http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/15768712.htm

Reaching out to new arrivals

While immigration stirs anger, a Delaware town has found peace.

By Paul Nussbaum
Inquirer Staff Writer


GEORGETOWN, Del. - The Guatemalans started arriving here in 1993 and 1994.

They came to work in southern Delaware's poultry-processing plants, and soon they were living 10 and 20 to a house in the rundown Kimmeytown section, wandering the quaint downtown streets after dark, and drinking in the woods.

They began to enroll their Spanish-speaking children in local schools, take their uninsured sick to the local hospital, and drive their unlicensed vehicles into locals' cars.

"People were upset and angry," said Mike Wyatt, the current mayor of Georgetown. "They were saying, 'How could this happen to our town?' "

The influx of Guatemalans hasn't stopped, but much of the animosity has waned. A dozen years of living on the front lines of America's immigration battle have brought wary acceptance, even accommodation, to this unlikely center of change.

Now Latino families are supplanting the single men who first arrived. They are opening shops and restaurants and buying homes. Hispanic elementary students here have the highest scores on standardized tests. The poultry plant in nearby Milford last week celebrated Diversity Day.

"The key is they were willing to work. People will forgive a lot if they see people are willing to work," said Carlton Moore, a local developer and community leader who is active in building housing for the immigrants. "They have filled a need. We would have a very difficult time without them."

Since 2000, Delaware ranks fifth in the nation in the percentage increase in foreign-born population, at 40.5 percent.

Driven largely by immigrants from Latin America working in poultry processing and construction, the wave of newcomers is changing the face of Delaware, especially rural southern Delaware.

In Georgetown, heart of the poultry industry, North Georgetown Elementary has become 40 percent Hispanic, and the police force spends 70 percent of its time responding to migrant-related incidents. But without the newcomers, the chicken industry would collapse and much of the local economy with it.

Georgetown is the seat of Sussex County, the nation's leading county in production of broiler chickens.

Perdue Farms Inc. employs 1,300 workers at its Georgetown plant, and 80 percent to 85 percent are immigrants or the children of immigrants, almost all from Guatemala, said Gary Miller, regional human-relations manager for the company. At Perdue's Milford plant, 60 percent to 65 percent of the 1,200 workers are immigrants from 15 nations.

Other major poultry operations in the country include Tyson Foods, Mountaire Farms and Allen Family Foods. Their trucks are a regular sight on county roads, taking live chickens in and prepared chickens out, and white chicken feathers sprinkle some roadsides like an early snowfall.

Immigrants are "essential" to the poultry business in Delaware and nearby regions of Maryland and Virginia, said Bill Satterfield, executive director of the Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc.

The work is hard, and the poultry companies say nonimmigrants aren't willing to take jobs that start at $8 an hour and rise to $9.70 an hour after an initial probationary period.

The poultry operators require workers to show documentary evidence that they're legally in the United States, and they use a voluntary federal verification program to assure eligibility. But forged documents and false names are commonplace, police and migrants say, allowing illegal workers to get jobs.

Georgetown Police Chief William Topping said his officers are trained to ask immigrants in traffic stops or other encounters for their "real name" and their "work name."

"We tell them, 'We don't care what you tell Perdue, but you need to tell us your real name,' " Topping said. His force of 18 officers now includes two Spanish speakers, and two years ago the local court instituted a Spanish arraignment night each Tuesday.

Topping said local police don't try to determine a person's immigration status. They don't accompany federal immigration agents on raids. Topping said the goal is to win the trust of the Hispanic community so crime victims are willing to work with police, without fear of being deported.

"My take is that they're not leaving. My best bet is to make them educated about the criminal justice system here, and I definitely feel like we're making headway," Topping said.

"It's difficult for a lot of our native Delawareans to understand that we can't deport them. But the issue isn't as simple as that."

Wyatt, the mayor, said many in his town have come to accept the newcomers, although some haven't. "They're very polite, very cordial, and they're hardworking, good people. The jobs weren't getting done by anyone else."

Some other Delaware towns have taken a harder line. In Elsmere, a town of 6,000 near Wilmington, a new ordinance allows police to ticket any parked vehicle with an out-of-state license whose owner has lived in Delaware more than 60 days; since Delaware has a high residency standard for issuing license plates, the ordinance is a way to ferret out illegal aliens.

And immigration has become a hot political issue in some Delaware races. Republicans John Jaremchuck, an Elsmere councilman running for the state legislature, and Jan Ting, a Temple University law professor running for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Tom Carper, have made illegal immigration prime campaign topics.

"It's not the job of the American government to supply a constant supply of low-wage workers for big businesses," said Ting, whose parents emigrated from China during World War II. "Big business loves illegal immigration because it suppresses the wages of American workers, too... . Do we care about the less-skilled, less-educated American workers?"

In Georgetown, the impact of immigration is felt acutely at North Georgetown Elementary. Principal Jim Hudson, a lifelong resident of the town, said that the lower grades were now 55 percent Hispanic, and that his school must shift resources to English Language Learner classes from such things as art and music and special reading.

"We need more support from the state," Hudson said. But he said the Guatemalan students were hard workers and quick learners who rarely presented discipline problems.

"The parents come in and they don't ask, 'How are my child's grades?' They ask, 'How is my child behaving?' " The school was just named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education, one of three schools in the state and 250 in the country to be recognized for strong academic progress.

Many of the town's Hispanic elementary students gather after school at La Casita, on the edge of Kimmeytown, for homework help. There, one of the parent leaders, Yolanda Diaz, an undocumented Guatemalan who has been here for 13 years, said it was important that her three sons, Jesus, Edward, and Manuel, do well in school.

"I don't want them to work in a chicken plant like I do," she said. "It's hard there."


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