By Peter Galuszka
Corey A. Stewart, the scourge of “illegal” immigrants and standard-holder of good old fashioned American values, is now running for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket in 2013.
News reports of his recent announcement were predictably bland – comments in the right-wing blogosphere even more so – despite the fact that Stewart is one of the most divisive, if not downright racist, politicians in recent Virginia history.
As a member of the Board of Supervisors of Prince William County since 2003, Stewart is famous for his movement to require county police to profile anyone they suspected of being illegal immigrants if they were stopped. This law was obviously aimed at brown-skinned Latinos. Similar legal requirements were later adopted statewide in Arizona and Alabama, bringing the U.S. global derision.
One immediate effect of Stewart’s 2007 initiative was that Hispanic immigrants started fleeing the county in droves regardless of whether their papers were entirely in order or not. Stewart claims that his move caused violent crime to drop 37 percent in the largely white and wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C. chock-a-block with federal jobs and cul-de-sac homes. More informed individuals, such as Steven Camarota, research director of Center for Immigration Studies, says the link between violent crime and illegal immigration is a lot more tenuous.
Among the negative fallout from Stewart’s xenophobic grandstanding was that it pit white-skinned against dark-skinned and haves against have nots. The lead-in to the law and the aftermath brought on some very ugly scenes that drew to the soul and conscience of what had been a rather quiet, growing county.
For an idea of just how rancid Stewart’s ideas were, check out the short, award-winning film 9500Liberty by Annabel Park and Eric Byler. The 2010 documentary runs less than five minutes or so, but shows Americana at its worst. In one famous scene, an elderly white man screams at Park and Byler to “speak English” and get legal. In response, Park, who was born in South Korea, is a naturalized American citizen and studied at Boston University and Oxford, produces her U.S. passport and flashes it in his face.
Even the chief of the county police has big trouble with Stewart’s law, which Stewart later tried to expand to the rest of Virginia in his “Rule of Law” campaign. My memory of Stewart is in October 2010 at the “Virginia TeaParty Patriots Convention” in Richmond manning a little booth trying to dish out anti-immigrant ideas. He seemed to be ignored amidst the hubbub of deficit hawks, Patrick Henry re-enactors in Colonial garb and gun fanatics packing Glocks and Colt 45s in Velcro holsters.
In any event, bashing immigrants has gone out of style at least for now. The reason is the economy. Fewer undocumented foreigners are coming here because jobs are nil. Ironically, Hispanic construction workers had been flocking to Prince William about 10 years ago to help serve the demand for badly-planned cookie cutter houses, including McMansions.
When the housing market tanked, some stayed, weren’t quite legal and their brown skins became more evident to the white folks when they were shopping at the county’s many strip malls. In an odd way, it’s a bit like Arizona which had been run by dark-skinned Native Americans and Spanish for centuries and was not even a state until 1912. Then, around the 1960s, flocks of retirees of more northern European ancestry showed up. Suddenly, Arizona became “American” and had to be protected.
For his lieutenant governor’s campaign, Stewart seems to have dropped the immigrant bashing because it has gone out of style. Instead, he says, he weathered the recession by not raising taxes in Prince William but investing in roads and “public safety’ (code word for immigrant bashing?) and cutting $143 million from the county budget.
He says: “Prince William County is a model for how to implement good conservative principles. Taxes are down, crime is down, and growth is up. I am going to bring to the Office of Lieutenant Governor the same conservative principles that I have led Prince William County with over the past 6 years.”
Naturally, he fails to mention that many of those new jobs come out of the federal budget, but no matter. The bigger point is that Stewart is going to have to come to terms sooner or later with the impact of immigration on economic growth now that recovery seems in the air. That will raise the immigration issue yet again.
Even the Wall Street Journal notes on its editorial pages today that too much visa protectionism is hurting the U.S. India is about to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization against a 2010 U.S. law that hikes fees for visas for highly skilled workers from India. Meanwhile, rejections of H-1B and L-IB visa applications for well-qualified foreign workers are considerably up.
One wonders what Stewart, who is casting himself as yet another “jobs” Republican, thinks about this. One thing he might be sure of. Some darker-skinned foreigners with PhD.s in highly technical fields that many Americans lack may think twice about moving to Prince William County, or maybe even the Old Dominion if he wins his state race.
