The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Letter From Farmers Branch
No Place Like Home
In the now infamous Dallas suburb, redevelopment is king, the lawns are immaculate, and illegal immigrants are no longer welcome.
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And that, Heller said, was typical of a city government that had become incrementally more repressive, imposing new rules regarding lawn upkeep—no grass higher than eight inches, no visible empty flowerpots—and devoting more resources to code enforcement (9,724 violation notices were issued last year in a city of 8,000 single-family homes). Then there were the city’s efforts to discourage the use of Spanish: The council had passed an ordinance proclaiming English the city’s official language, and subsequently the lone Spanish-language channel was pulled from the televisions at the Farmers Branch recreation center. The council also revised the instructions printed on city-distributed trash bags. Because health-and-safety-related matters were exempt from the language policy, the instructions regarding garbage collection were kept in both English and Spanish, but the recycling guidelines were printed in English only.
Farmers Branch is graced with abundant parkland and wide avenues split by grassy medians, but it lies outside the cone of more-recent development spreading north from Dallas. Over the years, as McMansion builders moved farther out, more minorities and immigrants arrived—a demographic shift common to many inner-ring suburbs. The population is now an estimated 37.2 percent Hispanic. Whereas to an interloping reporter its modest midcentury houses and mature trees might make the city more appealing than late-vintage sprawl (as might the taquerías, the Guatemalan bakery, and the fruit-and-vegetable store catering to immigrants), those things don’t draw the sort of retail that leaders would like to see in Farmers Branch—purchasing power does. O’Hare told me that when he’d e-mailed a grocery chain about opening a store in the Four Corners, where a Super Saver lies vacant, a representative responded that the area lacked the per capita spending level to support a new supermarket.
“People have labeled us as trying to get rid of all the poor people,” O’Hare said. “That’s nonsensical. But we do need to increase our spending per capita.” To that end the council has dedicated itself to sprucing up the city; hence the new street signs and the city’s recent purchase of a ramshackle house across the street from Farmers Branch Church of Christ (which O’Hare attends), so as to raze it and build something else, like a fountain or a gazebo. On a much larger scale, the city commissioned a Los Angeles design firm to work with Farmers Branch residents, business leaders, and city officials on the Four Corners Vision Plan, in which the current shopping centers—big surface parking lots surrounded by purveyors of cash advances, auto parts, cheap haircuts, and quick lunches—would be replaced by a mix of comelier retail stores and residences. One drawing that accompanies the plan shows a sidewalk cafe and a Gap store on a street reminiscent of downtown Santa Barbara.
Before the Vision Plan can be implemented, developers will have to negotiate with as many as 33 property owners in the targeted area. Yet to judge by a flap in March 2007 over a potential tenant for the Super Saver building, a vocal faction has already invested itself in a particular vision for the Four Corners. After a rumor spread that a Carnival grocery store, designed to appeal to Hispanic shoppers, might open there, a city council candidate named Tim Scott sent out an e-mail recommending that residents call Carnival’s parent company to protest. Scott, who now sits on the council, told the Dallas Morning News that his objection had nothing to do with race; he just didn’t want another “ultra-discount” store to open in the city. In the same article, O’Hare said that he also opposed a Carnival store: “If a fast-food joint was coming into the Super Saver parking lot, and I said, ‘Hey, can’t we get a Chili’s?’ who am I discriminating against?”
It’s difficult to assess the impact illegal immigration has had on any given community, all the more so in a Dallas suburb, where residents may be working, shopping, and drawing upon services like hospitals in other parts of the Metroplex. O’Hare has said that illegal immigrants are overburdening the schools, but in interviews school officials disagreed with that notion. He has also complained that some illegal immigrants are committing crimes, and while that is true, they don’t appear to be committing any more crimes than the rest of the population. (Police chief Sid Fuller noted that in a community where violent crime is very low, illegal immigrants stand out only when it comes to driving without a license or insurance.) Nonetheless, O’Hare insists that his constituents are fed up: “They would go through drive-throughs and the people on the other side couldn’t understand English. They were getting frustrated over pressing ‘one’ for this and ‘two’ for that. We had a Montessori school owner complain about how she’d find used drug needles and used condoms in front of the school, right across from a place everyone knows rents to illegals.” And he has the evidence of last May’s election to back him up. “We did what an overwhelming majority of our town wanted to do,” he said.
Nationally, immigration-related laws have seen their prospects rise and fall and rise again. Although last year several courts had sided with groups who opposed the laws, in December and January state statutes were upheld in Arizona and Oklahoma, while a federal judge upheld a local ordinance adopted in Valley Park, Missouri. In January the Farmers Branch council approved a new ordinance that had been drafted with the help of Kris Kobach, who had been the chief adviser on immigration law for former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft and who had participated in the Hazleton and Valley Park cases. Tailored to satisfy the latest court rulings, this ordinance would require all prospective renters to obtain a residential occupancy license from city hall and is set to go into effect after the case against the previous ordinance is resolved.
On February 21, Gene Bledsoe, a businessman and real estate agent, declared that he would run for mayor against O’Hare. He’d planned to make the announcement in front of city hall, but it was a cold, blustery day, so he and a handful of his supporters gathered in a corner just inside the building. “I think the city is headed in the wrong direction,” said Bledsoe, a tall, bald man who spoke carefully and briefly. “It’s gotten away from its fiscal conservative roots. As mayor I will represent all citizens of Farmers Branch, not just the rich, not just a few builders, but our older citizens, our poorer citizens, and our Hispanic citizens.” Afterward a heckler asked whether he was “for illegal immigration.” Bledsoe said he was not.
There is no very long tradition of political activism in Farmers Branch, as far as I could tell. In speaking with the ordinance’s opponents, I sensed that theirs was a dedicated but small group and that as much as Bledsoe wanted to represent the city’s disadvantaged and its minorities, he would have a hard time getting them to the polls. The lack of a downtown seemed symbolic: Without its own newspaper, without so much as a Four Corners grocery store where residents might interact, it was as if Farmers Branch had yet to get its municipal mind around its own diversity. Of course, suburban anomie is not a new phenomenon, but I wondered whether here, mingled with residual anxiety over 9/11 and all the hoopla around illegal immigration, it had turned a few distressed shopping centers and apartment complexes into an immigration crisis.
When I last spoke to O’Hare, he was on his way to a meeting of his volunteers, who were planning to stage an Easter egg hunt behind his campaign headquarters. “The big thing in Farmers Branch is we kind of let our town go for a while,” he said, “but now people are getting excited to see things are happening.” After all the notoriety the ordinances had brought Farmers Branch, both candidates for mayor seemed to want to distance themselves from the topic of immigration. But it wasn’t going to disappear just yet.
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