http://www.redding.com/redd/nw_business ... 16,00.html

Immigrant commerce booms beyond border states
Companies cater to Latino workers in new markets

By Rebecca Boone, Associated Press
December 4, 2005

BOISE, Idaho -- Three years ago, a tiny financial services office opened in Nampa, Idaho, with just a handful of employees and a focus on Spanish-speaking clientele.

But along with Idaho's Latino population, the business is exploding -- El Centro is opening a second office in Caldwell, with plans to expand to Denver and Chicago soon, said manager David Cahoon.


We're looking at hyper-growth areas. In Denver, there's a huge Latino market there, and the same with Chicago," Cahoon said. "In Idaho, the Hispanic population is growing. It's huge, and we don't really have much competition."

Most of the United States' Spanish-speaking immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- are from Mexico. Statistics from several agencies suggest the number of illegal immigrants in the country is growing, with Bear Stearns in New York estimating between 12 million and 15 million of the nation's jobs are held by illegal immigrants. About 95 percent of Cahoon's clients speak only Spanish, he said.

Even as businesses such as Cahoon's work to find ways to earn immigrant dollars, government officials in so-called new destination states are struggling to deal with the illegal immigrant population. Instead of staying in border states, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, new immigrants are heading to the suburbs of Tennessee, Mississippi, the Dakotas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

"Illegal immigrants are not just randomly flowing into places. They're following jobs," said Gordon Hanson, an economics professor at the University of California at San Diego. "Look at where the growth in the illegal immigrant population is strongest: It's in areas with growing populations, where there are more restaurants, grocery stores, construction and retail outlets. And it's in areas where the native U.S. manufacturing and labor force is aging and disappearing."

Such as in North Carolina, where the number of illegal immigrants jumped from 26,000 in 1990 to 206,000 a decade later. Many of those undocumented workers have been drawn to jobs in the textile industry, Frey said.

Mike Hubbard, the vice president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, has seen his industry and his North Carolina city of Gastonia change with the influx of immigrants.

As a child in North Carolina, Hubbard rarely heard Spanish, he said. Now many textile managers are learning the language so they can talk to employees, and businesses are translating their safety materials. North Carolina neighborhoods have changed, too, he said.

"Now there's Spanish grocery stands on every corner, and the food's getting a lot better," he said. "So there have been changes. Maybe wages here would have gone up faster without the immigration, but I can't say that for sure."

Some city governments are moving on their own to bring more Mexican nationals into the mainstream economy. Both Yakima, Wash. and Seattle -- along with about 360 other cities nationwide -- now accept ID cards issued by Mexican consulates as valid identification for obtaining library cards, help from community health centers or other services.

Many of the evolving economic advantages offered by illegal aliens are offset by social costs, Hanson said. Illegal immigrants tend to be poorer than their legal counterparts, are less likely to be insured and have larger families, he said. That all puts pressure on indigent health-care costs and public schools.

States generally fund schools based on enrollment numbers, and schools don't track students by their citizenship status, said Allison Westfall with the Idaho Department of Education. Still, the number of non-English-speaking students is growing. In 1997, the state spent $1.5 million to help just over 11,000 students learn English, she said, compared with $4.8 million for nearly 21,000 students in 2005.