Latino Immigrants Filling Southern Niches, Study Finds

A Latino immigrant to Los Angeles enters a community with a population in the millions, but an increasing number of immigrants crossing the southern border wind up in a very different kind of city.

According to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, many now go to six Southern states where Latino populations doubled, tripled or even quadrupled between 1990 and 2000.

Even as supermercados, or Latino supermarkets, move into defunct big-box stores and nurses head to Spanish classes, immigrants can find these new communities to be tougher homes than traditional destinations such as Los Angeles or Chicago.

“They are landing in a place with no large Latino community to accept them,” said the study’s co-author, Sonya Tafoya. “It’s not like L.A., where you can get by without speaking English very easily. The context is very different in the Southern states. These are truly pioneering communities.”

The six states -- North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee -- attracted Latinos, along with native-born Americans, during the 1990s, thanks to healthy growth in manufacturing. But now they are struggling with extreme versions of California’s longtime challenges: students whose primary language is not English, crowded housing and the quandary of whether to cooperate with immigration authorities.

In those six states, the number of Latino children enrolled in school is projected to increase 210% between 2001 and 2008. By contrast, in the traditional destination states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, an increase of 16% is expected over that time.

What’s more, the population change is concentrated in a few counties in those Southern states -- primarily those with slaughterhouses, big service economies or home-building booms, each of which attract migrants who are willing to work for moderate pay and limited benefits.

During the 1990s, the Latino population in the 36 counties examined in Pew’s report increased by as much as 1,500% in some and 500% in many others.

The Southern communities look different from those in California. Latinos in the South are mostly foreign-born, male and under 27. Most have less than a high school education and speak English poorly, if at all. Most are undocumented.

Tafoya said these factors were forcing communities to adjust -- fast. “Social service providers and educators have to serve an entirely new population,” she said. “They are not set up to do that. They are gearing up, but it’s not like California, where they have been incorporating immigrants for decades.”

Ferrel Guillory, co-author of “The State of the South,” a biennial study published by the Chapel Hill, N.C., think tank MDC Inc., said organizations in North Carolina were rushing to respond. The Catholic Diocese of Raleigh has sent its priests to Spanish classes, he said, and a women’s healthcare organization in Chapel Hill has begun guiding pregnant immigrants through the medical system.

Guillory said the South was increasingly dependent on immigrants for its economic survival. “This high-end, affluent society we’ve built requires services,” he said. Manufacturing employers have pushed to keep the supply of cheap labor coming, Tafoya said.

But residents, and legislators, can be less welcoming. In the last week, the state Legislature in North Carolina rejected a bill to let undocumented high school graduates pay the same tuition as legal in-state students at the state universities.

However, education could be the key to bringing the new residents into the mainstream, Guillory said. “We are changing from a muscle economy to a mind economy. We’ve got to do a better job and close the education gap between the native-born whites and Latinos.”