Crossing a line

This week's Economist reports on a story that has escaped the attention of the British media.

Farmers Branch is a small city of 27,000 people in north-east Texas. Like many outposts in the state, it has absorbed a large number of illegal Mexican immigrants; between 1990 and 2000 the number of Hispanics rose from 20 per cent to 37 per cent of the population. The growing Mexican presence caught the eye of Tim O'Hare, a blue-eyed, toothy-grinned personal injury lawyer, who connected this demographic change with the sluggish performance of his house price and the middling SAT performance of Farmers Branch schools. As a member of the City Council, O'Hare realised he was in a convenient place to do something about this. The result was Ordinance 2093, which proposed landlords should verify prospective tenants as American or legal citizens, with fines of up to $500 per tenant per day for those found to be harbouring illegal aliens.

Regrettably, the ordinance was warmly received in Farmers Branch, despite being outwardly racist, creating law enforcers out of landlords and encouraging blanket prejudice against Hispanics. According to the website created by O'Hare and his fellow campaigners, the bill was backed by over two-thirds of voters in a referendum. The US district court had the sense to intervene and stop the bill in its tracks, but not before the city's mayor who opposed the bill had been hounded out of City Hall by vandals. In response, O'Hare is considering appealing to the federal supreme court.

The background to the events of Farmers Branch is President George W. Bush's ongoing attempt to reform US immigration policy. The latest version of Bush's bill stalled in the senate this week when it failed to garner the required support (60 per cent) necessary to trigger a vote. The bill has been watered down to a compromise that now suits nobody. Bush's own supporters are split in half. The employers favour easy immigration to enable them to pay illegals paltry wages to do their most unpleasant jobs, while the social conservatives have baulked the proposal to offer immediate legal status to the 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the US. The second part of the bill would tighten the security of the Mexican border through hundreds of miles of new fencing, thousands of new border guards and an ID card system.

This will relieve the self-appointed Minutemen who have stalked the border voluntarily for years whilst emitting a constant, low-level grumble about how the government ought to be doing the job for them. The Minutemen and one-off entrepreneurs such as Tim O'Hare have become both more acceptable, and more popular due to the Bush administration's failure to live up to one of its key priorities. The current congressional deadlock may mean it is up to the 2008 presidential candidates to ensure that a process as ugly as vigilantism does not spread further.