Harrumph, says Pahrump

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

Michael Miraglia, Pahrump Town Board member, remembers going into a restaurant to ask for "a simple napkin."

"They said they didn't speak English," he says, shaking his head. "That really floored me."

Two and a half years ago, he bought some land to build a house in the fast-growing town on the other side of the Spring Mountains.

"If you asked someone a question about the roof, or the air conditioning, they would say they didn't speak English," Miraglia recalls.

"How can we get along in this country?" he says.

Miraglia, who joined the board in July, wants to do something about a host of issues he sees tied to his town's rising Hispanic population.

He has proposed the "English Language and Patriot Reaffirmation Ordinance," which would make English Pahrump's official language, prohibit flying a foreign flag by itself and make it illegal to close a business in support of protests, such as those this summer over immigration issues.

The ordinance would also pull out the economic rug from under the town's illegal immigrants by making it a crime to hire them, rent to them, or lend or give money to them.

The ordinance's author says that much of the supporting material he has gathered in drafting the law has come from radio talk shows and The Minutemen or other anti-illegal immigration groups.

Although the act won't be voted on for at least six weeks, it is expected to be read into the record for the first of three times at the board's meeting at 7 tonight.

Immigration and civil liberties advocates outside Pahrump say the law continues a recent trend where local governments from Pennsylvania to California have attempted or are attempting to legislate on immigration-related issues.

But they also say Miraglia's ordinance, like some others, will run into a constitutional brick wall if passed.

"If I were them, I would think long and hard about the kinds of lawsuits and negative publicity that could come from this," says Peter Ashman, a Las Vegas immigration attorney and member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association's board of governors.

Ashman was at a meeting Monday night with the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists to plan a strategy against the proposal.

Allen Lichtenstein, attorney for the ACLU of Nevada, says the bill's measures on language and flags amount to "dictating what you say and display ... (which is) so un-American that it requires an immediate negative response from individuals throughout the entire political spectrum."

A few miles down West Basin Avenue from where Miraglia, 67, was volunteering at the Pahrump Senior Center on Monday, Marcelo Morales deftly laid cement across cinder blocks with a trowel.

Morales, foreman with M&M Masonry and a mason for half of his 40 years, was born in Las Vegas and raised in Pahrump. His father, Jose, is Mexican, and was Pahrump's first mason, Marcelo Morales says. That was long before the town reached its current population of 35,000, up to 15 percent of whom are Hispanic.

Morales and a crew of five masons and four laborers were working on a plot of land that will soon hold some of the 18,000-plus houses currently in the pipeline for the Pahrump area.

"I really don't agree with it too much," he says of the proposed ordinance.

"Ever since 9/11, why are they picking on Mexicans? I don't see any Mexican terrorists blowing up things. They're just out here to make an honest living."

Morales says he has seen signs of tension grow at a pace with the local Hispanic population and recalls a recent afternoon when a man drove up to their work site, leaned out the window and shouted, "Go back to Mexico, you f-in Mexicans!"

Marcelo's brother, Javier, laying blocks farther down the wall, says he has "learned to tune it out" when people target him, his workers or family with such epithets.

Ronald W. Johnson, town board vice chairman, says that while he thinks that "all people are just persons on this planet Earth, all in search of the same things ... (Pahrump) is experiencing some serious growth that is an outcome of what's happening all over our country."

Johnson says the federal government has dropped the ball on immigration.

"We are a community that loves service people," he says, referring to another area of the local economy occupied by immigrants.

"We're just trying to let America be America," he says, while emphasizing that he hasn't taken a position on Miraglia's ordinance.

Pahrump Town Manager Dave Richards says he's unsure of the size of the local Hispanic population. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated it at 7.6 percent in 2000, and a local Spanish-language newspaper, El Vendedor Express, which just published its first issue, puts the number at 15 percent.

Javier Morales, back at the job site, says economic needs - including those of the contractors at his work sites - will trump other considerations as Pahrump continues to stretch out across the landscape.

"They can pass any law - it won't change anything," he says. "Cash has always moved the world.

"We still need to do business with them (illegal immigrants). We still need their work."