By KENT JACKSON
Staff Writer

SCRANTON — Enforcing Hazleton’s ordinance to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants will increase wages for legal workers, a Harvard economist testified Monday in a trial about the law’s constitutionality.

Professor George Borjas based his testimony on his national research showing a 10 percent increase in immigration triggers a drop in wages of 3 to 4 percent. Wages declined 8 percent in one study of low-skilled workers from 1980 to 2000, he said.

Borjas, who emigrated from Cuba in 1962, was the first witness called by the city in the trial that began March 12.

STEVE MOCARSKY
Staff Writer

SCRANTON – Attorneys on both sides in Hazleton’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act trial believe they advanced their cases through testimony from expert witnesses as the trial entered its second week on Monday.

One witness said the presence of illegal immigrants working in Hazleton would drive down wages for competing workers, and their absence would lead to higher wages for workers competing for those jobs.

The other said that all undocumented non-citizens in the United States are “not necessarily illegal,” refuting Mayor Lou Barletta’s well-known contention that “illegal is illegal.”

By Milan Simonich
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HAZLETON, Pa. -- This small city is filled with immigrants and urban legends. Most of the stories claim that the Hazleton laws aimed at throwing out illegal immigrants have harmed innocent people instead.

On North Wyoming Street, where Latino newcomers operate nearly all the businesses, many people insist that the ordinances drove out Jose and Rosa Lechuga, who owned a restaurant and grocery store.

The Lechugas, legal immigrants from Mexico, said police damaged their businesses by parking cruisers nearby. They said this was a source of intimidation to potential customers, whether they had citizenship or not.

Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta and I are almost related. His Uncle Joe dated my Aunt Melane. You could say we came close to being a butter knife away at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Barletta is now being vilified in certain quarters for combating illegal immigration. He deserves praise, not scorn. His city is a place with which I am well familiar.

My parents both grew up there.
My mother is one of the "Grovich girls" from Green Street. There were eight of them, plus three brothers.

Her parents were immigrants from Yugoslavia who settled in the 1920s, drawn by mining jobs. Mom was once Miss West Hazleton High. Mr. West Hazleton High was a guy named Moose Denesevich. Names like that (or Smerconish) used to be as common in Hazleton as Smith or Jones.

By KENT JACKSON
Staff Writer

SCRANTON – By winning a court battle challenging its immigration law, Hazleton might gain $100,000, or about what it spent last year on police overtime, which the mayor said rose due to illegal immigration.

Fees of $10 that tenants pay under the act will amount to $100,000 more than last year, according to a line in the city’s budget that an attorney challenging the act read during the trial Friday.

Attorney Thomas Fiddler brought up the fee when quizzing city Administrator Samuel Monticello during a cross-examination that also might cause the judge to re-evaluate what Mayor Louis Barletta said Thursday about police overtime.

JENNIFER LEARN-ANDES
Staff Writer

HAZLETON – The city’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act court battle has become the talk of the town at bars, restaurants and pretty much anywhere folks congregate.

A couple of regulars at Third Base – a Hazleton institution known for its hoagies – were more than willing to share their opinions, as long as their names were not printed. The owner of the eatery declined to get in the middle of the debate.

The customers said illegal immigrants don’t belong here – period – and should be forced to comply with laws “like everyone else.”

They said they have no problem with legal, taxpaying newcomers and are tired of people in the national media portraying Hazletonians as bigots. They say support for the ordinance is automatically interpreted as anti-Latino.

BY WADE MALCOLM
Staff Writer

Despite Hazleton’s intentions to begin enforcing its illegal immigrant control ordinance Nov. 1, city code enforcement officers never received training in how to verify immigration papers, several witnesses testified Friday in the federal court trial of a suit seeking to have the ordinance declared illegal.

City code enforcement officer Rich Wech and Paul Kattner testified they were unfamiliar with how the ordinance would work and what their responsibility would be.

City engineer Bob Dougherty, who supervises the code enforcement office, said he has no procedures in place for how to investigate violations of the ordinance, which aims to punish landlords renting to and businesses hiring illegal immigrants.

By Matt Birkbeck
Of The Morning Call

Newly compiled police statistics reveal that violent crime in Hazleton rose by 60 percent from 2003 to 2006, when the city experienced an influx of new Hispanic residents, Mayor Lou Barletta testified Thursday.

Barletta also said 19 illegal immigrants were charged with violent crimes including homicide, rape and aggravated assault last year, more than all the illegal immigrants charged during the preceding five years combined.

''How many people need to be shot before we stand up and fight back?'' Barletta said during his second day of testimony in a federal trial over Hazleton's Illegal Immigration Relief Act. The ordinance, passed last summer, imposes fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and companies that employ them.

By KENT JACKSON
Staff Writer

A tally of violent crimes presented Thursday in federal court corresponded with what Mayor Louis Barletta said he saw in Hazleton before proposing the Illegal Immigration Relief Act.

Taking the stand for the second consecutive day in the trial about the act’s constitutionality, Barletta described crimes that jarred his community the past six years:

o A murder on a Friday night in October 2001 as students went for pizza after a high school football game.

o A young woman staggering onto the street with a knife in her stomach after her boyfriend stabbed her and jumped out a window onto a police officer in 2003.

By STEVE MOCARSKY
Staff Writer

SCRANTON – Hazleton Mayor Louis Barletta on Thursday finally got to tell a judge the story he’s been sharing with the rest of the world for the past nine months – but in greater detail.

And he got to give his critics something they’ve been demanding for months – statistics on crime and other factors that compelled him to propose what has become one of the most controversial illegal immigration laws in the nation – Hazleton’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act.

U.S. District Judge James Munley also heard political science professor Marc R. Rosenblum – an expert witness for the plaintiffs – testify earlier Thursday how the Relief Act and a related landlord/tenant registration ordinance could lead to employment and housing discrimination in Hazleton.