Gainesville advertises itself as “the poultry capital of the world” and it is the chicken-processing plants that are driving much of the city’s startling growth. Since 1990, the official population has nearly doubled to 32,000 and the number of Hispanics has quadrupled to compose nearly half the registered population — and far more when illegal immigrants are considered.

Regarding the relationship agriculture industries have with migrant workers:

“Reality speaks and it says that, absent Hispanic workers, we could not process chicken,” said Tom Hensley, chief financial officer for Gainesville’s largest chicken plant, Fieldale Farms. “There aren’t enough native American people who want to work in a chicken plant at any wage. We’d be put out of business.”

A dozen years ago, Fieldale employed fewer than 100 Hispanics. Today, Hispanics total 3,000 in a 4,700-person workforce that transforms live birds by the thousand into boneless chicken flesh. To win jobs that start at about $10 an hour, applicants must present at least two identity documents from a government list of 18.

Congressman Kingston has noted before the trends of illegal immigrants who start their journey in southern Georgia as seasonal migrant workers in then move north for higher paying poultry and textile jobs.

You can read his testimony from last November before a House Committee after the jump on this post or at his RedState diary.

It is estimated that in the year 2000 there were 228,000 illegal aliens in the State of Georgia. That was a seven-fold increase from the INS estimate of 32,000 illegal aliens as of October 1996. The number of illegal aliens has increased 613 percent since 1996 and 777 percent since 1992, giving Georgia the seventh largest illegal alien population in the country.

Georgia has two distinct experiences with illegal immigration. In the south, illegal aliens tend to be seasonal, migrant workers. This is especially true in the agricultural sector. Northern Georgia, however, has more permanent illegal aliens, especially in the textile and poultry industries. It is believed many of the seasonal workers who start in the south migrate north where they become more permanently settled. Georgia’s immigration problem is a classic Catch 22: Send the illegal aliens home and America’s produce will rot in the field. Keep the illegal aliens here and you will put unnecessary strain on local governments and taxpayers.

Congressman Kingston stood with U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) to send a message to the Senate that the House will not accept any plan for amnesty and that America must address border enforcement first.

http://kingston.house.gov/blog/?p=140