Zogby's Global Village

By John Zogby

If you have been following my odyssey you see that I get to go to a lot of different places. I was just in Hazleton, PA over the summer at a great family reunion. My mother was born in nearby Shenandoah and lived in Hazleton for a decade. We visited the city as a family a few times a year for many years so it was really a second home. It is nice place defined by faith, family, and ethnicity. Rare is the surname that is not Irish, Slovak, Italian, Jewish — you get the picture. And there is the legendary Jimmy’s Hot Dogs, which in itself is worth pulling off of Route 81.

This is the heart of the anthracite coal region. Years ago, the major film about the Molly Maguires — the 19th century Irish-American coal miners who used violence to protest their abysmal conditions — was filmed nearby. Sean Connery came to town. Hazleton was devastated when the mines closed but in the late 1950s and early 1960s a combination of business and civic leaders put together a community wide campaign to save the local economy. The Can-Do Campaign built a series of industrial parks and put residents back to work. A Penn State campus was built and expanded. Hazleton was cited as an All-American City.

Zogby International was hired to do a visioning study by Leadership Hazleton, the Can-Do organization, and the chamber of commerce in 1998. I did much of it myself because I wanted to catch up on the dynamics of my “home town”. I found a community that was suffering from all the stresses of small cities on the edge of an increasingly global economy. It was a successful project and we were able to help in a number of ways – most notably in the creation of community scholarships to college to local graduates who promised to stay in Hazleton for a number of years. In return there was a promise from local leaders that decent jobs would await them.

We were asked back in 2006 and 2007 to conduct a study that looked into the present and future demographics of the city and determine what institutional and agency changes might be required to address future demographic needs. Back when I was a kid, Hazleton was nearly all white and ethnic. By 1998, this city which once boasted a population of 40,000 had declined (as many northeastern cities had) to about 20,000 – but the total population had begun to increase due to the migration of Hispanics. By 2006, the Hispanic population grew to approximately 7,500 or more people. And herein lies the rub. With any dramatic population growth comes social problems – notably crime, especially violent crime, schools bursting at the seams, language and cultural misunderstandings, and so on. This is precisely what happened and necessitated our addressing this great and tumultuous change in our final report.

I was concerned that the local mayor, who had been re-elected with about 90% of the vote and had become a fixture on cable television as an anti-illegal immigration public official, was allowing the legitimate discussion of community growth and potential to be distorted. And I was further troubled to read in the local newspaper and in national publications that the mayor’s unconstitutional efforts to prohibit employers to hire and landlords to rent to illegal aliens was causing an exodus of Hispanics from this fine city. Someone who considers Hazleton a second home had to be bothered by the headline of a New York Times editorial that read “Hazleton vs. Humanity”. To see legitimate businesses owned by Hispanics shuttering and Hispanics moving out was a bad move – and certainly counter-productive to our study and to the work of the broad committee of leaders charged with coming up with solutions for the future.

Herein comes the controversy: in a personal executive summary to our study, I said that “the mayor…needs to be challenged” because his efforts were not helpful to Hazleton’s image nationally and to the long range work that needed to be done. I also said that a program that seeks to “oppose the sort of prejudice and oppression demonstrated by the local ordinances now in place in Hazleton” needed to be established and I offered a myriad of suggestions. The mayor took my account as a “personal attack” and some community argued that I was accusing the mayor and the public of racism. Since I am not in the habit of arguing or debating with clients I left this alone. Now two full years have passed and here is what I think:

1. No personal attack against the mayor of Hazleton. They elected him and I don’t know him. But his efforts were not helpful.
2. I met with approximately 150 community residents when I was there in October 2007 and they were receptive to getting to know their Hispanic neighbors better; so too were the Hispanics present.

I understand that there are now some efforts to heal these problems. I truly hope so.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under The Global Odyssey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.