Thread: Rural areas adapt to immigrants

http://www.newsobserver.com/1155/story/412513.html

Jessica Rocha and Michael Easterbrook, Staff Writers
WARSAW -- The view from Warsaw's busiest intersection is a sadly familiar one in small-town Eastern North Carolina.
Hardee's is boarded up. Western Auto is closed. The Quick Trip gas station at College and Pine streets recently changed hands, and its prospects are uncertain.

But across College Street, a new furniture store called Muebler'a El Nido just sold a twin box spring to Anthony Frederick, a sharecropper's son who works at a car upholstery plant in nearby Kenansville.

A few blocks away at Warsaw Meats, butcher Rodney Best recently hired a Mexican woman named Carmen, and he has placed his first orders for cow's heads and chorizo, popular items among his Hispanic patrons.

In recent years, hundreds of Mexican and Central American immigrants, many of whom entered the country illegally, have helped reverse the population drain in Warsaw, a town of 3,000 residents 70 miles southeast of Raleigh in Duplin County.

For businesses there, the influx has meant new customers with money to spend, and a stable and inexpensive labor pool.

North Carolina is now home to about 400,000 illegal immigrants, most of them Hispanic, and since 2000 they have continued to arrive at a rate of 40,000 or more a year. The majority settle in urban areas such as the Triangle and Charlotte. But certain small towns also have been transformed by immigration.

Warsaw and its county are at the head of that rural pack. In 2004, Hispanics made up 17.5 percent of Duplin County's population, the highest proportion in the state. The Pew Hispanic Center in Washington estimates that about half of North Carolina's Hispanic immigrants are in the United States illegally.

Among longtime residents, sentiments are mixed.

Mayor Win Batten said he hears many people grumble that the immigrants are straining schools and turning neighborhoods into slums by overcrowding houses and rental units.

"They see them sitting outside with their shirts off drinking beer, and that creates an unsightly situation," he said. Companies that hire illegal immigrants should be fined more harshly, Batten said, and the immigrants should be deported.

At the Warsaw Chamber of Commerce, President Jim Harris prefers to focus on the benefits the newcomers bring to local businesses.

Asked to explain how he feels about immigration, Harris held up a July issue of Business Week magazine and pointed to the cover title: "Embracing Illegals."

"That pretty much says it," he said.

Warsaw then

Incorporated in 1855, Warsaw began as a depot along an arrow-straight stretch of railroad track that runs north from Wilmington. By the early 1900s, it had tobacco warehouses, at least two hotels, an ice plant and a canning plant and two cotton gins.

Jimmy Strickland, 85, a lifelong resident and the town's unofficial historian, remembers Warsaw as an energetic place when he was growing up.

"On Saturday night, you couldn't walk down the street there would be so many people," he said. "The streets would be lined with cars."

At that time, families of teachers and clerks and shop owners, most of them white, lived in Warsaw's homes, while black sharecroppers resided on the outskirts working in the tobacco, corn and cotton fields.

Over time, things began to slide. Shops closed. Saturday nights downtown felt lonely. In the 1980s, for the first time in at least a century, Warsaw lost population.

That drain might have continued had it not been for the immigration from Mexico and Central America.

At first, the workers were seasonal and worked mostly on farms, said Batten, the mayor.

"They would come through the strawberries, the cucumbers and through beans, then they would go home," he said.

When poultry and hog processing grew in the 1990s, the workers started to stay year-round. Some found jobs cutting grass, cleaning offices and working in construction.

The 1990 census counted 46 Hispanics in Warsaw. Ten years later, there were 481 -- 16 percent of the town's population.

Warsaw now

The immigrants have changed Warsaw, visibly and audibly. The sound of Spanish is common, as are Mexican restaurants and Hispanic grocery stores. Signs abound in a language that few longtime residents can read.

Warsaw now is about 51 percent black and 36 percent white, census data shows. Hispanics make up 16 percent (the designation is an ethnicity, not a race, so the numbers reflect some overlap).

Since Warsaw's portion of sales tax revenue is based partly on the size of its population, the immigration has helped channel more money to the town.

Despite some resentment, many locals say the immigrants have helped the town.

Before John Williams built Mid-Town Laundromat in 2003, the property held four trailers and was valued at $36,000. Today, the property tax valuation is $391,000. As a result, Warsaw's annual tax levy on the property jumped from $212 to $2,307.

A retired welder, Williams does his best to make his Hispanic patrons welcome. The sign out front says "lavander'a," Spanish for laundromat. Inside, he sells Mexican fruit drinks and keeps at least one of his two TV sets on a Spanish-language station.

Asked how much money he's making, Williams smiled and replied: "I'm very much pleased with it."

One Sunday at the laundry, customers watched a Spanish-language movie and a soccer match from Mexico as they waited on their clothes.

Carlos Enrique G-mez, 23, said he comes to Mid-Town because it's always clean.

G-mez said he arrived in Warsaw three years ago after illegally crossing the U.S. border in Arizona. He has found work cutting trees for a contractor, and he plans to stay for another three years "if God allows it" to save money to buy a home in his native Guatemala.

"It's very beautiful here," he said. "Very peaceful."

Near the laundry is a grocery and wholesale food business called El Mariachi Gordo (the Fat Mariachi). Fernando Sánchez Jr., a U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico and grew up in Brooklyn, opened it eight years ago.

Two years ago, he built a large warehouse across the street. Before he did so, Warsaw valued the property at $33,000; now it's assessed at $329,000, and its annual property tax is $1,942.

Sánchez knows that illegal immigrants account for a lot of his business.

"Not just mine, but the entire local economy," he said. "Without the 'illegal aliens,' as they call them, the local economy would be slow."

Poverty endures

Still, Warsaw and Duplin County remain poor.

The county's median per capita personal income was $20,827 in 2003 -- 88th among the state's 100 counties.

In 2000, the median home value was $63,422 -- 87th in the state. Its property tax rate, 77 cents per $100 assessed value, is among the state's highest.

Two plants closed in the past few years, and hundreds of lost jobs haven't been replaced.

What the county needs is more jobs and more economic development, Mayor Batten said. Though Hispanics may add sales tax revenue, he questions whether they help the town's overall prosperity.

"If we didn't have the Hispanic people here, there would be job opportunities [for others] here," he said.

The immigrant influx has forced the Duplin school system to hire more than 20 people to teach English to foreign-language students, said Linda Smith, federal programs director for the county schools. She said the district receives more than $1 million annually from the state to pay for instructors along with the training and resources they need.

Most school buildings are aging and need to be renovated or replaced, in part to accommodate the growing enrollment. The estimated bill for that is $86 million -- money the county doesn't have, Batten said.

At the start of the school year, Hispanics made up a quarter of the students at Warsaw Middle School and 33 percent at Warsaw Elementary. Countywide, Hispanic enrollment is 23.2 percent, the highest of any district in the state.

Some people say they have noticed an underlying tension between the different ethnic and racial groups.

As a child, Anthony Frederick, 41, worked alongside his sharecropper father picking whatever was growing, but he has grown accustomed to seeing mostly Hispanic faces working the fields.

Now, he said, the change is more widespread. He said that in the past year, the work force at the local McDonald's has shifted from a majority of black teenagers to a majority of Hispanic adults.

Sánchez, the El Mariachi Gordo proprietor, said his customers sometimes complain of being mocked for their accents or not speaking English at other local stores.

"You can definitely feel it," Sanchez said. "Some Hispanics are being treated differently."

Help for businesses

Still, the list of businesses in Warsaw that have been boosted by Hispanic immigration is a long one, said Harris, the Chamber of Commerce president.

At the Piggly Wiggly on Pine Street, where manager Randall Casteen stocks bottles of mole sauce, dried red chilies, plantains, mangoes and pinatas, about 20 percent of the customers are Hispanic. At the nearby Golden City Chinese Restaurant, it's about one-third.

And at Warsaw Meats, Best is starting to supply local restaurants with beef tripe, beef tongue and other cuts preferred by Hispanics. With his Hispanic customers in mind, he's keeping the cutting area open to the store so it has more of an open-air feel.

"They like their meat cut with a knife instead of a machine," Best said. "It reminds them of home, I suppose."

Best thumbed through his new English-Spanish dictionary to check whether "cerdo" really does mean chicken but finds out it means pig. He's got "hola" down for hello.

His new employee, Carmen, is a quick learner, he said. She's picking up the language and has learned how to wrap meat.

"When she's here, we get so tickled," said Lou Best, the owner's mother. "She's trying to learn the English, and I'm trying to learn some of the Spanish."

The Bests are also teaching Carmen about some Southern favorites, and it's starting to show.

Though Carmen won't touch the liver pudding, she's come to tolerate the chitterlings.

USE OF ANONYMOUS SOURCES: The last names of some people who appear in this series have been withheld. With rare exceptions, it is The News & Observer's policy to fully disclose the names of news sources. For these stories, some illegal immigrants -- and in one case, an employer -- agreed to be interviewed only if they were not fully identified. We included their comments to help explain what's happening with illegal immigration in North Carolina.

Staff writer Jessica Rocha can be reached at 932-2008 or jrocha@newsobserver.com.

For businesses there, the influx has meant new customers with money to spend, and a stable and inexpensive labor pool.

They may be the economic heros for the businesses but they are still violators of federal law and soon to be felons who are putting a strain on the local schools.

The immigrant influx has forced the Duplin school system to hire more than 20 people to teach English to foreign-language students, said Linda Smith, federal programs director for the county schools. She said the district receives more than $1 million annually from the state to pay for instructors along with the training and resources they need.

Most school buildings are aging and need to be renovated or replaced, in part to accommodate the growing enrollment. The estimated bill for that is $86 million -- money the county doesn't have, Batten said.