A City’s Open Arms Close as Tensions Rise : A petition drive tried to reverse a declaration that Somerville, Mass., is a sanctuary for refugees.

When the leaders of this crowded, working-class city on Boston’s border declared it a sanctuary for immigrants and refugees in 1987, they attracted little attention; they were joining a national trend.

By 1990, however, a murmur was growing among longtime residents that the Board of Aldermen had opened a floodgate. Tension mounted the following year; there were racial conflicts in some neighborhoods and a brawl at Somerville High School between Haitian and white students.

A petition drive to withdraw the declaration, which has no legal force, peaked this fall when a repeal measure qualified for the November ballot.

“The cost of illegal aliens is too much,” the petition said. Its supporters called for a “closed city.” Somerville stood ready to test anti-immigrant sentiment at the polls.

But election officials threw the measure out after a handwriting expert convinced them that hundreds of petition signatures were forged--probably copied from other petitions.

The spirited debate that followed may have helped clear the air. There were some new fights at the high school but no major violence. And there were also advances: The city’s new Human Rights Commission met for the first time.

With clapboard triple-decker and two-family houses, in many areas built so close together they seem to touch, Somerville has been for generations the most densely populated city north of New York. The city’s ethnic transformation has been dramatic. In 1980, it was 96% white, filled with descendants of Portuguese, Irish and Italian immigrants. By 1990, the federal census reported that, with the city’s population steady at 77,000, 16% of the residents were non-white or Latino.

And the flow of immigrants from Haiti, Brazil and Central America has continued. By last year, in 40% of the households that had public school students, English was no longer spoken. One main business area now boasts shops and restaurants representing 12 cultures and four continents.

“That’s a big change in a city that was famously insular and parochial, so people are having a hard time dealing with that,” says city human services director Ralph Hergert.

Somerville was remade in the economic boom of the 1980s. Property owners close to affluent Cambridge sold at huge profits. At the other end of town, speculators subdivided houses and doubled rents.

“What started to happen was the west end of the city was gentrified and the east end of the city was flooded with immigrants,” says Jack Hamilton, director of the Community Action Agency of Somerville.

Passed just as these changes were taking shape, the city’s sanctuary declaration was a political gesture of friendliness. Perhaps because it notes that city employees aren’t legally required to report anyone’s citizenship to federal authorities, an assumption grew that most immigrants were illegal. Natives blamed them for dilapidated private housing, for a rise in violent crime that was actually less dramatic than in any nearby city and for cuts in city services.

“I think they cost in housing, subsidized housing,” said petition drive leader Alice Driscoll, a lifelong resident. “They have welfare, they have food stamps, they eat better than I do. They take up space in the schools, the bilingual program. They have special teachers for that; we never had that.”

“We are coming for political freedom, not because we want to cheat off the entire system,” countered Marcos Garcia, director of the Committee for Refugees From El Salvador. “They don’t remember that the first generation who came here went through the same thing--Italians, Irish, Portuguese.”

When housing prices started sliding in 1990, Hergert says, some who hadn’t managed to sell felt cheated. Jobs continued to decline. The city laid off some of its employees.

To increase racial harmony, nonprofit and city agencies launched a number of ventures, including a student mediation program, an annual international festival and coalitions to empower various ethnic groups.

But leaders on both sides of the immigrant issue say this fall’s debate may have been just as important in moving the city forward. Driscoll and fellow repeal advocates have gained a public voice they had largely been denied when more liberal residents tried to squelch discord. But petition opponents say public acceptance of the forgery ruling proves that anger over immigrants is limited.