Hispanics and the South – one county’s story

November 5, 2006

Southern states have many small counties, which eases tracking the changing face of their populations in census data.

The number of Hispanics in southern states quadrupled between 1990 and 2005, rising to 2.4 million from 562,663. The result is the kind of rapid change that the US last experienced a century ago, when southern and Eastern Europeans arrived in the cities of the north and Midwest.

Atkinson County, Georgia, with a population of 8,000, was described a "cauldron of demographic change" in the New York Times on August 4, 2006.  Between 1990 and 2004, the Hispanic share of the county's  population rose from three to 21 percent, as the number of Hispanics surpassed the number of Blacks, who are 19 percent of residents.  

Some local residents believe that "third-world" immigration will make the county a "third-world place."  The county is poor, with a quarter of residents having below poverty-level incomes and 44 percent of the housing mobile homes, according to the 2000 census.

Atkinson County's demographic change began with farm workers in the late 1980s, after IRCA legalized a sixth of the adult men in rural Mexico. Some migrants settled and moved into nonfarm jobs or opened businesses catering to the growing number of Hispanic residents. Some local businesses benefited from the growing population, but some local leaders decried the rapid population growth, in the number of non-English speaking students, and uncompensated health care costs. Some Hispanics, in turn, complain of police harassment.

The New York Times in October emphasized that Hispanics in Georgia have lower unemployment rates than Blacks, seem to be preferred over Blacks by factory employers, and operate more small shops and stores.  Many Hispanics say that Blacks avoid hard work, while Blacks say that Hispanics are willing to work harder for lower wages because they are immigrants.

About 75 percent of US-produced carpets are made in 150 factories around Dalton, a city of 25,000 in Georgia. In 2006, about half of Dalton-area carpet workers were Latinos, as were over 60 percent of the K-12 students; the number of Hispanics in Whitfield county rose from 2,000 in 1990 to 18,000 by 2000.

Latinos began arriving after legalization in 1987-88, as networks spread the word that there were factory jobs in Dalton paying more than seasonal farm work or nonfarm meatpacking and services such as janitorial work.  Most carpet factories offer entry level wages of $8.50 to $10 an hour, and many workers reportedly use false documents to get jobs.  Some experts say that, when 1996 summer Olympics construction projects fell behind schedule, and immigration authorities promised not to enforce sanctions laws actively,

Hispanics headed for Atlanta and have since spread from there around Georgia.

Dalton's Mohawk Industries is being sued by local workers under a 1996 law that makes those knowingly hiring unauthorized workers subject to triple penalties under RICO. The workers allege that Mohawk knowingly hired illegal workers to hold down wages.