THE NEW LATINO SOUTHTHE PEW HISPANIC CENTER MAJOR FINDINGS SUMMARIZED AND PARAPHARASED Please see the full report at http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/50.pdf. The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the South than anywhere else in the United States. Across a broad swath of the region stretching westward from North Carolina on the Atlantic seaboard to Arkansas across the Mississippi River and south to Alabama on the Gulf of Mexico, sizeable Hispanic populations have emerged suddenly in communities where Latinos were a sparse presence just a decade or two ago. The robust growth in local Southern economies has acted as a magnet to young, male, foreign-born Latinos migrating in search of economic opportunities in all variety of communities—rural, small towns, suburbs and big cities. Understanding the interplay of Hispanic population growth and the conditions that attended it helps illuminate a broad process of demographic and economic change in the South and in other new settlement areas as well. To varying degrees, Hispanic communities scattered from New England to the Pacific Northwest are also surging and the South, different in so many ways for so much of its history, now offers lessons to the rest of the country. Although most of the Latinos added to the population of the new settlement areas of the South are foreign born, and their migration is the product of a great many different policies and circumstances in the United States and their home countries, there is a local context as well, and it is different in the new settlement areas of the South than it is in states such as California and New York, where migrants join large, well-established Latino communities. Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee registered very fast rates of Hispanic population growth between the censuses of 1990 and 2000 and continue to outpace the national average in the most recent census estimates. The region added jobs for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers at rates well in excess of the national average. In this respect, the economic context to the growth of the new settlement areas of the South mirrors the demographic context, since Hispanic population growth in the six-state region was accompanied by continued growth in the black and white populations. By contrast, in some states where Hispanics had traditionally settled, such as New York and California, the non-Hispanic white population actually declined. The prospect of work has attracted large numbers of young Hispanics, often unmarried and mobile enough to pick up and move where the jobs are. Because the Hispanic population in the new settlement areas of the South had been so small prior to the recent surge, the region has seen less immigration due to the pattern of family reunification that is common in areas of long-established Hispanic settlement. Therefore, Latinos in the new settlements of the South are much more likely than to have been born abroad (57 percent) and arrived recently (particularly from Mexico), to be male (63 percent), to be unmarried, and to be young (median age 27). Most have relatively little education (62 percent without a high school diploma), and many do not speak English well or at all. The impact on these regions will be dramatic, particularly on the schools. Unemployment rates in the new South states and key metropolitan areas within those states were consistently lower than the nationwide rate between 1990 and 2000. However, as the new immigrants grow older and use more health services, and as more wives join their husbands, evening out the current gender imbalance and leading to more children, the demands they make on public services will increase but so too may their contributions to the tax bases supporting those services. For example, By the 2001-2002 school year, Hispanics accounted for 4 percent of school enrollment, but by 2007-2008 the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects they will make up 10 percent of the primary and secondary school students in the six new settlement states of the South. Some of the major findings in this report include:
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