Despite Backlash, Illegal Immigrants Stay Put

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John Clark for TIME

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Local contractor Wayne Mayo, 54, has watched this long slump up close. Like many other people in St. Helens, he used to work in the timber industry, as a lumber broker. But his more recent turn, as a general contractor, brought him face-to-face with an economic force he felt he could influence: illegal immigration. Although St. Helens has a relatively small Hispanic community — some legal, some illegal — the town is just 30 miles (about 50 km) from major population centers like Portland and Beaverton, close enough that out-of-town contractors with crews of underpaid, underdocumented construction workers began bidding on jobs around town eight years ago, says Mayo. Local contractors had a stark choice: either go out of business or stop paying their workers enough to support their families. (See pictures of three generations of immigrant workers.)

Mayo is a former lay minister whose brand of genial grievance would make him a perfect AM-radio host. He had long been a presence in the local Op-Ed pages, campaigning vigorously against everything from a porn store near the high school to an unsafe highway pass. He started speaking out on illegal immigration, hectoring elected officials and writing a stream of e-mails to local newspapers. Eventually he wrote a ballot initiative, a bill to levy fines against employers of illegal immigrants. He was outspent and outorganized by regional activist groups — he raised $430, they raised more than $70,000 — but his proposal still won by 15 percentage points. (A more ostentatious second proposition, to post 4-by-8-ft. [1.2 by 2.4 m] plywood signs at certain job sites declaring them for "Legal Workers Only," failed at the ballot box.) Like many others in the fight against illegal immigration, he sees himself as a reluctant warrior drawn to action by federal timidity. If the government had done its job and enforced laws against illegal immigration, he argues, he wouldn't have had to go through the initiative process. "Just start putting a few folks in jail and the world will change," he says.

Mayo's bill has won him plenty of enemies among the illegal immigrants I spoke with. None knew him personally, but they spoke of him with equal parts fear and resentment. "That is the man who started this racism," says Margarito's uncle Ramón. "He is the Deceiver."

But Mayo's supporters are just as impassioned. At a February demonstration against Mayo's law, a passel of counterprotesters, VFW types in trucker caps, spoke reverently about "Pastor Mayo" and the movement he started. Mayo didn't show up for the demonstration because he — shrewdly — didn't want to be seen as endorsing the idea that his opposition to illegal immigration is necessarily an attack on Hispanics in general.

There are inevitably some racial tensions in St. Helens. Most residents probably don't care to know much more about Mexico than what they can glean from the menu of Muchas Gracias or the two other Mexican restaurants in town. Westerling, whose Rural Organizing Project canvassed St. Helens and surrounding towns as it fought against 5-190, says voters were truly undecided about the measure until the fall, when the worsening economy hardened their opinions. "Immigrants are serving as a great dog for people to kick when they're frustrated," says Westerling. But there is a sincerity to the most ardent activists against illegal immigration in St. Helens, a sense that their town is trapped in the swale of a very bad economic cycle and that the undocumented workers might be making things worse.

Travis Chamberlain, 30, shares this sincerity. I met him halfway through the protest march, where Columbia Boulevard starts to sag toward the Columbia River. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was leaning against a stone wall, filming the protesters — for Mayo, he said — with a small Taiwanese Aiptek HD camera. After the marchers passed, Chamberlain lit a Marlboro Light and climbed up the embankment to where his wife Kristy, 30, and friend Heather Douglas, 28, were drinking Starbucks coffee drinks near two homemade signs they had hung for the occasion: "Our Country, Our Jobs" and "We Welcome Legal Immigrants."

See pictures of protests for immigration reform.

See pictures of migrant workers from the gulf states.