- Hazleton, Pennsylvania - Andrew Bossi
Hazleton, Pennsylvania, like many small cities in America has endured profound changes over the last generation. A city built on coal, and the third city on Earth to turn on an electrical grid, when I was growing up here, Hazleton was all about mining and providing power to America. Today, if one does an Internet search on the City, and particularly, adding the word “immigration” to the research, some thirty thousand hits arise, most portraying the City in an extremely unflattering light, in essence as a place that is rooted in racism and profoundly anti-immigrant.
Yet few of the journalists who write about the city and its treatment of illegal immigrants have actually come here to this mountain municipality to report their stories. And while many stories can be reported well from a distance -- as a journalist I do this frequently -- an understanding of the city’s problems requires one setting foot on anthracite ground. Having lived here the first twenty-six years of my life, and then spending two decades in the New York metropolitan area, I returned to my hometown four years ago, finding it in unprecedented crisis. Because I had spent so much time away from home, I could see the city with fresh and stinging eyes.
It had certainly changed, drastically. Located atop a mountain of hard coal in Northeastern Pennsylvania and about two and a half hours away from both New York City and Philadelphia, low housing costs had attracted many newcomers from the metropolitan areas. However, the city’s employment situation remained traditionally problematic, causing most young people who went to college to move away. I was one of those people.
The Internet’s increasing power of opportunities finally allowed me to return home to the same neighborhood where I spent my teen years and young adulthood. Unlike much of the city, it looked the same as it had in the 1970s. Many of the same neighbors who knew me as a teen remained in their homesteads, optimistic yet hunkered down. While my block was utopia, I realized that I was living in a fractured world that I idealized in miniature. Most neighborhoods had not remained intact, and in many cases, they were struggling for a sense of basic safety.
Murders in Hazleton, Pennsylvania
During my first few months back, more murders occurred than I could chart during the first twenty-six years of my life in Hazleton. Investigation proved a strong gang and drug link. Downtown swarms with gangs and territorial colors, intimidating long-time residents, particularly the elderly. Law enforcement needs greater support to netrualize the gangs. In fact, a small army would probably take care of the issue. Yet, if the police ultimately gain control over the problem, hoodlum bands will only move to smaller cities with limited police departments. Until the federal government realizes that a limited civil war is going on in America -- one between gangs and law-biding citizens -- no solution is at hand. The reality is that over the last two decades, the central government has chosen to let small cities like Hazleton sink or just float precariously with the sharks on their own.
Hazleton Shares the Blame
During the late 1970s, the city’s brain-drain reached its peak, as many great potential leaders left a place they found profoundly unwelcoming. The age of coal was over, and the new generation did not want the lives of their parents or grandparents. And who could blame them? Coming from an immigrant family of coal miners, I grew up hearing tales of my paternal grandfather, John Jacketti, being crushed by a boulder in the mines, while my Uncle Joe Jacketti, the eldest of the sons, stood by him, just evading his own death. Nearly all the boys of this eleven child family would choose to work in the coal breakers rather than the more dangerous mines. My father, Pasquale Jacketti, spent forty-eight years in the breakers, having begun his work there at the callow age of ten. Like his father, coal would kill him; however, it would happen more slowly, as Black Lung disease took over breathing. He died just before I turned ten.
By then, I had witnessed the deaths of many of my uncles, and neighbors too -- all from coal. With no industry to replace the deadly anthracite mining, it was no wonder that the City lost the population that could save it. The industrial push needed at the time was white collar, but it never happened. Instead, the physics I learned in high school to go into action -- nature abhors a vacuum; thus, the population void in Hazleton called out to be filled.
Traditionally, a city of immigrants, Hazleton has always welcomed legal immigration. However, the federal government’s confused and often contradictory policies on immigration, plunged the City into turmoil, as it became a haven for illegal immigrants. When Hazleton took desperate action to staunch illegal immigration -- the famous Hazleton Ordinance that is now better known as the Arizona Ordinance -- the City immediately became fodder for national and even international journalism, most of it superficial and skewed.
Yellow Journalism
Opinion soon transformed journalistic fact, as the Internet profile of the City became that of a redneck refuge, the most racist small city in America. Good journalism, however, required actual on -location investigation, and not the day trips the major networks and even the BBC, and other European networks made to town. To understand the City’s plight, one needs to spend a semester here, at least four months. A journalistic sojourn in a place once known for worldwide illumination, an unbiased one, will show a city that trusted the federal government to care for illegal immigration, per its obligations. The City trusted the federal government to fight its most crucial problem -- the war against metropolitan-imported gangs and drugs.
Hazleton will never welcome gangs, whether homegrown or immigrant-based. No American city should ever give into this abomination. On the other hand, the City has always welcomed hard working legal immigrants. When the feds decide to write fair and non-contradictory immigration laws and empower this legislation with a sense of urgency, the reputation of Hazleton may ascend to some clarity. In the meantime, many journalists who have scribed about the City appear terribly jaundiced.
Maria Jacketti - I have been a writer and writing teacher for nearly thirty years. My books in print include Neruda's Garden, Maremoto: Seaquake, ...
