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In the early 1990s, when Herndon’s arrival city was only beginning to take shape, the newly arrived men would gather at the corner of Elden Street and Alabama Drive, near apartment complexes where many of them lived, to look for cash work. There was a constant demand for hourly, daily, and weekly labor, so most did not stand in vain. After a decade and a half, this exposed and unprotected setting had become a social and humanitarian worry, so, in 2005, the Herndon town council, led by Mayor Michael O’Reilly, voted to create an indoor day-labor center, using county funds and staff from a local church non-profit agency. This initiative attracted anti-immigration forces, such as the vigilante group the Minutemen, which opened a chapter in Herndon. They claimed that it was unacceptable to use taxpayer money to assist illegal immigrants. The proposed center then became the focus of an ugly election for Virginia governor in 2005, in which Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore built much of his campaign around his opposition to Herndon’s approach, making the town a conservative emblem of wrongheaded state support for undocumented migrants. (He lost by a narrow margin.)

Then, months after the center opened in a former police station on a two-year funding contract, the people of Herndon responded by voting Mayor O’Reilly out of office by a wide margin in a single-issue campaign devoted to the center and replacing him with Stephen J. DeBenedittis on a radical anti-immigrant policy. Not only did he shut down the center in 2007, driving laborers back onto the streets, but he enrolled the town police in a federal program to train local officers to enforce immigration laws. He also enforced a zoning ordinance, aimed at Latinos, which mandated eviction if more than four “unrelated people” shared a residence. It got about 200 non-compliance complaints a year.

Yet this backlash was ignoring the most significant effect of the Herndon migrant boom. Those men on the street, many of them undocumented and very poor, were only the poorest and least well-connected of the Central American villagers arriving here. Most did much better. Within a decade of the first immigrants’ arrival, 53 percent of the foreign-born in Herndon were home owners, a rate approaching the 62 percent average for the native-born population of the Washington area. The upward social mobility of the migrants was striking. Nevertheless, the backlash had an effect: Latino-owned businesses had trouble getting started, and large numbers of immigrants departed when the economy slumped in 2008. Herndon’s economy suffered.

There is another way to respond when your suburb becomes an arrival city. On the other side of Washington, the northeastern suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland, experienced an equally dramatic transformation in the 1980s and ’90s: The suburb of Wheaton, at the very end of Washington’s Metrorail line, went from being 90 percent white in the 1970s to 40 percent immigrant in 2000, just like Herndon. Led by Salvadorans, its arrival-city communities include Vietnamese, Jamaicans, Filipinos, Peruvians, Mexicans, and other Central Americans.

But unlike in Herndon, the voters and officials of Montgomery County saw the villagers not as a threat but as an opportunity to revitalize their fading town center. They built and embraced a day-labor center and launched a branding campaign to make Wheaton known across the capital region for its multi-ethnic cultures, festivals, and foods, under the banner “deliciously habit-forming.” Zoning rules and business offices were used to encourage and help immigrant entrepreneurs set up restaurants, markets, and colorful shops, which were promoted in city-sponsored advertisements. A county official in Wheaton described the suburb’s self-image as “accommodating and capitalizing on the immigration trend” by promoting its “funky, ethnic mix that makes it feel like a true urban environment without the urban problems.”24

This sort of promotion, which did indeed revitalize Wheaton’s core, would not have been possible without the community