What happens after we send the illegal immigrants away?

For years, we’ve been told how much better our lives would be after we truly cracked down on illegal immigration. There’d be more jobs for Americans, fewer classrooms bogged down by non-English speakers. Our emergency rooms would be free of burden. We wouldn’t have to punch “1” so much for calls in English. A better life, if only we could send the illegals home.

Now we know.

Here’s what you get when you get the Mexicans to leave: Rotting crops, businesses closing, concerned police, children missing school. And, of course, families torn apart.

But at least the lawbreakers are leaving, right?

This is what we’re seeing in Alabama, which this month began enforcing the most rigorous immigration law in the country. There, it’s illegal to knowingly employ, assist or house an undocumented immigrant. The law also compels schools and police to verify the status of immigrants – or at least those who look like one – although a circuit court temporarily blocked the schools provision late Friday.

Georgia and Arizona lawmakers have passed similar laws, and North Carolina is prepping the soil by forming a new legislative committee on immigration issues. Its goal: make North Carolina “unwelcome for any illegal alien,” said Republican Rep. Frank Iler, a co-chair, to a Wilmington reporter last week.

Now we have a preview of what comes next. In Alabama, the new law has jarred cities and rattled communities where Latinos long ago put down roots while tending crops and working in poultry plants. Church pews are emptying. Businesses are scrambling to replace workers. Police are fretting about when and when not to check papers. Superintendents are pleading with Latino parents, assuring them they won’t be grabbed for deportation when they pick up their child. It’s not working – parents have pulled the kids, many of them U.S. citizens, and kept them home.

Above all, immigrants are leaving – some to other states that might be more welcoming, some back to their homeland.

To which many of you out there would say: Great.

Immigration opponents have long declared – with some real justification – that illegal immigrants strain our emergency rooms, slow our classrooms with ESL students, and cost our cities and towns millions in services. And once they’re gone, the thinking goes, more jobs will be available for unemployed American workers.

Except: In Alabama and Georgia, farmers say the law is killing them. The farmers, most of whom live in rural, conservative counties, say the U.S. Guest Worker program is woefully inadequate in supplying workers to tend their fields. What about all those locals needing jobs? “You’re out there in the sun and the rain,” an Alabama farmers representative told the Washington Post. “It’s just not attractive to Americans.”

So crops are going unharvested, with more than half rotting in some places. Farms are floundering, and prices surely will rise. Another casualty: Businesses that serve immigrant communities are suffering and closing their doors. That’s money that helps rev our economies – and jobs going away when we need them most.

It’s why the send-them-home solution has long been antiquated. Our cities and towns have settled into commerce that includes immigrant communities, their labor force, and their dollars. A better solution includes a combination of tightening borders, penalizing illegal immigrants with back taxes and fines, and perhaps making them take English lessons to help them assimilate – all in exchange for a path to U.S. citizenship.

That basic framework happens to be what President George Bush proposed five years ago, but those ideas were trounced in the Senate. Still, his attempt offered more than President Barack Obama and Congress, who occasionally talk immigration – but never risk the danger of an actual proposal.

The reason, of course, is that poll after poll show passionate disapproval of illegal immigrants. But another survey, conducted this year by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling, showed that 69 percent of Americans were in favor of a solution similar to Bush’s, with both penalties and a path to citizenship. That support included 80 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats. Surely, numbers like those might help regrow some spines in Washington.

Because what we have otherwise is Alabama and Arizona and, soon enough, North Carolina.

Here’s what we get from those laws: U.S. citizens carrying identification papers because they look a little brown. Legal Latinos going back to their homeland, too, because they rightfully feel unwelcome. We get, most of all, another shameful chapter of Americans struggling to welcome someone different from those already living among them.

That’s OK, some say, so long as the lawbreakers are leaving.

But where is it leaving us?

An enemy's death - and neighbor's loss

What should we say to the Khan family?

They live in northeast Charlotte, in a middle class community, and in the five years before my family moved last year, they were my neighbors. They lived down the road and around the bend, and they had a son who played basketball in the street. I probably drove by him, and I’m sure I’ve waved at his parents driving by my home, but I don’t remember.

In fact, I never had occasion to meet the Khans until a few years back, when I walked down the street to knock on their door and ask, as a newspaper reporter, why their son hated the United States.

They didn’t answer the door then, and they have since been quiet until last week, when they released a statement after Samir Khan was killed Sept. 30 along with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki by a U.S. drone in Yemen.

Samir Khan was 25 years old, a former Central Piedmont Community College student who started writing a radical blog in the basement of his family’s home. By several accounts, his father and others tried to convince him his radicalism was misguided, but Khan moved to Yemen after newspaper reports about that blog. There he produced the al-Qaida magazine “Inspire,” in which he wrote: “I am proud to be a traitor to America.”

So if you’re expecting a defense of Samir Khan here, know this: He declared himself an enemy of the United States, and he died riding in a car with another sworn enemy. We can allow ourselves at least a portion of the satisfaction he would’ve taken if our country were to be attacked again.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t questions we should ask. What should we say to the Khan family, which was contacted by the U.S. government last week only after the family noted in the statement that no U.S. official had called about Samir Khan’s remains, nor offered any condolences? How do we respond when the Khans point to their son’s death, then to the Fifth Amendment, which promises due process to American citizens?

Constitutional scholars have been divided when asked to reconcile the two. Khan’s death sets a precedent in which the U.S. president can authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a formal charge or trial – and without, essentially, any substantial outside checks on the decision. Even if we think this president made no error with this decision, do we move forward believing every president will make the same, right choice for the right reasons, unchecked and in secrecy? If you were troubled by the constitutional overreaches of the post-?9/11 Bush administration, you should be just as unsettled now.

Many won’t be, of course, just as many have responded to the Khan family statement with the predictably shrill voices that paint Samir Khan as representative of the Muslim American population. Some of us, too, struggle with a subtler and quieter discomfort. It’s that anxiety that’s stirred whenever we see a turban on a plane, and although we fight that urge, in difficult moments we give in. We look the other way when we learn that there’s one less terrorist that can threaten us. We don’t admonish our government for being shamed into acknowledging a family’s pain.

We are 10 years past 9/11, and the stain keeps reappearing. Not the extremists who protest mosques and prattle about Sharia law. Not the intolerant who will find fear no matter the color of its skin. It’s the reasonable among us who lose that reason, in subtle and significant ways, then promise we are and will be better than that.

So what do we say to the Khans, our neighbors, who lost a son last week after losing him years ago? Perhaps there’s not anything we can say, but we can start with this:

We’re sorry.

When the risk-takers run out of risks

That house on Camilla Drive is finally off the market.

You may have seen it driving through South Charlotte – or in an Observer column I wrote late last year. It’s a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 6,977-square-foot palace near South Park, a home that has a little Charleston, a little Dilworth, and a lot of made-you-look going on.

It is, depending on your perspective, a spectacularly unusual house in a city where even the mansions are afflicted with sameness – or it’s a self-indulgent castle unwisely plunked in a neighborhood of smaller and plainer 1970s and 80s homes.

This much we know: 4823 Camilla Drive was on the market for more than eight years, longer than any home that Realtors across Charlotte could recall. Most told us they couldn’t think of another home that came close to hanging on the rack that long.

But now the house has occupants, who have signed a lease-purchase agreement allowing them to pay monthly rent that goes toward a purchase down the road, if they decide they want to own. So although the house is off the market, it technically has not been sold.

Which means it can torment its owner a little while longer.

“Nothing about this house,” says Eric Markel, “has been easy.”

You might remember Markel. He is the cocky president of a New York property management company who moved to Charlotte 13 years ago. He decided to build a few luxury homes here, none more extravagant than Camilla, but he chose to put that house in a neighborhood with properties worth a fifth of his home’s $2.45 million asking price.

It was a bold choice in a city where boldness usually paid off handsomely. But although people were dazzled by 4823 Camilla when it hit the market in 2003, no one bought it. Then, the recession arrived.

By the time he gave me a tour last December, he was understandably miffed. Along with touting the Brazilian hardwood on the deck and the custom cherry kitchen cabinets, he had some less-than-laudatory things to say about real estate agents and Charlotte in general.

“People don’t understand it,” he said of 4823 Camilla.

And: “They’re living in their own little Charlotte world.”

Charlotte, as you might imagine, had some suggestions on what Markel might do with those Brazilian planks.

Markel laughs now at the comments – his and other’s – although he still thinks Charlotte didn’t fully appreciate his creation. He does, however, have this to say about his homebuilding career: “It’s done.”

That would be a shame, because even if it comes bundled in brashness, Markel has a point about Camilla and Charlotte. When he built the house eight years ago, our city was beginning to do things out of the ordinary architecturally. Markel saw Camilla as the antithesis of the new luxury homes that populated Charlotte, the brick mansions with all the same bells and whistles that builders knew would attract buyers.

Charlotte has historically been much like those builders – checking off all the amenities that newcomers might like. We’re clean and pretty, and we have museums and pro teams, all of which is why people like Eric Markel came here and stayed.

That’s helped us thrive enough that something special was beginning: We were accommodating the uncommon, the independent businesses and funkier neighborhoods that give a city more texture and soul.

Then the economy squeezed most everything, including Markel, who’s doing fine now, in case you’re wondering. He’s made enough money elsewhere to survive the financial blows, but he says: “I can only imagine the bigger guys that really got hit.”

He believes prosperity will return here, and he’s already seeing glimpses of it in small ways – busier nights at restaurants and the mall. Bigger investment will come, he says, for all the reasons Charlotte thrived before.

But the risk-takers, the people who wanted to build one unusual house, open one unusual business? Those are the ones who have the least amount of resources – and the least amount of will – to risk it all again. In some ways, with our biggest businesses among our most uncertain, the smallest are the ones we need more than ever.

Maybe so, Eric Markel says, although it won’t be him. “My day has passed,” he says.

Then he pauses.

“But,” he says, “human beings have short memories.”

A wedding, and all that we bring to it

Bobby is unsure about his wedding. He’s thinking that intimate might be the way to go – family and some close friends in a small celebration. Or maybe a bigger bash with everyone they know, a chance to look out on all those faces smiling back at you.

He’s the last in our family who’s unmarried. My sister was the first to take the plunge, more than 20 years ago in New Hampshire. A little more than a decade later, I brought everyone south to my bride’s Alabama church.

Now Bobby, my older brother, is thinking of having us join him in New York, where lawmakers voted this summer to legalize same-sex marriage.

This week, N.C. legislators dug in harder on keeping the wedding day away from gays, approving a constitutional amendment outlawing homosexual marriage that will go before voters next May. Our state already has a law against gay marriage, of course, but a consititutional amendment is harder to change than a simple law. Gay marriage opponents know it’s their best chance at defending an institution they believe is under attack.

That’s a word – attack – that sneaks often into this gay marriage debate. And also this word: agenda. It’s how those who fear homosexuality separate gays from the rest of us, by painting them as “others,” as an occupying force that wants to diminish the things we hold important.

Some of us, maybe most of us, know something different – that gays are our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They grew up in the same households we did, grounded in the same values and appreciating the same institutions, then keeping or discarding those lessons as we all do when we move into adulthood. There is no gay filter through which they process all of life’s issues. It’s part, not the entirety, of who they are.

In my house, those values and institutions were brought to us by parents who are approaching 50 years together, with the delights and bumpiness that so many marriages traverse. Now, says Bobby, he looks around and is sometimes troubled that marriage isn’t valued the way he thinks it should be. That might surprise you if you believe, as many do, that gays don’t bring the same depth of commitment to their relationships. But Bobby, who’s been with his partner for 15 years, wants to participate in marriage for the same reason others don’t want him to – because it says something important.

He understands, too, that such importance is what tangles marriage with legislation. As much as homosexuals and their advocates would like a clean break between our laws and our religion, our laws are a reflection of our values, and those values are often grounded in faith.

And this is where I confess. I’ve long struggled with what my Bible says about my brother. I know Leviticus, along with the other Scripture spread before us as evidence against homosexuality. But scholars I respect tell me the Bible isn’t as certain about gays as some think. They also tell me to be cautious about selective literalism – holding up the passage condemning homesexuality yet ignoring the one that says it’s shameful for a woman to speak at church.

What they don’t have to tell me is this: We should all think hard before declaring ourselves God’s proxy on determining what makes for a big sin – and who is a sinner.

Yes, that’s an easier spot to land intellectually when you have a brother who’s gay, but polls are showing that time is bringing more of us to the same place. We live in a country that moves slowly in allowing rights to its minorities, but eventually it gets there, and eventually we will.

That’s a good thing not only for the oft-stated and significant reasons – that gay marriage laws discriminate and fuel hostility, and that gays deserve the rights and benefits that come with marriage. It’s good because my brother and Osvaldo, and all our brothers and sisters, get to do the same thing we did – stand in front of a large or intimate gathering, wear a tux or a dress or a ring or none of those, but announce a commitment we believe will endure.

Bobby isn’t sure about his wedding’s particulars, but with it he’ll get to appreciate all those things big and small. In time, that’s coming here, too, no matter what happened last week or happens in May. It’s coming not because we’re finally willing to accept people who are different, but because we understand that they’re not.

I'm moving. (Sort of.)

I'm packing and hauling - across the newsroom. I'm honored to be taking a position on the Observer's editorial board.

I'll continue to do columns - at least weekly - that tell our stories and talk about issues, so keep sending me your thoughts and ideas. Those columns will appear in this blog, so online readers won't notice much of a difference moving forward. In print, the columns will appear in our Opinion section instead of the Local section.

I'll also be participating in the editorial process, and I'm excited to share my perspective with editorial board members, who are among the most thoughtful people I know. Regular readers of this column know that I land center-right on many issues, especially fiscal. But not all.

As I wrote in my first metro column a year ago:

I’m 45, a husband, a dad. I’m about to become the third smartest person in my house, behind my wife who was ahead of me all along – and my 9-year-old son, who is gaining fast. I attend church each week. I like sports. I write beer reviews. I grill.

....I’ve been writing news and features and sports for almost 20 years, long enough to understand that you rarely peg folks based on first impressions, or even third impressions.

Here’s an example: If I tell you I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, which I did, some of you will get to work taping up that ideological box we like to put people in. But what if I tell you I voted for George Bush in 2000? And that I’m not entirely comfortable with the way either decided to spend my tax dollars?

Regular readers also know I welcome your thoughts and won't hesitate to discuss the topics I write about in the comments that follow. That won't change with the new gig.

I'll start on Monday. Talk with you soon.

Peter

From one gesture, a larger harvest comes

Bill Crowder lives on 20 acres near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He’s farmed some of that land, but he’s thought recently that he’d like to use it better. Earlier this month, his sister called with an idea that she got from reading the Sunday newspaper.

Gaye Dimmick read the same thing – a column I wrote about Chris Yost, who earlier this year invited Bhutanese refugees to turn her half-acre east Charlotte backyard into a farm. The refugees, who were farmers long ago, once again had land to tend and find worth in.

Dimmick, who has more than a dozen raised beds at her home off Central Avenue, decided she wanted to do the same for refugees. Crowder says he could plow a patch in his land if refugee families wanted to plant and harvest. There are others, too, more than a half dozen people from Mooresville to Mint Hill, making the extraordinary offer to let strangers use what’s theirs.

One of the satisfactions of writing for a newspaper is the benevolence we often see. Write about someone who’s trying to overcome hardship, and readers will hold out their hands, with kindness that can swell your heart.

But this story, and the response to it, might be about more than kindness.

For Gaye Dimmick, it is. She and her partner, Jean Wesselman, started their urban garden a few years back when Jean lost her job. They sold their harvest at farmers markets for extra income, but Jean got a job last year, and the garden became less of a priority. When Gaye read about Chris Yost, she saw an opportunity to keep her land purposeful.

There’s also this: Gaye just turned 50. “I thought, ‘Let me live my next 50 years a lot better than I lived my first.’ ”

Bill Crowder grows corn and beans and peas on his land in northeast Charlotte. Last year, his sister told him about her church starting a community garden to give food to Charlotte shelters, and he considered helping out this year. When he heard about Chris Yost, he thought of the refugees and his land. “They would get more good out of it than I will,” Bill says.

Patrice Ognodo nods at this. He’s the founder of the Neighborhood Good Samaritan Center, which for six years has helped refugees assimilate to their new home in Charlotte. Patrice is from Togo in west Africa, and he spent three years in a refugee camp before coming to the United States. Once an attorney in Togo, he drove a cab in Charlotte before one of his fares helped him start a career – and a new life – selling insurance.

Now he is seeing a different and profound kind of generosity. “We have been waiting for something like this,” he says.

Patrice has spent the last two weeks joyfully visiting backyards and other patches of land, then arranging for refugee families to come. He knows what will happen next, because it’s happening now in Chris Yost’s backyard. In that land, the refugees reclaim a small part of their lives, a part he’s heard them talking about, while they farm. He calls them their “Once upon a time” stories.

Here’s another: Once upon a time, many of us saw our land and possessions differently. We accumulated what we needed, but not necessarily all that we wanted. Now, in these hard years that follow prosperity, more of us are re-evaluating what we use and what we waste. “People are rethinking their values,” says Gaye Dimmick. Maybe these backyard farms, these unusual loans, are a product of that.

Or maybe it’s simply the generosity of some good people. That’s OK, too.

At Chris Yost’s house, by the way, the farm is flourishing. “Holy cow,” she says. “Everything’s coming up.” This past week, her refugee friends picked three bulging bags of eggplant and okra, snap peas and peppers. As usual, they knocked on her front door to share some of the bounty.

With Charlotte Knights, commission makes an error

Four years ago, Mecklenburg County commissioners participated in a complex exchange of parcels and buildings with the city of Charlotte and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The big swap was largely for the benefit of a minor league baseball team – one that couldn’t fill half its stadium in South Carolina and wasn’t required to provide much assurance that it could afford a new center-city home.

But it was Charlotte, and it was early 2007, and back then we dealt in a prosperity that made risks seem hardly risky.

In the four years since, however, we’ve endured a recession and its suffocating residue. Some of our tax-supported risks have turned out worse than expected: The NASCAR Hall of Fame gets a third of its original attendance projections. The U.S. Whitewater Center makes money only if it doesn’t have to pay its debt.

As for the Class AAA Charlotte Knights – they’re no closer to getting the funds they need to build and live uptown.

So why is our county commission behaving like it’s still 2007?

Commissioners voted 7-2 Tuesday to take the next step toward extending the Knights lease agreement on an uptown plot of land for another year. The extension comes with a few new conditions – such as $100,000 in earnest money – that are designed to make the commission look tougher this time around. But it’s essentially the same deal – except better for the ballclub.
This time, commissioners decided to waive an important safeguard requiring the team to show its long-term financial viability within 10 days of signing the lease.

That clause was a part of two original agreements that gave a sweet deal to the Knights. The team got a patch of uptown land worth millions, plus some more millions worth of infrastructure work. It had “sole discretion” about any loans and financing it would use, and it didn’t have to provide details upfront about sponsorship and naming rights, which can account for up to half of a ballclub’s financing package.

That means the team got everything it needed for an uptown stadium, without having to prove it could actually build one and survive in it.

In Charlotte 2007, that wasn’t such an outrageous proposition. Uptown had decided that minor league baseball would improve its curb appeal, and when center city’s power brokers historically gave the nod to that type of venture, the money eventually followed.

The recession changed all that – not only for the Knights, but for the city. We’ve spent the past few years thinking smaller, not bigger. We’re reevaluating budget priorities. We’re looking harder at the risks we want to take with our money.

Or at least we should. But instead of requiring the Knights to provide signed agreements upfront for naming rights and two top-tier sponsorships, the county now proposes allowing the Knights to buy their way out of that mandate by paying another $100,000 to escrow. (Which might seem like a lot until you consider the team has been collecting years of parking revenue off that uptown parcel.) And instead of requiring the Knights to prove with audited financials that they could weather attendance falling short or costs swelling, the county is again leaving that requirement vague.

Commission chair Jennifer Roberts, among the seven who voted this week to move toward a final vote next month, says the lease extension is appropriate. The land won’t be used in the next year anyway, she says, so why not give the Knights another year to figure things out. If they do, it would be a good thing for uptown.

The thing is, she’s right. It’s not difficult to picture walking to a Third Ward ballpark after work, watching some quality baseball, looking out to see uptown’s skyscrapers draped over the outfield walls. But as we’ve learned, attendance isn’t always what we think it will be. Revenues fall short. Bills still have to be paid. If the Knights find uptown wasn’t their cure after all, they’ll likely come asking for public help, no matter how clearly a lease agreement says the county has put its wallet away. Will the commissioners choose a big, empty ballpark then?

Better to get assurances now, instead of getting caught up in how good uptown baseball might be, which is what the commission did this week, all over again. In 2007, that might have been the visionary thing to do. Now it’s just irresponsible.