Pat Nicolosi hopes to move the Democratic Party in New York in an anti-immigrant direction. Running for the Assembly on Long Island, he is a well-known activist in anti-immigrant organizations who spoke out this Spring against immigration reform and in favor of mass deportations.
Nicolosi is allied with the Nassau Civic Association, which while it sounds like a middle-of-the-road community group is actually a hotbed of anti-immigrant organizing. The Association’s homepage prominently features a link to the armed Minuteman militia. It also attacks the Park51 Project alleging that it is terrorist-related and endorses the tea party, none of which are standard civic association positions in Nassau County.
In this posting on its web site, the group “applauds” Nicolosi’s efforts to remove Latino day laborers from his community.
Nicolosi’s community activity is so well known that several years ago the New York Times profiled his efforts to expel Latinos from his community:
The streets where Patrick Nicolosi sees America unraveling still have the look of the 1950′s. Single-family homes sit side by side, their lawns weed-whacked into submission to the same suburban dream that Mr. Nicolosi’s Italian-American parents embraced 40 years ago when they moved to this working-class community on Long Island.
Patrick Nicolosi, a former school board candidate in Elmont, N.Y., has filed many complaints about illegal apartments in town, including the one occupied by the Mexican family across the street.
Patrick Nicolosi says he is fighting to save a way of life.
There is the gas station a dozen blocks away where more than 100 immigrant day laborers gather, leaving garbage and distress along a residential side street — and undercutting wages for miles, contends Mr. Nicolosi, 49, a third-generation union man and former Wonder Bread truck driver who retired after a back injury. There are the schools and hospitals filled with children from illegal apartments like the basement dwelling, which Mr. Nicolosi calls “a little dungeon, windowless.”
“Two children are in school, and one is handicapped — that’s $10,000 for elementary school, $100,000 a year for special education,” he said. “Why am I paying taxes to support that house?”
One man’s frustration over a family in a basement goes a long way toward explaining the grass-roots anger over immigration policy that many members of Congress say they keep hearing in their districts. And it also illustrates the unsettling consequences such anger can set in motion.”
[Nicolosi said] “And now we can’t afford to pay taxes. People like me who want to live the suburban dream, we’re being pushed out unless we join the illegality.”
Unlike most people, Mr. Nicolosi joins the civic fray. A self-appointed watchdog, he tries to get local officials to investigate houses that he and his allies suspect of violations, and to crack down on day laborers spilling into front yards.
But this spring, as the immigration debate ignited nationally, the results of his crusade unfolded like a parable about being careful what you wish for — leaving the Mexican family uprooted, neighbors unhappy, and Mr. Nicolosi himself more frustrated than ever.
Elmont, just over the Nassau County line from Queens, has always drawn immigrants or their children. In the decades since Mr. Nicolosi’s father, a bus driver, moved his family here from the city, families from every continent have joined the Italian and Central European generations who settled the first subdivisions. Its population of 33,000 is about 46 percent white, 35 percent black and 9 percent Asian, and 14 percent of its residents are Hispanic.
Mr. Nicolosi, a compact, animated man, says he is fighting to save the modest suburban lifestyle that these families seek, regardless of ethnicity.
As president of the Elmont East End Civic Association, he prods the police to enforce laws against loitering, and in letters to newspapers laments the erosion of suburbia with examples uncomfortably close to home.
And as he drove his black S.U.V. through a neighborhood where garden shrines outnumber basketball hoops, his world view darkened what he saw. Passing a small house, he shared his suspicion that it illegally harbored multiple immigrant families, because a dozen children regularly played out front.
But the homeowners later set the record straight. “We’re a family here — we’re no immigrants,” declared Fanny Echeverria, 40, quickly adding, “What makes him better than immigrants?”
She and her husband, George, have five children between them, and their yard is a magnet for neighbors’ children. Ms. Echeverria is a native New Yorker of Greek and Dominican heritage, her husband a naturalized United States citizen born in Chile. And they own one of Long Island’s most highly rated French restaurants, Soigné, in Woodmere.
Mr. Nicolosi …and a neighbor often joke that they should move to Mexico and return illegally: “Then we don’t have to worry about health care, don’t have to worry about paying taxes. And if I worked for $100 a day I’d be better off. After I pay taxes I don’t even have $100 a day.”
From the basement, what struck the Mexican couple, however, was that Mr. Nicolosi did not work.
“The man has nothing to do except look,” the wife said in Spanish as her husband cooked dinner. Recalling the Latino workers she saw renovating his house, she added, “If we weren’t here, who would do the work?”
In Guanajuato, Mexico, Mr. O.’s best option was a job at General Motors that at the time paid $10 a day, he said. Like everyone, he added, “we came for a better life for our children.”
But upstairs that day, their landlords were deciding to evict the family. An official had called, alerting them to a new complaint by Mr. Nicolosi, the Cervonis said. This time, with heightened public attention, it would lead to hefty fines unless the basement was vacated.
Joseph Cervoni broke the news to the tenants the night President Bush spoke to the nation about immigration. As word spread, neighbors blamed Mr. Nicolosi. Carolyn Gilbert, a retired secretary who advocates an electrified fence at the Mexican border, said he had no conscience. “People forget the human dimension,” she said.
Louise Cerullo, 84, a registered Republican like Mr. Nicolosi, protested: “They’re human beings. If they can work and pay their rent, what’s wrong with that?”
The talk reached Mr. Nicolosi soon after his school board defeat. He denied complaining, then threatened to sue local officials for identifying him, and questioned the timing of the crackdown.
“They did it now to shut me up,” he said.
On the first Saturday in June, the Mexican family moved out. Watching from next door, Ms. Gilbert worried about the children’s schooling, and wondered where they could go. Probably, she said, to another basement apartment.
“For every problem, there’s a solution,” she added. “For every solution there’s another problem.”
