Nashville has gained a national reputation for being one of America’s friendliest cities.
 Can a handful of key public policy decisions change that image?
That is the question immigrants’ rights advocates, local NAACP leaders and the city’s progressive political wing are asking as a series of headline-grabbing events may challenge what has become a key component of the city’s identity.
Some of the biggest public policy debates in Nashville’s recent history appear to be disparate issues. Many have caused tension with segments of either the city’s immigrant or minority communities.
- A recent school board meeting on rezoning reminded some of Civil Rights-era desegregation rallies;
- Davidson County’s sheriff has ramped up a program that has by some accounts frightened and angered Nashville’s immigrant community;
- Underway is a ballot drive to make English the one and only language of Metro government.
The English Only initiative has become the hottest ‘wedge’ issue as the mayor and 25 Metro Council members have gone to great lengths to discourage Davidson County voters from supporting the charter amendment proposal. The amendment, pushed by Councilman Eric Crafton, states that no individual will have a right to government services in any language except English.
“The negative consequences of this amendment would be very real and substantial,” Mayor Karl Dean said. “It is a divisive issue, and ultimately, a distraction from those things that are important to us as a city and that we need to be working together.”
A ‘Bigger Deal’
In an interview with The City Paper, Dean said English Only would “handicap Nashville in ways people weren’t thinking through.”
“It’s a much bigger deal than people have talked about,” Dean said. “The school system is part of the Metro government. So is business recruitment… If you stop and think about all the different things we do as a city, and the need to communicate around the world, the need to bring visitors to the city, the ramifications are pretty enormous.”
However, Dean and the Council didn’t come down hard against English Only until after Crafton had most or all of the necessary 10,103 signatures to get the proposal on the November ballot.
Now for the second year in a row, Nashville’s Convention and Visitors Bureau along with the Chamber are explaining why English Only is bad for the city’s image.
“At a time when Nashville is enjoying tremendous success recruiting international companies — and thousands of high-paying jobs that grow our tax base — Councilman Crafton’s ballot drive divides our community and projects a negative and inaccurate perception of our city to the world,” read a Chamber-issued statement on English Only.
Earlier this year, Travel and Leisure magazine named Nashville the friendliest city in the country, while the Today Show gave it a top-5 ranking.
History lessons
While English Only has ruffled the feathers of many local leaders in addition to the business and tourism industries, Metro Schools’ Board of Education rezoning plan has served to anger some of Nashville’s African-American community, many of whom believe it marks a return to segregated schools.
The Board passed the new rezoning plan in July with a 5-4 vote in a raucous meeting with shouts from the opposition raining down from the back of the room.
The rezoning, which some referred to as re-segregation because it made some Nashville schools less diverse, evoked a visceral reaction from those who remembered the struggles of the civil rights movement.
“We’re not trying to be confrontational. It’s all about the children,” said Marilyn Robinson, president of the Nashville Chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). “We just don’t want to go back to where we were, and we know the city doesn’t want to be postured as the Old South, either.
“We’ve made too many gains in so many other areas that are… progressive. We don’t need to step back into a 50-year era of putting all white children together and all black children together,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
And while community leaders decry both the English Only push and the School Board’s re-zoning plan, a seemingly less polarizing issue has brought Nashville unwanted national press in recent months.
Immigration vs. discrimination
The 287(g) federal immigration program run by the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office has drawn the ire of leaders in Nashville’s immigrant community.
The program allows for the Sheriff’s Office to check the immigration status of an individual once they are booked in the county jail. Using federal equipment and training of local officers, it allows a local law enforcement agency to act as an arm of federal immigration efforts. It has led to 3,500 illegal immigrants with criminal charges being sent to federal immigration courts and eventually deported.
When the program was proposed by Sheriff Daron Hall it received bipartisan support from the state’s leaders, including Gov. Phil Bredesen. Immigrant rights leaders have complained simple traffic stops have seen immigrants end up in jail for lack of identification, calling the program discriminatory.
“When you have a mother and a father who won’t ride in the same car together to take their child to school for fear of, ‘Who will take care of them if we end up with a tail light out?’ Then something is wrong,” Stephen Fotopulos, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition, has said.
Hall said the 287(g) program is not discriminatory, but simply punishes those who come into the country illegally. Hall said a traffic stop might start a chain of events that eventually leads to an individual being deported. But the fact the person is in the country illegally is the reason for the deportation, not the traffic stop, and all the sheriff’s office is doing is checking the immigration status.
It was a traffic stop, however, that forced the sheriff’s office in July to defend the program and its treatment of a illegal immigrant woman — nine months pregnant — who later gave birth while in custody.
The story of the woman, who was jailed July 3 for driving without a license after a visit to a doctor’s office, spread across the country after the account published in the New York Times.
Fotopulos said the fear in the immigrant community is real, but Hall maintains those here legally should have nothing to be worried about.
“If you’re illegally here and committing crime, I think you should be in fear quite frankly,” Hall said. “If you’re committing crime and you’re here illegally in our country, you should fear the fact you’re going to be held accountable for that.”
Looking ‘backwards’
Some of the initiatives in this body of public policy, like rezoning, are still being questioned. Others, mainly 287(g), appear popular and maintain their support.
“As board members, we cannot think of a more unwelcoming message to send to those visitors than the adoption of an English Only policy,” the Convention and Visitors Bureau board of directors said in a letter to Metro Council last week.
Metro Council responded to the call of Mayor Dean, combined with the Chamber and tourism industry, by voting through a memorializing resolution requesting voters to oppose the English Only initiative.
Talk continues that interested parties can sit down and revisit the controversial rezoning plan in the coming months, although the 287(g) program maintains wide support despite objections from the immigrant community.
At-large Councilman Jerry Maynard, who voiced vocal opposition for the re-zoning plan and English Only, said Council’s 25-8 vote in opposition to the charter amendment proposal was a promising sign.
“My response is the vote on English Only showed that we have the potential to be a great city for the 21st century global economy,” Maynard said. “But then we have other challenges like the rezoning plan and other issues that as a Council we’ve got to show leadership to keep us in a favorable position.
“If we don’t, we’ll be seen as a backwards city that is not prepared for the global economy, a city not prepared for a $700 million Convention Center, not prepared for bringing in a Volkswagen or Nissan. We’ve got to stay on top of the game.” |
Can a handful of key public policy decisions change that image?
That is the question immigrants’ rights advocates, local NAACP leaders and the city’s progressive political wing are asking as a series of headline-grabbi
