All this was happening as the city of Atlanta underwent equally dramatic demographic change. The 2010 census for the city itself showed a decrease in the African American population of more than 10 percent, to a bare 54 percent majority, coupled with an increase in the Anglo white population of 17 percent. Meanwhile, foreign newcomers were bypassing Atlanta itself and moving directly to the suburbs.
By 2008, the Hispanic population of Gwinnett County was 17.5 percent, and much more in Norcross and Duluth. Then the increase slowed down, or even went mildly into reverse. By the end of the year, the real estate recession had taken its toll on the proliferation of subdivisions, and there was little construction work to be found. “Latinos are leaving the state of Georgia because there is no construction here,” reported Letycia Pastrana, a longtime Latina activist and director of the Gwinnett Village Community Alliance. Indeed, the 2010 census showed a total population in Gwinnett County of a little more than eight hundred thousand residents, and a modest Hispanic increase.
There were no reliable numbers documenting how many Hispanic immigrants had left the county, or where they went. It was known that some of the male laborers had returned to Mexico, and others had gone to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to build the casinos put up rapidly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the departing Mexican immigrants were replaced in part by an influx of new arrivals from Colombia, Bolivia, and several Central American countries. So while there is unlikely to be a significant increase in the overall Hispanic population in Gwinnett in the near future, the numbers are likely to stay relatively stable.
The white middle class moved to Gwinnett in large part to be safe from urban violence, and through the 1980s and 1990s it was in fact one of the most crime-free places in America. The countywide incidence of crime is still lower than the national average, but in the past several years, the influx of illegal immigrants has created an underclass that has raised the crime rate and brought the previously unknown presence of loitering day laborers into several of the small cities. Whenever there is even a small amount of construction work to be had, day laborers cluster outside strip malls in Gwinnett just as they do in other parts of the country. In 2008, one Norcross resident wrote an angry letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution lamenting what he felt had happened to his town. “Illegal immigrants have already broken several laws to get to my neighborhood,” he said, “and I can attest that their penchant for lawbreaking did not stop at our borders. We have had murders, home invasion, and burglaries galore.” There are outposts of the Mexican drug trade in Gwinnett, as well as a growing number of meth labs operating out of private dwellings. Longtime residents tend to associate these developments with illegal immigration.
It’s dangerous to place much faith in the anger of one resident or anecdotal citizen fears, but no one really disputes that Gwinnett has acquired a crime problem in the past five years. It has also begun to confront the realities of poverty and homelessness. In 1990, the countywide poverty rate was 4 percent. By mid-2009, it had more than doubled to 9 percent, and 11 percent among children. “We are leading the region in the growth of poverty,” says Ellen Gerstein, of the Gwinnett Coalition for Health and Human Services.
The issue of what to do about illegal immigrants poses a huge challenge for the five-member Gwinnett County Commission. This governmental body seems in a way to be an anachronism. All five members are conservative white Republicans; no Democrat or member of any minority group has been elected to countywide office in Gwinnett in the past twenty-five years. And all the current members are facing decisions that their careers and background have not really prepared them for.
Some of these, of course, concern illegal immigration. Georgia has one of the toughest laws against illegal immigrants anywhere in the country, providing in certain cases for their deportation, but it has not been strictly enforced so far. Some Georgia counties, among them Cobb, just west of Gwinnett, have signed up for the 287-G federal program that trains local police to crack down on the undocumented. The regional undercurrent of hostitility to immigrants is not to be underestimated.
Some of Gwinnett’s small towns have passed their own ordinances to deal with what many residents consider public nuisances. Lilburn limits occupancy in any dwelling to one person for every seventy square feet of bedroom space, in an attempt to end the clustering of as many as a dozen single male Hispanic immigrants within one house. The city of Duluth allows no more than three unrelated persons to live together.
But the county commission, with far more power at its disposal, has treaded fairly lightly on immigration issues. This is in part because it is caught between two constituencies. The Republican commissioners have traditionally been close allies of the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, which has been phenomenally successful at attracting new business even amid demographic turmoil. And the chamber is unabashedly pro-diversity and pro-immigration. “If you don’t enjoy and embrace diversity,” says Nick Masino, the chamber’s vice president, “then get out of the Southeast. Go to Nebraska.”
The commission doesn’t like to disappoint the business community. But if it sticks too close to the Chamber of Commerce line, it risks stoking up resentment against illegal immigrants that continues to exist among white middle-class residents. There are regular protests from activists such as Bob Griggs, publisher of the Gwinnett Gazette, who told his readers in 2009 that “illegal immigration costs cities, counties, and the state government an estimated $1.6 billion annually.” The commissioners can’t be sure at any moment how far they might be from a full-fledged populist revolt.
In early 2011, the state of Georgia passed one of the nation’s strictest laws targeting illegal immigrants. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on politics in Gwinnett County.
IT WOULD BE a mistake to feel too sorry for Gwinnett County. Even in recessionary times, it has continued to be a magnet for businesses from around the world. In June 2009, NCR, the former National Cash Register Company, now largely a maker of ATMs and grocery checkout machines, announced that it would be moving its global headquarters and more than fifteen hundred jobs from Dayton, Ohio, to Duluth, in Gwinnett County. It was the second Fortune 500 relocation to the county in two years (the other was Asbury Automotive, a dealers’ group, which moved from New York in July 2008).
Meanwhile, Gwinnett is pressing hard to attract Asian corporations, touting its large Asian population and overall diversity as a reason to do business there. Asian immigrants are nearly all legally documented residents, and the county school system, for all the demographic upheaval, remains among the more respected and high-performing large systems in the nation. According to the 2000 census, Gwinnett was the seventy-first-richest among the 3,140 counties in America on a measure of household income. By 2010, the median household income had grown to nearly $60,000.
In short, Gwinnett County is doing quite well in a number of different ways. But it is nothing like the place that its white middle-class home owners counted on when they moved there by the hundreds of thousands in the last quarter of the twentieth century. What the county has acquired is not merely diversity but what some scholars call hyperdiversity: a multiethnic presence infinitely more complicated than that confronting other places that have simply attracted growing populations of Hispanics and African Americans. If you want evidence of this, consider the schedule of services on a typical Sunday in 2008 at Lilburn’s First Baptist Church: Regular service, 8:00 a.m; Chinese, 10:00; Hispanic, 11:00; Korean, 11:30; Vietnamese, 2:00 p.m; Arabic, 5:30; Indian, 6:00 p.m.
NO PLACE the size of Gwinnett County has changed quite the way Gwinnett has over the past twenty years, but suburbs all over America are moving in the same direction. In 1970, a majority of foreign-born newcomers to this country were settling in cities. By 1980, more were settling in the suburbs, although relatively few demographers were paying much attention. Today, the numbers aren’t even close. In 2005, it is estimated, 4.4 million immigrants went to suburbs and 2.8 million to cities. This is fa
r less dramatic than what has happened in metropolitan Atlanta, but it is a powerful statistic nevertheless.
It essentially violates the theories of immigration and living patterns that were developed by Ernest Burgess and the Chicago school of sociologists in the early twentieth century and were rarely questioned for decades after that: Foreigners came to this country, found marginal places to live in the center of big cities, close to the industrial core, and then gradually moved farther out as their savings enabled them to purchase or rent property separated from the noise, dirt, smells, and dangers of the inner city. This theory applied to New York, where the newly arrived residents of the Lower East Side moved out to the Bronx along the subway line, and then, a generation later, to Long Island or New Jersey. It applied on the other side of the continent, in Los Angeles, where immigrant enclaves such as Boyle Heights and East L.A. saw successive waves of the foreign-born move in, up, and then farther from the center.
As we have seen, inner-city neighborhoods such as Sheffield in Chicago and lower Manhattan in New York are becoming attractive to the affluent, and considerably more expensive than most of the metropolitan periphery. In most successful large cities, it is simply no financial bargain for newcomers to live downtown anymore. Most of the jobs they seek are in the suburbs anyway. At this point, more than two-thirds of all the manufacturing in America takes place outside city borders.
It does not require much more than this to explain why most of the conflicts over immigration now occur in suburban jurisdictions, often ones relatively distant from the big-city borders. It was in Herndon, Virginia, some twenty-five miles from the center of Washington, D.C., that voters unseated a mayor in 2007 because he had created a publicly funded gathering place for Hispanic day laborers. He hoped to bring them in from the street corners and strip-mall parking lots where they had been assembling each morning in search of short-term employment. The idea actually worked: 120 job seekers came in from the streets to use the facility, but a majority of local residents found the center to be an inappropriate gift to people who had entered the country illegally. As one voter complained, “Herndon is acquiring a reputation as a sanctuary, a place that is actually sheltering illegal aliens.”
This was too much for a community that considered itself to be part of affluent exurbia and to a great extent was. Herndon had become an oddly dichotomous town, with wealth management consultants operating out of large Colonial homes around the corner from pupuserías where not only the customers but the employees spoke no English. The shuttering of the public day labor center did nothing to change this: By mid-2008, the laborers were back congregating in front of 7-Eleven stores and auto body shops in the center of town, as many as fifty at a time on an average morning. Only the slowdown in residential construction reduced those numbers significantly in the years after that. Herndon remains a place deeply split between a foreign-born population approaching 40 percent and a tenuous Anglo majority seeking to preserve its original exurban aspirations.
Few American suburbs have experienced the turmoil of Herndon, or that of Prince William County, on the south side of the D.C. metro area, but in the past decade, most suburbs have witnessed changes they never expected to see. Asian Indians have become so numerous in Plano, an upscale exurban community some twenty miles north of central Dallas, that there has been a proliferation of weekend cricket leagues and the establishment of an Asian Women’s Lions Club. The suburbs east of Portland, Oregon, are now home to cul-de-sacs in which every resident is a Bosnian. The Hmong and Lao refugees who settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1980s have spread out into more affordable suburban territory, following the jobs, 80 percent of which are now located more than five miles from the center of either St. Paul or Minneapolis. Given these numbers, it is no surprise that Susan Hardwick, an immigration scholar at the University of Oregon, talks about the United States making a transition to a “suburban immigrant nation.” What is surprising is that all this is happening much faster than demographers predicted a decade ago.
MORE AND MORE, Gwinnett County has come to be a magnet for newly arrived Asian immigrants. The first to come in large numbers were Vietnamese, many of them supporters of the fallen anti-Communist regime in Saigon, admitted as refugees under federal laws of asylum. Some had been senior officials of the South Vietnamese government, and had spent much of the previous two decades in jungle detention camps. Many more spoke French than English. Churches all over metropolitan Atlanta sponsored them, but large numbers eventually found their way to Gwinnett. They were not, at least at first, an economically successful immigrant group. Many had to settle for entry-level factory jobs, working on auto windshields and air-conditioning units. It wasn’t work to which most of these newcomers, in their forties and fifties, were very well suited. But there weren’t many other options. “You really have no choice,” says Lam Ngo, a Vietnamese Realtor and community leader, “when you don’t have the language and your résumé just says you were a bureaucrat and served prison time.”
At first, many of the Vietnamese settled on the other side of the county border in Chamblee or Doraville, along the MARTA train route, where modest apartments had been found for them. But as the new century began, many of the Vietnamese had found businesses to operate in Gwinnett, most notably the nail-painting salons that seemed to be on every block of Buford Highway. These businesses involved virtually no start-up costs, other than leasing a storefront, often a vacant one in an old Buford Highway strip mall. Few of the customers of the salons were Vietnamese, but just about all the workforce was. Painting nails was a job that required good manual dexterity but little English proficiency. There was no shortage of young Vietnamese women who qualified. “We are taking over the county,” one Vietnamese activist joked, “one nail at a time.”
The Vietnamese also proved to be resolute home buyers, investing in part for speculation and in part because of their large family size: At one point, Vietnamese in the Atlanta region as a whole had an average household size of 4.18, compared to 2.68 for all ethnic groups combined. Vietnamese community leaders have estimated that 60 percent of all the Vietnamese immigrants in the Atlanta area now live in Gwinnett County.
In the wake of the Vietnamese came an influx of Indians and Pakistanis, most of them arriving in the Atlanta area to study at local colleges. Many found jobs afterward at the new tech center. Like the Vietnamese, these people were literate and well educated, but their literacy was in English, they possessed skills that were in demand, and they tended to draw good salaries. By 2008, Indians formed the largest Asian immigrant group throughout the region. Among men age twenty-five and over, 71 percent possessed bachelor’s degrees, and 38 percent graduate degrees. Today, they make up a dramatically disproportionate share of the county’s medical profession.
Gwinnett is home not only to the largest Indian community in metropolitan Atlanta, but to 31 percent of all the Indian immigrants in the entire state of Georgia. Many of them can afford to live almost anywhere in the county, and there are few easily identifiable Indian enclaves. They are generally mixed in rather inconspicuously with the rest of the ethnic population. But one Asian cluster is clearly developing in the Gwinnett town of Lilburn, where in 2006 a Hindu sect known as BAPS, which stands for Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, built an immense temple, known as a mandir, on the outskirts of town. Seventy-two feet high and an eighth of a mile long, containing thirty thousand square feet of floor space, it is an amazing sight as one drives by. It is as if someone attempted to construct a rival to the Taj Mahal on an ordinary road in the Atlanta suburbs. Its building blocks of limestone, sandstone, and marble were carved in India and shipped to Lilburn to be assembled like an immense jigsaw puzzle. Its main staircase alone is seventy-three feet wide.
The Hindu temple that rises suddenly and dramatically on Rockbridge Road in Gwinnett County is a graphic reminder of how a once overwhelmingly white enclave has changed its complexion in just a few years. (photo credit 4.2)
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p; There is something undeniably incongruous about the BAPS mandir, situated as it is next to a Walgreens and a string of dilapidated bungalows. But in three years, it had become a focal point of Hindu life in Georgia and indeed in the entire South. In the words of Charles Bannister, the former county commission chairman, who lives in Lilburn, “They are buying houses and moving closer to [the mandir] all the time.”
The mandir is in part responsible for an episode that startled much of Gwinnett County in the fall of 2009: Parkview High School in Lilburn was unable to field a ninth-grade football team. That is no major tragedy; many schools have never even played ninth-grade football. But Parkview is different. It has long been the sports powerhouse of Gwinnett, the winner of four state football championships in a dozen years. In 2006, Sports Illustrated named it the fifth-strongest athletic high school in the entire United States. Ninth grade has traditionally been the time when much of the aspiring varsity talent first displays itself to the school’s fans.
The failure to make up a team was a piece of gossip all over the county within a few days. But few of the roughly twelve thousand residents of Lilburn itself were puzzled about why this had happened to Parkview. Locals knew how much the school had changed in the previous five years. What had long been a mostly white institution with an African American minority had become a miniature United Nations, with the white and black cohorts nearly equaled by students from dozens of countries all over Asia and Latin America. Asians, most of them from India, now made up a fifth of the student body. They were winning math competitions, boosting the school’s SAT scores, and enhancing its overall academic reputation. But very few of them were playing football. The school “has regressed some in that respect,” admitted former commission chairman Bannister. “Academically, it hasn’t.”
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 11