2000 Census Shows Latino Boom, High-Tech Prosperity in N. Carolina

Driven by the twin engines of immigration and technological prosperity, North Carolina emerged from the 1990s with a new ethnic complexity and a bustling urban life, according to census figures released Wednesday.

The Latino population more than quadrupled in the last decade, exploding from less than 77,000 in 1990 to between 335,115 and 378,963 last year. North Carolina now has the largest Latino population of any Southern state except Texas and Florida.

(Race and ethnicity figures from the 2000 census are reported as ranges because, for the first time, people could report that they belong to more than one group.)

Asians more than doubled their numbers, displacing American Indians as the state’s third-largest racial group.

Overall, North Carolina’s population added a robust 21.4%, with the strongest growth in Wake County, home to a portion of the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park. Nestled among three universities, the nation’s largest technology office complex provides about 43,000 jobs and has drawn such corporate giants as IBM Corp., Nortel Networks Corp. and Glaxo Wellcome Inc. to the area.

“It’s a booming state,” said William Frey, a demographer for the Milken Institute. “It has all the ingredients. It has high-tech and world-class education. It has become a secondary stopping point for immigrants and a destination for the elderly.”

Retirees flowed into North Carolina’s coastal and western counties in the 1990s, while Latinos gravitated to areas like Durham and Chadham counties, where they became mainstays at meatpacking and poultry-processing plants.

“The prosperity is the draw,” said Hilda Gurdian, publisher of La Noticia, a weekly paper in Charlotte.

Almost one-third of the Latino community is younger than 18, a powerful signal of still more profound changes to come.

North Carolina’s ethnic shift magnified a nationwide trend that brought Latinos and Asians to regions of the country where the mix had consisted almost exclusively of black and white.

Census reports show the Latino population more than doubled in Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas during the 1990s.

Their gains may, in part, reflect that California is claiming a smaller share of new arrivals than it did in the 1980s, demographers said.

“Once these people left California to go to places like Arkansas and North Carolina, others followed and immigrants started to go there directly,” said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the nonpartisan Urban Institute who specializes in immigration issues.

The exponential extent of North Carolina’s Latino boom exceeded earlier Census Bureau projections, but state officials said Wednesday that the numbers came as little surprise to them.

“We’re not the sleepy Southern state that people on the West Coast think we are,” said Rob Lamme, spokesman for Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight.

The results will not immediately affect the state’s power balance. Latinos still account for only 4.2% to 4.7% of the population, Asians and Pacific Islanders just 1.4% to 1.8%.

Almost 3 in 4 North Carolina residents are white. The African American population increased more slowly than that of the state overall but was up by almost 275,000. Blacks made up 21.4% to 22.1% of the whole in 2000, slightly less than in 1990.

But Latinos’ enhanced visibility is slowly triggering a response in all areas of state life, Lamme said. Basnight, for example, recently added a staffer specifically to handle concerns of the Latino community.

“You can’t be a North Carolinian and not see the growth in the Latino community firsthand,” Lamme said.

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Associated Press contributed to this story.