Many Hispanics Are Hit Hard by Economic Slump

New York Times ^ | 13 May | Peter S. Goodman

[flowerplough]

In his first years in the United States, Carlos B. Jacinto endured the itinerant life of a Guatemalan migrant worker, from picking fruit in Florida to moving logs at a sawmill in Washington. Eventually, he settled here in northern Georgia and erected a middle-class American life.

The carpet factories that sustained this town were desperate for workers to supply a nationwide boom in home construction. The wages Mr. Jacinto earned over the last decade were enough to buy a minivan and a brick house with a yard and a swing set for his four young girls. It was a long way from his childhood home in Guatemala, a wooden shack without electricity or plumbing.

But last month, amid the shrinking fortunes of the American economy, Mr. Jacinto, 37, was laid off. Everything he has achieved is suddenly at risk.

“Am I going to be able to keep up the payments on my house?” he asked. “I never believed this could happen. Now, we don’t know the future.”

[goodnesswins]

New York Times must be thinking they have a new subscriber base....lol

[martinidon]

I was there too, and I did not see anything remotely close to what you are describing. I was also involved in the hiring process and I can tell you the company I worked for hired based on qualifications not on “illegal status” or low wages. The mills competed with each other on wages to keep employees from jumping from mill to mill. If your friends were laid off there were other mills willing and ready to hire them. If you were fired one day you could easily be employed the next day. That is why the Hispanic population grew so rapidly in Dalton because there was a shortage of workers.