Alarm over burgeoning immigration in rural areas and small towns "helped seal defeat" for the immigration-reform bill in the Senate yesterday, The Washington Post reports, using as its object example the state of Georgia and the city of Gainesville, self-proclaimed "Poultry Capital of the World," where chicken-processing plants have come to depend on Latino immigrants for production-line work. Reporter N.C. Aizenman notes that Republican Sens. Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia helped write the bill, then voted against it after being overwhelmed by objections from opponents.
"Analysts say the unprecedented passion over immigration is largely the result of the seismic shift in settlement patterns since the mid-1990s," when "the foreign-born population of 25 states doubled" and the Latino population more than tripled "in six other states with almost no prior experience of Latino immigration."
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, told the Post,"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 neighborhoods." (Read more)
Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder writes, "The Post’s notion of a 'small town' is typically myopic. Gainesville is a metropolitan area with over 100,000 people. It’s urban all the way. But Gainesville is smaller than many cities, and we here at the Yonder can see the immigration issue driving the presidential debate in truly small-town Iowa. The pages of the Iowa Independent tell us daily that the biggest applause lines come when candidates talk about defending borders — and defeating the Senate bill." (Read more)
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