There’s a new U.S. development on the horizon that’s coming on us like a Singapore sunrise – which is to say, fast.

Small towns in America are rebelling against unchecked immigration, which has spread well past the big cities like Los Angeles and deep into the small towns of America.

Tiny Hazleton, Pennsylvania got itself a slew of lawsuits from leftwing lawyers like the American Civil Liberties Union for passing some of the toughest anti-illegal immigration muncipal laws in the country. The small city, population 31,000, made English its official language, vowed to fine anyone who rents flophouses to illlegals, 20 to a room, $1000 a day, and posts big sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The lawyers say the town is trying to usurp federal immigration laws. The town points out that it’s not shipping home anyone who’s illegal, it’s just using zoning laws to target lawbreakers’ enablers and to preserve the town’s quality of life.

Itty bitty Riverside, N.J., home of 3000 illegal Brazilian immigrants, is passing a similar measure. Booming Escondido, Calif., which I’ve been to many times, it’s becoming a run-down shantytown of Mexican illegals, is also passing a similar measure, Huntsville, Ala., is passing a similar measure, and now Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, is on the same track. There are towns in Arizona, in Nevada, in North Carolina, in Washington, in Georgia (where illegal immigration is up 120% in the past six years, the highest percentage gain in the country) that also have similar plans. Google Hazleton, and you will learn that Wilkes-Barre, Shenandoah, Altoona, Pocono, all are thinking of this, too. None of them are famous, they are all little towns.

The sentiment in Coeur d’Alene, here, is unbelievably negative against illegal immigrants. These tiny towns out in the middle of nowhere, are getting flooded with illegal immigrants. Leftwing lawyers are swift to dismiss them as a bunch of small-town rube racists who refuse to adapt to the tolerant ways of the Big Cities, but as usual, they are calling it like a cartoon, arrogantly refusing to look hard at what’s really going on in these towns they’d never otherwise set foot in.

There are some major problem with illegal immigration as it hits small towns: The first is economic: Illegal immigrants, 20 to a room, do not invest back in their communities. They live solely for their communities back home. They earn $6 an hour packing chickens or cleaning houses or hauling hods but all the money they earn doesn’t return to the small towns they occupy, it goes back to build a roof on the casa in Zacatecas. That Mexican town, gleaming and empty, stands people-free, maybe just a few old people and small children left behind while all the able bodied people work up in El Norte. Meanwhile, tiny Hazleton, or Van Nuys or Escondido or any of these other places, starts looking like pre-immigration-era Mexico: poor, undercapitalized, impoverished, and not invested. Just check out what once-gleaming Van Nuys has become now that illegal immigrants have moved in. It looks like Nayarit, Mexico, circa 1986, when I last visited – a veritable third world dump – garbage, crime, litter, rundown mess.

But there is plenty of work in Van Nuys. It really shouldn’t look like a hellhole. That’s what’s so paradoxical about this. What’s happening is, the cash that should be invested from the work provided in Van Nuys, something that happens in economically natural conditions, is now being invested in the gleaming, people-free homes of Zacatecas. That’s why Van Nuys is such a third world-looking place right now.

Do you see the strange contradiction? There’s something wrong with this picture, where whole towns are being used as money-earning depots, sort of yucky economic bus stations where transients pass through, but going permanently underinvested as money heads somewhere else.

Investment and the appearances of towns isn’t the only problem with vast influxes of illegal immigrants. Here’s another problem: The very act of being an illegal immigrant is a challenge to authority itself. By being illegal, you are necessarily going to distrust authorities, you are necessarily going to avoid them. So, if a crime is committed, you aren’t going to want to say you saw anything to the cops investigating the problem. Your interests and the cops’ interests will necessarily be different. Think about the impact of that attitude on community development and cohesion. You have whole towns where no one will talk to the cops and you cannot be surprised if crime suddenly becomes rampant. If no one will talk to the cops, the cops can’t solve anything. This is a direct byproduct of non-citizenship and non-legal residency. You just don’t care or are too scared to care what goes on in the small town you happen to occupy, you have other interests, like that roof you are earning for the place home back in Zacatecas and the parents you need to support. You may be acting rationally from your own perspective, but you are not acting in a way tha supports the town’s community interests. After all, your community is elsewhere. So crime goes unchecked, ESPECIALLY in the non-cooperating illegal immigrant enclaves, and it spreads to affect the citizens who are lawfully there. That’s another reason why small town people see a problem. They don’t have the material advantages of the Big Cities, but their consolation is that they don’t have the crime, either. Well, now they do. Ironically, it’s a direct result of the federal government’s failure to enforce immigration laws.

Another problem is medical care. If you are busy remitting money back to Zacatecas, you might well neglect your health. You might bring in TB, spreading it to others, or wait until your ailment gets so serious you’ve got to get emergency care. That’s flooding emergency rooms, which tiny small towns need to pay for, and if you are an illegal in the underground economy, no one is going to know enough about what you earn to be able to counter your claims of being indigent. From your own point of view, it would make sense to say you are destitute because no one can check on tax-free income earned illegally, and in so doing, get free medical care. Enough illegals are doing it that the city and the taxpayers are starting to grow angry. They feel expenses faster in small towns because they don’t have the vast pots of money you might see in big cities.

Here is a fourth factor that I think making the debate so bitter: Small towns have been maligned for a long time as rust-belt has-beens, and many have had to pick themselves up by their bootstraps to become economically attractive again. It takes a lot of work and dedication of small town leaders and townspeople to do this. Like third world countries on IMF programs, they’ve had to do things to make themselves attractive to business – they’ve done tax cuts, enterprise zones, other free market improvements. They do it to attract people, but when they attract the wrong people, the illegals, it throws their hard work to the dust, because the town isn’t safe or nice to live in anymore. It’s nasty. It would have been better if they had not done anything at all. It sucks the incentive out of doing the economically intelligent things, and instead brings back the temptation to do the populist things, like crony pork-barrel spending that dampens free enterprise and innovation. Do you see how scary this is?

The only alternative is to make the illegal immigrant problem less pervasive at the very least. That’s why these ordinances are going up at the speed of condos in Marina del Rey. They going up everywhere. Leftwing lawyers and their leftwing judicial allies are so far behind them, working in solidarity to distort the picture and call the small townspeople hopelessly evil.

Meanwhile, as muni ordinances strive to put bandaids on the festering and growing problem of illegal immigration – up from 6 million illegals in 2000 to 11 million in 2006, the backlash is populism. This is happening because it’s getting clear that the elites don’t know what they are doing, ignoring an obvious problem like illegal immigration and failing to police our borders. But populism and protectionism and other bad ideas don’t make things really better.

Illegals and legitimate citizens are now pitted against each other, and the struggle is bitterest where they can see each other closest and can’t get away from each other, in the small towns. I fear that much more trouble is on the horizon over this.