US:Shifting patterns of settlement helped raised passions over immigration, writes NC Aizenmanin Gainesville, Georgia
Stephanie Usrey strode up to her local Wal-Mart store the other morning with the steely look of a boxer about to step into the ring.
A stay-at-home mother of two, Usrey has dreaded shopping at this branch ever since an afternoon five years ago, when she said she suddenly noticed she was the only non-Latino customer. "That was the first time I looked around and said, 'Man, I didn't realise how many Mexicans there were here'," Usrey (39) recalled. "And they don't seem to feel any discomfort when they're, like, six inches from your face and talking to each other in their language, either. I just felt very encroached upon . . . It was like an instant feeling of 'I'm in the minority, and if we don't get control over this, pretty soon all of America will be outnumbered'."
That sense of alarm, echoed in communities across the nation, helped seal defeat for the Senate immigration Bill on Thursday.
Fuelled by talk-radio hosts and websites, Usrey and tens of thousands of other first-time activists bombarded their senators with phone calls and e-mails decrying the Bill as an unacceptable amnesty for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Nowhere were the Bill's opponents more influential than in Georgia, whose two Republican senators, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, originally helped craft the legislation.
Two days after its unveiling in May, Chambliss was booed at his state's Republican convention. Isakson's office received more than 21,000 calls from opponents of the Bill, compared with 6,000 from supporters. On Thursday both senators voted to kill the Bill they once supported.
Analysts say the unprecedented passion over immigration is largely the result of the seismic shift in settlement patterns since the mid-1990s - when the expanding economy prompted a surge of immigrants to bypass long-time gateway states such as California, New York and Texas, in favour of suburban and rural regions of the south and midwest.
Within a decade, the foreign-born population of 25 states doubled. Six other states with almost no prior experience of Latino immigration, including Georgia, saw their Latino populations more than triple.
"I think this new pattern of immigration is what's really pushing the politics of this," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "Before, people outside the seven gateway states didn't care much one way or the other about immigration. Now, you suddenly have all these people across Middle America seeing immigrants in their neighbourhoods."
Gainesville, an area of about 102,000 set along a lake in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is solid Bush territory. Even now, many locals speak of the president's support of the Senate Bill the way one would of a beloved son who has momentarily strayed but is sure to come to his senses.
Downtown Gainesville retains a tranquil, small-town feel. Clothing boutiques and cafes ring a landscaped central square with a marble monument dedicated to "Our Confederate Soldiers".
A few feet away, in almost as prominent a spot, stands a statue of rooster - a testament to local pride in the chicken processing plants that have given the region its identity as "poultry capital of the world" since the 1950s.
But those poultry plants are arguably most responsible for the wave of immigration transforming Gainesville. For years the plants employed mostly African Americans to do the gruelling work of poultry processing. Then, in the early 1980s, a growth of other industries opened up less-taxing jobs. The poultry plants responded to the resulting labour shortage by welcoming workers from Mexico. Today, Hall County, of which Gainesville is the county seat, is more than 25 per cent Latino. Max Crawford (54) a plant production manager, estimates that 90 per cent of the workers he supervises are Latino immigrants.Drive along the industrial strip just south of town, and you could almost be in Mexico.
The immigrant presence is just as noticeable in local schools, some of which are as much as 70 per cent Latino.
Uraina Smith (61) and her husband, Billy Ray Smith (66) said they were forced to sell their home in a pretty subdivision of colonial and ranch houses because it was "taken over" by Mexicans who parked on the grass, jumped into the communal pool in their jeans shorts and crammed multiple families into the same house. Although their complaints were not new, until recently few had done more than gripe to one another.
Crawford said he decided to get in touch with his senators because, "everyone was saying you need to let them know how you feel about this right now ."- (LA Times-Washington Post)