by Ray Suarez
At the end of the Central American civil wars and the Cold War, there were large and growing communities of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. During the 1980s the Latino population of the United States had grown by a stunning 53 percent, to more than twenty-two million.
Cities and counties outside the Western and border states or Florida and New York now saw things they had never thought about before: barrios and bodegas, demand for teachers of English as a Second Language and Catholic priests able to say the Mass in Spanish, and social workers and cops who could find out what they needed to know from clients. New Latino residents revived sagging commercial strips, took seats in post–baby boom elementary schools, and helped the high school soccer team suddenly become a contender.
Omar Vasquez became part of the new wave of immigrants moving to places unaccustomed to immigration. For most of American history the states of the old Confederacy were the most uniformly native-born of all the states. With the exception of Louisiana and Florida, the American South had not been home to large ethnic communities, had not been a place accustomed to the sounds of foreign languages on the street or on the radio. Vasquez left Los Angeles, a place he found tougher to work in and growing steadily less safe, and headed east to Dalton, Georgia. Since the Immigration Reform and Control Act, he had a green card in his pocket, and the carpet mills were hiring.
“The mills were going day and night. There was lots of overtime. The very next year lots of people started to come from Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas, and Mexico.” Along with the work, Vasquez said, he found security. “When we arrived here it was strange, but I found out that it was different than California. Dalton was safe, not like Los Angeles. There were no gangs. It was family friendly. People don’t rob you here.”
By the 2000 census, Vasquez had plenty of company. Dalton was 40 percent Latino. They made up a third of Whitfield County, where Dalton was the county seat. A third of Mexican immigrants were no longer heading to the big metropolitan areas that had been destinations since the Mexican Revolution. Now they were going to Georgia, Alabama, Nebraska, North Carolina, Iowa, and New York.
No longer confined to agricultural labor, Latino workers have spread to every part of the country and many different sectors of the economy. Latinos are heavily represented in the South’s carpet industry, as in this factory in Dalton, Georgia. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/JOHN BAZEMORE
Professor Rubén Hernández-León of UCLA’s Center for Mexican Studies said a look at multiple factors makes it easier to understand why Mexicans in particular have moved well beyond traditional areas of settlement. The Immigration Reform and Control Act and continuing illegal immigration brought the number of Latino workers seeking jobs in the Southwest to the saturation point.
“There were, in essence, too many immigrants, too many conationals competing for the same jobs in the same labor markets, in the same industries. At the same time, the quality of life was actually deteriorating for many families, and those conditions actually propelled many of these immigrants to look for alternative destinations in places like Dalton and other cities and states in the Southeast. More recently, of course, the recession has had an important severe impact across the country for sure, but in places like Dalton that are essentially one-industry towns.”
So, has dispersal worked for the new migrants? Enrique Pumar, the chairman of the Sociology Department at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has found in his research into the new Latino suburbs that, on balance, it has. “It’s a good thing for them. They are out of the way. They are not as visible and not as exposed to anti-immigrant politics. They do very well in these new communities.
“For a century this model, the University of Chicago school of urban sociology, was based on the assumption that newly arrived immigrants would settle in the city. Today that model is upside down. It’s no longer viable. Center cities are becoming very attractive. So the price of housing has increased and immigrants don’t feel as welcome anymore.”
However, that old immigrant model existed for more reasons than just the price of housing. An immigrant arriving at Ellis Island in, let’s say, 1905 would have headed to a place where already settled immigrants had begun to build a place where he or she would feel welcome. A place to buy a newspaper or bread for Sabbath blessings in Yiddish, a place to hear Mass in Italian and live among people who come from not just your country, but your own hometown.
Suburbanizing immigrants pay a price, according to Pumar. “There is a loss of social solidarity, because the barrio is disintegrating and people are taking advantage of opportunities outside the barrio. The old immigrant neighborhood was a place where people had a grocery store and a local bank that knew them.
Even as Latino trailblazers move into professions where they once were rare or that were even closed to them, they are still disproportionately represented in blue-collar work. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS, DAN HENRY
“There are effects on mental health. Low social solidarity means greater social problems. We have to be compassionate. Individuals left their families behind, and now find themselves in the United States without neighbors who can show them around. They have to acquaint themselves with a new environment, and it can be very difficult.”
In the first decade of the new century, many Americans were not feeling particularly compassionate, or seeing any upside in what some were now calling an “invasion.” Who were these people? Where did they come from? Latinos, legal and illegal alike, were not prized workers and much-needed customers; they were a drain on the public finances. They arrived at hospital emergency rooms with critical needs and no health insurance. They gave birth in county hospital maternity wards and the public picked up the tab. Their kids arrived in kindergarten unable to speak English, not just taking up a classroom seat and costing the school district money, but also needing expensive supplementary help while pulling down test scores and driving other families away. All this, it was alleged, while giving back “nothing” to the community and paying nothing in to defray the added costs caused by their arrival.
Governor Pete Wilson of California figured he had taken his citizens’ temperature, and saw an opportunity. “For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I’m suing to force the federal government to control the border. And I’m working to deny state services to illegal immigrants. Enough is enough!” Governor Wilson said cash-strapped California could no longer afford to pay to educate and provide health care to more than a million people living in the state illegally. The state’s ballot initiative Proposition 187 asked Californians to give state government the power to withdraw public services to people living in the state illegally.
In the 1994 election, the measure passed with a seventeen-point majority. The ballot measure won support throughout the state, except for a cluster of counties around the liberal bastion of San Francisco. Proposition 187’s supporters called the initiative “Save Our State.” Its opponents called it racist and unconstitutional and headed to federal court.
Just weeks after a majority of voters said Proposition 187 should become California law, a federal appeals court judge, Mariana Pfaelzer, said it would not, issuing a permanent injunction against 187. Part of Pfaelzer’s legal reasoning was that California could not regulate immigration through state legislation, a responsibility reserved by the federal government. Remember that argument; it will come up again.
Sociologist Marta Tienda of Princeton University has said the panicky political rhetoric about an immigrant “invasion” was out of date anyway. It was natural growth of an already present population that was driving Latino numbers. “Immigration was not the problem. It was merely a smoke screen. By the nineties most of the Latino population growth was in fact due to birthrates. If you look at the census numbers there was a dramatic shift in the population. But most of the growth was in
the number of children born to legal and American-born Mexicans.”
President George H. W. Bush had negotiated and pushed hard for the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. The treaty created a three-nation free-trade zone among Canada, the United States, and Mexico, a common market for goods from the Arctic Circle to the Guatemalan border.
Henry Cisneros became Mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in 1981 and joined the Clinton Administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1993. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/SUSAN RAGAN
Attorney and public servant Maria Echaveste rose to become deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. CREDIT: MARIA ECHAVESTE
Apart from changes in the labeling on manufactured merchandise, and pressures to move manufacturing and sales staffs for international companies south, Americans didn’t anticipate major changes right away. For Mexico, NAFTA brought wrenching transformation, not least in farming. With the agreement to end the ejido system of communal lands, with roots going back before the arrival of the Spaniards, Mexican small farmers would feel the chilly blast of competition from the vast mechanized farms of the United States and Canada.
Corn was to be opened to increasing competition from other North American markets. Corn is central to Mexican identity and the Mexican diet, and now thousands of farmers would find they could no longer make a decent living growing it. Eduardo Paz, a Mexican and a Mixtec Indian, was one of them. Two years after the passage of NAFTA, he decided to head north.
“Many people from my village were leaving. We were all working in the traditional way, raising corn on our small plots of land, watered only by rain. The little plot of land could no longer support the family.” Eventually, a million farmers gave up. When you look at an economy from very high up, in treasuries and agricultural ministries and international trade talks, these are the necessary compromises needed to modernize an economy, but that did not make it any easier for Eduardo Paz. “Necessity is what drove me to go north. I couldn’t make a living. I had to feed my family. So I came to el Norte. I came to this country to work honestly and make a little money for my children. It is with this purpose that I came here. We are all the same. We want to help our families.”
The original rationale for NAFTA, often heard in the Washington debates over the treaty, said the trade pact would eventually reduce illegal immigration by making work more plentiful and profitable in Mexico, giving people a reason to stay home. All it did was change where Mexicans left to move north in search of opportunity. NAFTA brought new prosperity to metropolitan areas while making it harder to earn a living on the land.
Paz eventually headed to Dalton, Georgia, where Omar Vasquez had relocated. “We have three children—a daughter and then twin boys. They were born in the U.S., so they are citizens. We’ve lived in Michigan, North Carolina, Kentucky, and now Georgia. I work at one of the factories where they don’t check for papers. There used to be so much work that they would hire people without asking for papers.
“But since the economy has slowed down and there is less work, things have changed. Georgia recently passed a law that makes it illegal for me to be here. If I get caught driving without a license I’ll probably be deported. My brother-in-law and my friends who have driver’s licenses take turns driving me to work.”
Like millions, Paz lives in a mixed-status family. He and his wife are in the United States illegally. His children are citizens. If he is caught by immigration authorities in a workplace raid, or even after inquiries made during a routine traffic stop, he and his wife face deportation.
Minor children who can remain in the country legally cannot save their parents from being sent home. So families face difficult choices: leave young children behind with family or friends, with no clear road to reuniting with their parents, or just take them back “home,” to a place they have never been.
Activists working on behalf of these families hope comprehensive immigration reform will find a durable solution for the Paz family and millions of others. Others who lobby Congress look at the current political scene in Washington and put any such immigration bill many years away.
Eliseo Medina was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. His parents were farmworkers, and the family headed north to look for work in California. He worked as a grape and orange picker and eventually as an organizer for the United Farm Workers. Medina was a leader in spreading the boycotts and an organizer in the fields. CREDIT: ELISEO MEDINA
The sudden and devastating decline in new construction ushered in by the housing crisis in 2008 landed like a sledgehammer on Latino employment among the native-born, legal residents, and illegal immigrants alike. Latinos had moved heavily into the construction industry over the previous twenty years, and now saw cratering job markets, spilling over into manufacturing centers and places like Dalton. After all, if people are not building new houses, and losing the ones they already own, fewer carpets will be made and sold.
For Professor Hernández-Leon the resulting suffering heightens the need for a solution to the immigration issue: amnesty, legalization, regularization, a path to citizenship, whatever you want to call it. “Any of those names, any of those labels essentially addresses the very crucial need to give legal status to millions of immigrants who have basically lived their lives or a good chunk of their lives, a good part of their lives in this country—that have purchased homes, that have paid taxes, that have contributed to retirement and Social Security, who have contributed to economic growth and the vitality of their communities through their labor.
Eliseo Medina eventually left the UFW to become the highest-ranking Latino in the history of the Service Employees International Union. He is the international secretary-treasurer of the heavily Latino service workers union. CREDIT: ELISEO MEDINA
“These immigrants are not just workers; they are parents, they are grandparents, they are children and brothers of other people who are in a similar situation, so this issue of immigration regularization is clearly the only way of dealing humanely and practically, in fact, with the current situation.”
The professor also argues that such reform is not vital just for Latinos, but for all Americans. “It is not good for any country to have a large population that essentially lives in the shadows of society. These are individuals who are afraid of interacting with institutions in general, who may not be willing to report a crime to the authorities. These are people who cannot make long-term plans, who cannot make the investments that any person makes throughout a lifetime, and who cannot contribute fully to the well-being, the development of the next generation. So it’s very important that this population receive some kind of legal relief, so they can essentially get on with their lives and live their lives just like any other human being who not just resides in a place but actually has legal rights and really, ultimately belongs to the place where he or she lives.”
Dan Stein does not buy that argument. As president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, he is one of the highest-profile spokesmen for the proposition that the United States already has too many immigrants and should be very cautious about taking more. In 2011, he told PBS NewsHour, “I know some people think we’re too hard-hearted. We’re truly concerned about a breakdown in the integrity of this country’s ability to control its borders and determine who has the right to stay and who doesn’t. That is what is at stake here, far broader than the question of the three hundred thousand people now in the deportation queue. . . .
“The American people have a right to have their fiscal integrity secured through border and perimeter controls, whether it’s good schools, health care, hospitals, our job market. We have the right to compete in a fair labor market where illegal immigrants are not working.”
Before the recent severe recession and continuing problems in the job market, the battle lines were already sharpening. Between 1990 and 2002 the Latino population took another enormous leap, adding ten million. The U.
S. Border Patrol and other police agencies were catching ten thousand undocumented people a week trying to cross the border, or in workplace raids.
Tensions grew, and lurid anti-Latino crimes began to be reported in widely dispersed places across America:
Twelve-year-old Emilio Jiménez Bejinez was killed by a single shot to the head as he crossed the border with family members near San Ysidro, California. Two men in an apartment near the border got out a rifle and took aim after one suggested, “Let’s shoot some aliens.”
Near San Francisco, a young white man bludgeoned a Mexican mother and daughter to death on the street, while friends watched from a parked car.
An arsonist burned an apartment in Columbus, Ohio, killing ten Mexican immigrants.
Then in 2002 came the Minutemen. Across the country local people volunteered to keep an eye on the U.S. border and daily-hire pickup sights in communities far from the Mexican frontier. Their opponents called them vigilantes. The Minutemen insisted they were simply doing their duty as citizens, helping law enforcement at every level of government.
Minuteman Project cofounder Jim Gilchrist said the United States was under threat, and did not have the luxury of waiting for the federal government to act. “The border between the U.S. and Mexico is not a border. It’s a wide-open invitation to illegal aliens, drug smugglers, child-sex traffickers, and terrorists! It’s a national disgrace—and a huge danger to our country. I finally came to the realization that we were having an illegal-alien invasion crisis.”
Veteran Republican Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin caught the spirit of the times. He introduced H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. It called for up to seven hundred miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexican border at the most popular crossing points. The bill mandated fines for illegal immigrants, made housing one a felony, and redefined being in the country illegally from a low-level civil infraction to a federal crime.