Tolerance wears thin

Johnston's sheriff says Hispanics spread crime and dodge taxes. Yet he respects their hard work and expresses pity for their plight

SMITHFIELD -- Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell's territory is one of country stores and fading tobacco barns; but increasingly his work -- and his words -- reach far beyond his rural county. Advocates and politicians across the state have come to know him as the lawman with the deep country twang who makes incendiary comments about "drunk Mexicans."

"Look at that," he says, pointing to tiendas that have cropped up amid the barbecue joints. "You can't even read the durned sign. Everywhere you look, it's like little Mexico around here."

Bizzell is a farm boy so steeped in traditional American culture that he won't even eat spaghetti, much less a taco. Since becoming sheriff a decade ago, he has watched a Hispanic influx change the rural landscape of his home county. Its population is now 11 percent Hispanic.

These mostly undocumented workers have helped build a new economy, fueling a construction boom and harvesting most of the county's crops. But some residents of this once insular place see them as a threat, opening Spanish-speaking businesses, crowding hospitals and schools, even monopolizing aisles at Wal-Mart.

Bizzell has emerged as the face of the backlash.

But to travel with Bizzell is to understand not only the anger, but also the ambivalence that surrounds an intensifying crackdown on illegal immigrants.

In one breath, he condemns illegal immigrants for "breeding like rabbits" and spreading a culture of drunkenness and violence. In the next, he sympathizes with laborers who know the same calloused-hand work that he did as the son of a farmer.

One day he says immigrants take American jobs. The next he says there is work for anyone willing to pull his weight. He resents the increasingly Hispanic face of his county, but he acknowledges that immigrant workers have enriched many of his constituents.

Bizzell is, in many ways, the face of a state coping with a problem the federal government has failed to solve, struggling to reconcile long-held resentments with its essential humanity.

"Everywhere I go," Bizzell says, "people say, 'Sheriff, what are we going to do about all these Mexicans?' "

Politically astute jabs

Bizzell's strident rhetoric -- his claims that illegal immigrants "rape, rob and murder" American citizens, fail to pay taxes and drain social services -- has had clear political benefits.

It has cemented his popularity among conservative voters and, in a place with no Hispanic leaders, has drawn little organized opposition. He also enjoys strong support from other local political leaders. "Everybody in this county sleeps a little better because he's here," said Linwood Parker, the mayor of Four Oaks.

His blunt talk helped propel him to the presidency of the N.C. Sheriffs' Association.

Before giving up that post in July, he urged the state's 100 sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. He has helped make North Carolina one of the most aggressive states in the nation for deporting illegal immigrants.

He has also become an ally of Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who has made deporting criminal illegal immigrants a centerpiece of her campaign. Dole paints Bizzell as a sheriff dealing with the criminal toll of illegal immigration.

"He's just like the vast majority of sheriffs in North Carolina," said Brian Nick, Dole's chief of staff. "He'll be the first to tell you that he has no inclination to go around and round up people, that he's focused on a criminal element."

The reality is blurrier.

Hispanics, a large share of whom are in the country illegally, have been responsible for more than a third of drunken-driving charges in Johnston County in the past five years. In March 2007, Luciano Tellez, an illegal immigrant, sped through a stop sign and killed a Clayton man and his 9-year-old son in a fiery explosion, then sped away. Empty beer cans littered his car.