One town's struggle to accept immigrants

Walking by the remains of a firebombed clapboard home that was formerly occupied by a family of Mexican immigrants, Pedro Escorza Vargas shrugs incredulously.

"This was racism," says Mr. Vargas, a Mexican day laborer. "Most of the people here know we just want to work, but there are some that hate us."

Just after midnight on July 5, long after local Independence Day firework displays had ended, a flammable device was thrown into a small two-story house in this semi-suburban Long Island town. The house, with a family sleeping inside, was quickly enveloped in flames. Neighbors who heard the blast helped ferry the family out of the home without injury.

Though Suffolk County police initially stopped short of calling the firebombing a "bias crime," officer Robert Reecks said last week that after more investigation, "it looks like they have been targeted because of who they are." The FBI has also become involved.

Like other towns that have experienced a sudden influx of immigrants, Farmingville has become a flash point for those angry about the rising presence of nonwhite immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, but also from Africa, India, China, and other parts of Asia. Although a virulently anti-immigrant group based in Farmingville lost much public support during the past year, the firebombing suggests hostilities haven't vanished. Indeed, the incident highlights the tensions sometimes produced when a sizable number of immigrants take up residence in places well removed from urban centers.

"How immigrants or any new group is met by those who have lived there for a while depends on the community itself," says Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks the operations of hate groups nationwide. "Some communities are able to assimilate these people. Some tolerate and even welcome them. Some go in the opposite direction."

For immigrants and their advocates, the location of the arson attack erased any doubt that the incident was meant to intimidate the 3,000 or so Latino immigrants that live and look for work in the town. Immediately next door to the firebombed house, now boarded up, lies the home once occupied by two Mexican laborers who were nearly killed after being picked up in Farmingville in 2000 by a pair of white supremacists masquerading as contractors. The laborers, both undocumented immigrants, were taken to an abandoned industrial park in a neighboring town and attacked with a pole-hole digger and a knife.

Back then, suspicions fixed on a highly visible anti-immigrant group called the Sachem Quality of Life Organization. However, the pair later convicted of attempted manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years in prison were neither members of Sachem nor residents of Farmingville. Rather, one lived in Queens and the other elsewhere on Long Island.

Ed Person, president of Sachem, flatly states that none of his members had anything to do with this month's firebombing. He adds, "If the federal and state governments were enforcing the law against these illegal aliens, a lot less of these problems would be going on."

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