alfredo Velez, who moved to Fremont in 1998 to work at the Hormel Plant and now owns a Latino grocery store, picked Fremont as a good, safe place to rear his family. Though born in Mexico, he has lived in the U.S. since 1976 and became a citizen more than 25 years ago.

More recently, he received an anonymous letter falsely accusing him of harboring illegal immigrants and someone broke out the front window of his store. Velez said he has dropped plans to start another business because he fears his customers might be driven away.

Don Hinds, a retired real estate agent who moved to Fremont 47 years ago, is co-chairman of a business-backed committee fighting the illegal immigration ordinance. He said the ordinance could cost the city millions to defend and would simply promote racism.

“Fremont is one of the most caring, compassionate, concerned communities I've ever seen,” he said. “I just hate to see that feeling or reputation being assailed like this.”

Ordinance supporters say it's “a weak point” to accuse them of racism.

“That's not at all what we're intending this to be, I cannot stress that enough,” said John Wiegert, who teaches fifth grade in Yutan, Neb. “We're for immigration, we're against illegal immigration.”

Both sides in the fight accuse the other of allowing “outsiders” to influence Fremont's decision.

Opponents say supporters are allowing Fremont to be used as a test case by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR's legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, arranged for University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor Kris Kobach to defend the petitioners and any court case challenging the ordinance.

Backers, however, point to the original city council hearing where they say people from outside Fremont crowded local residents out of the auditorium. They say the National Chamber of Commerce, the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest and ACLU Nebraska are stage-managing the opposition.

Warner said that when he introduced the ordinance, “nobody outside the city of Fremont knew I was going to do it.”

“Once I did it,” he said, “and with this Internet, I got over a hundred calls from outside of Fremont, mostly in support. There were three calls that said I was wrong, but a hundred said I was right.”

If passed, the ordinance would require businesses within city limits to use E-Verify, a federal immigration data base, to doublecheck new hires' identification documents. In addition, landlords could rent housing only to people who had first obtained a $5 occupant's license afer submiting their identification to the Fremont Police Department for verification.

Bill Ekeler, a businessman who headed the mayor's task force on immigration, formed after the council rejected the ordinance, said it won't solve the problems cited by Warner and other supporters.

The mayor's task force studied immigration's impact on the schools, the hospital system, welfare, the courts and law enforcement and issued reports that generally concluded that local officials already were doing all they're able to do under current federal law to investigate and enforce immigration requirements.

Although the task force also recommended that Fremont employers be required to use E-Verify, it mostly called for an education-oriented approach to Fremont's immigration issues.

Ekeler and his father own Overland Products, a tool and die and metal stamping business. He said he began hiring Hispanic workers six to eight years ago to fill a handful of positions with chronic turnover. Today about a dozen of his 80 workers are Hispanic.

Ekeler said the ordinance won't apply to Hormel and Fremont Beef because they're outside city limits. Many of the trailer courts where Fremont's Hispanic immigrants live also are outside city limits.

In addition, Ekeler said, most major employers already voluntarily use the E-Verify system. That includes Hormel and Fremont Beef, where suspected illegal immigrants were arrested in March. The system, he said, only verifies whether an ID is valid — not whether it actually belongs to the person using it.

Ordinance supporters say it's time to do more about illegal immigration.

“I'm sick and tired of the federal government not doing a thing about it,” said Wiegert. “I'm sick and tired of city government not doing anything. The people need to step up and do something about it.”

Warner said he's eager for the election to settle the issue. “It's been a really angry topic here and I can't blame the people of Fremont.”

Said Jensen, of the minister's group: “I know people on both sides are good people. They have good hearts. They have good intent. We all do. How can we pause, take a deep breath, and really address the immigration issue as it relates to Fremont?”

Contact the writer:

402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com

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