immigration face off brad BOTWIN
Protesters have come by the thousands to the foot of the Capitol to lobby for immigration reform, hoisting banners, signs and flags, and chanting in unison: “Sí, se puede!” (Yes, we can!) Across the street, a dozen people sit in lawn chairs or stand beneath homemade posters in red, white and blue that deliver the opposite view: “Secure Our Borders.” “If I close my eyes, I think I’m in Mexico City,” Brad Botwin mutters of the “Si, se puede!” crowd on this warm day in April 2013. “I’m expecting Che Guevara to be onstage next. Maybe Fidel [Castro] himself.” In many ways, Botwin is swimming against the current. President Barack Obama has pushed for immigration reform. The Senate has supported it.
this country as children. A conservative Republican in a Democratic state, Botwin takes his defeats in stride. “I’m doing this in my spare time,” he says. He’s an immigration foe in a county where the immigrant population has soared. About 320,000 Montgomery County residents—nearly a third of the population—were born in another country, up from 81,500 in 2000. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, labels Help Save Maryland a “nativist extremist group” alongside organizations such as the Minuteman Project, whose self-appointed members patrol the Mexican border. The Anti-Defamation League similarly criticizes Help Save Maryland as being part of a coalition that promotes “anti-immigrant themes that demonize individuals.” Botwin, who is Jewish, bristles at the comparison. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan “would sooner hang me than have me as a member,” he says. Help Save Maryland claims more than 3,000 subscribers to its newsletters, in which Botwin rails against immigration reform and attacks CASA de Maryland, the immigrant aid group that he views as his archrival and that inspired him to form Help Save Maryland. In 2006, Montgomery County approved CASA’s day labor center in Derwood. Botwin was incensed. He lives a mile away, in a subdivision of houses with porches and two-car garages, set along curving streets with Native American names—Mahaska, Oskaloosa. An American flag flies over his home. Two SUVs sit in the driveway. One bears the bumper sticker: “Don’t blame me, I voted for Romney.” Botwin and his wife, both career fed-
“I’ve had Latino players living with me... To call me a racist, it’s kind of silly.”
—Brad Botwin
Only hard-line House Republicans hold out against immigration reform, which party moderates view as key to winning Latino votes. “My grandparents were Russian immigrants,” says Botwin, pale and wiry, with glasses and a bristly mustache. “These are not immigrants. These are freeloading migrants.” The 56-year-old Derwood resident is the face of the anti-immigration movement in Montgomery County. He directs Help Save Maryland, a group that in 2012 unsuccessfully battled Maryland’s plan to give in-state tuition to socalled “Dreamers” who came illegally to
eral employees, raised their son and daughter, now 25 and 27, in this house. Because of his activism, Botwin won’t say where he works, but it doesn’t take much Googling to find him at the Commerce Department. A family of merchants, Botwin’s ancestors emigrated from what is now Belarus at the turn of the 20th century, part of a Jewish exodus fleeing religious persecution. His father became an engineer who worked on the propulsion system that brought the Apollo 13 astronauts home. His son is a nuclear engineer. “That to me is the excitement of the American Dream,” Botwin says. “That is wonderful. But it can’t be a free-for-all— just get here, touch the ground and Ollie, Ollie, all in free.” His daughter has immigration problems of another sort. A year ago she married an Englishman who has not yet obtained his spousal visa. “We had to get interviewed at the embassy,” Botwin says. “I had to sign away my life that he’s not going to be a debt to society. The day laborers at the center here in Derwood—who’s signing for them, making sure they’re not a debt to society? Nobody. Only the schmucks have to fill out forms and come here legally.” In person, Botwin is mild-mannered when talking about anything other than immigration. He loves baseball. He served as vice president for the Rockville Express, a summer collegiate baseball team. “I’ve had Latino players living with me…,” he says. “To call me racist, it’s kind of silly.” But his newsletters rant: “Hispanic illegal aliens” are overcrowding neighborhoods and schools. “Illegal alien criminals” have caused a “massive increase in robberies and assaults.” Gaithersburg is a “haven for illegals.” CASA is an “ethnic supremacy group.” Sometimes the rhetoric surprises even him. “I’m not sure I used the word ‘supremacy,’ ” he says. But when the words are read back, he doesn’t retract them. CASA’s response? “I think that ratiocontinued on page 134
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