New People of the Newest South: Prospects for the Post-1980 Immigrants (Report‪)‬

THE SOUTH IN RECENT YEARS HAS UNDERGONE A DRAMATIC AND, TO most eyes, astounding demographic shift. From 1850 to 1970, it stood as the region with the smallest percentage of immigrants (and the largest percentage of born-in-state residents). Suffice it to say that the volume in Louisiana State University Press's History of the South series devoted to the New South from 1945 to 1980 barely mentions immigration. By the 1990s all that had changed, as the census of 2000 identified the South as having the fastest-growing immigrant population in the country. (1) Like the national pattern, reflecting first of all a heavy influx of Latinos (tripling the Latino population in the region and thus augmenting a pattern previously established in the states of Texas and Florida) and lesser but still significant numbers of Asians, along with scattered other groups, the new phenomenon reached nearly every hamlet in the southern states. The region thus contributed mightily to the making of a multiracial America, a transformation that has been marked both by the census count of 2003 that confirmed that Hispanics have surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority group and by the projection that by 2050 non-Hispanic whites would no longer compose a majority of the U.S. population. (2) Home to more than 11 million Hispanics and more than 1.5 million Asians in 2000, the region in the contemporary era has lent a special, new meaning to the term global South. (3) Though too recent to have generated sustained analysis in many academic monographs, the subject of the new immigration has nevertheless attracted much scholarly as well as popular attention. Generally speaking, moreover, it is an attention with a kick. Like many contemporary issues, the social fact of new immigration to the South provokes commentary that tends to divide between those who see the glass half-full and those who see it half-empty. In short, will the new arrivals lift--and in turn be lifted by--the quality of life in the region, or will they create another social bottom-rail in a place all too used to racialized inequality? This essay focuses on the phenomenon of the new immigration (with particular attention to Latinos in North Carolina) and highlights both the promise and the problem of acculturation in an era of uncertain economic and political prospects.