Well, the shiny new Catholic town of Ave Maria in Florida is up and running, and the university bearing its name is also open for business. But according to local reports, not everybody is thrilled with any of this:

The students of Ave Maria University returned this semester to a brand new campus in a town that a few months ago did not exist.

But as incoming freshmen sit through their first classes in Sacred Scripture and Moral Theology, residents in neighboring Immokalee worry that the new town, which covers thousands of acres of farmland and promises to bring more development to the area, will undermine their livelihoods and their community.

Ave Maria University was founded in 2002 by Tom Monaghan, the multimillionaire founder of Domino’s Pizza and conservative Catholic philanthropist, who moved the campus from Naples, Fla., to a 5,000-acre tract five miles from Immokalee, which is 30 miles northeast of Naples.

It is part of an ambitious development called Ave Maria Town, which will include 11,000 homes, three golf courses and its own water park, all oriented around a towering church.

Before it was transformed by more than $400 million in private investment, the land on which Ave Maria rises was home to tomatoes and citrus harvested by migrants, many of them undocumented, who earn as little as 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket picked.

One of those workers is Lucas Benitez, who came to Immokalee from his family farm in Guerrero, Mexico, more than a decade ago after a drop in corn prices following adoption of the North America Free Trade Agreement — the free-trade pact of Mexico, Canada and the United States.

After years of picking tomatoes, Benitez co-founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization that fights for better wages and working conditions for farmworkers.

He sees Ave Maria as ”the NAFTA of Immokalee,” and says its backers want to replace the farms with gated communities.

”They aren’t talking about improving the town or creating more employment,” he said. “They are talking about getting rid of the workers who have lived here for decades.”

Benitez said the impact was already being felt through Collier County’s crackdown on trailers where the farmworkers live. In the past year and a half, 226 trailers have been condemned, said Nancy Freeze, the Immokalee director of the Health Department.

Freeze said the trailers were closed as a result of safety concerns. ”We need migrant-worker housing,” she said, “but if there’s a place that’s not up to code, then we close it.”

To Fred Thomas, who lives in Immokalee and is a former director of the county housing authority, the trailers represent the canary in the mine of affordable housing.

”If you’re talking to people on the lower end of the economic scale, they may suspect that Naples is creeping into Immokalee,” he said, ”and that is a legitimate concern.” Naples has the second-highest concentration of millionaires in the nation, according to Kiplinger.com.

The concerns of Immokalee’s residents go beyond jobs and housing.

The Rev. Hector Rubin is the priest of Immokalee’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where, he estimated, 70 percent of his parishioners were migrant workers. He believes the Catholic Church must tend to all of the immigrants’ needs — ”not just the religious needs, but educational, social, and material ones as well” — and said his parish had become a home away from home for workers in Immokalee without friends or family.

When Monaghan announced plans to move Ave Maria close to Immokalee, Rubin said, ”many Catholics open to human values feared that the university was trying to stop whatever inroads the church was making to new immigrants.” He said this fear was rooted in the orthodoxy of Ave Maria, which, he said, “rejects any social or theological change in the traditional practice of the Catholic Church.”

The people behind Ave Maria don’t see themselves that way.

The Rev. Robert Garrity, chaplain of Ave Maria University, said Ave Maria students were already doing charitable work in Immokalee, tutoring students and giving free language lessons.

Nor does everyone in Immokalee see Ave Maria as an interloper. Juan Barrera, a child of undocumented farmworkers, said he grew up ”living the migrant life.” He was the first in his family to go to college, and was hired as an assistant construction manager at Ave Maria.

A devout Catholic who speaks English as effortlessly as Spanish, Barrera thinks Ave Maria will provide Immokalee with a model for building a stronger community, and instill Christian values in its younger generations. He enrolled his 10-year-old son in Ave Maria’s K-12 school.

Barrera’s attitude toward Ave Maria is emblematic of many of Immokalee’s second-generation immigrants — restaurant owners, doctors and teachers — who see Ave Maria as an opportunity rather than as a threat.

Read on for more.