Under The Sun
A new wave of immigrants is transforming communities nowhere near the border
CARRBORO, N.C. --The young Mexican men arrive just before nightfall, some still in work clothes spattered with paint and plaster. Their sun-baked faces sag with exhaustion from another long day mowing lawns, hanging drywall, and framing the latest luxury condominiums rising just up the road in Chapel Hill.
Roberto, who shares this two-bedroom, one-bath apartment and $455 monthly rent with five other men, greets a group of friends with hugs. The pungent aroma of chicken mole wafts from the kitchen where Francisco, in a T-shirt that reads, "You say psycho like it's a bad thing," stirs the pot.
The men, who work illegally in the area's thriving shadow economy, sprawl on secondhand couches and drain icy bottles of Corona beer, needling each other over soccer bets and joking about their American patrons. "A moving man ask me if I speak English," says Elias, in a language he's learning watching U.S. movies and television, "and I say, 'Why? I no talk to the furniture.' " The men laugh. "We're here because we need a couple bucks," says Roberto, who crossed the border six years ago. "We made a lot of mistakes . . . but this don't mean we're bad guys or different, we just didn't have money in Mexico. Here, I see a beautiful opportunity if we do it right."
But where Roberto sees opportunity, many Americans see and feel something very different. Waves of undocumented immigrants, most from Mexico, are pouring into North Carolina and other states that have little tradition of large-scale immigration. And with no road map, these states are struggling to understand what's happening and what it means. Bitter debate, fueled by talk radio, new interest groups, and nostalgia for a more simple past, has dogged the new immigrants, from Georgia to Utah, Tennessee to Arizona.
No return. Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants already live in the United States, and nearly 800,000 more are believed to arrive each year. A U.S. Census Bureau report released last week said the nation's overall Hispanic population--legal and illegal--reached 41.3 million as of July 2004, and noted that Hispanics accounted for about one half of America's population growth between July 2003 and July 2004.
And there's no going back. Not for states like California and Texas, where undocumented workers have been living for generations, and not for other states, where the variegated weave is new. A study released in March by the Pew Hispanic Center reported that since the mid-1990s, the fastest growth of undocumented migrants has been in states that previously had only small foreign-born populations--places like Arizona, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Latino populations in these "new settlement areas" grew by 130 percent between 1990 and 2000.
The influx has prompted strong reactions. In Virginia, a lawmaker proposed barring illegal immigrants from state colleges and universities. In Arizona, the Legislature denied some welfare benefits to undocumented workers. But no state is struggling over the issue as mightily as North Carolina. Here the Latino population, mostly undocumented immigrants, has surged 400 percent in 15 years. "The demographics have changed so fast," says Millie Ravenel, executive director of the North Carolina Center for International Understanding, "that people are struggling to figure out how to make it work."
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