Latino Settlement, Service Provision and Social Justice in Charlotte, North Carolina

The large scale and unexpected settlement of Latino immigrants into the collective states of the U.S. South has precipitated a number of challenges for receiving communities, not least of which is meeting the service provision needs of newly arrived, culturally foreign, non-English speaking and often impoverished immigrants. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a city where the metro area Latino population has grown about 1,000% since 1980, the struggle to meet the health care, personal safety and educational needs of this population is bringing to the fore growing antiimmigrant sentiment. Strain between racial/ethnic groups is emerging as limited funds are perceived to be re-directed towards program building for Hispanics and increased pressure is placed on local providers to identify and respond differently to documented versus undocumented immigrants.

In this context, unexpected but not entirely unfamiliar issues of social justice have arisen as Charlotte's service providers seek to adjust their structures to meet the needs of the city's changing resident base. Drawn largely from a series of 41 key informant interviews conducted between fall 2005 and early spring 2006, this commentary focuses on the experience and social justice dilemmas faced by Charlotte's educational, police and health care professionals.

Perhaps nowhere else in the city is the impact of Latino migration and settlement more acutely felt than in the school system. Since 2000, enrollment of Hispanic children in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) has grown from 4.5% of the student body to 12.2% in early 2006. Representatives of CMS emphasize that the steady 2% per year increase experienced over the last five years is likely to accelerate given higher than average fertility among Latino families and sustained and maturing immigration streams. The school system already has two elementary schools with majority Hispanic enrollment and a third hovering at 49%. Two middle schools have 2006 enrollments with more than a 1/3 of the students being Latino and one of CMS's 17 high schools counts more than a quarter of its student body as Hispanic. Given these statistics, some anticipate that Hispanics will make up more than a third of all Charlotte-Mecklenburg's public high school graduates by the year 2013.

As CMS teachers and administrators seek to provide equal access to educational opportunity for all their students, several issues of social justice have arisen to complicate these efforts. First, in the state of North Carolina, public universities do not accept in-state applications from immigrants with undocumented status. Last year as many as 1,400 illegal immigrants graduated from North Carolina high schools. With public post secondary education closed to them in their state of residence, what are Hispanic students to do? Community leaders both within and beyond the school system are deeply concerned about the effects of this situation on Latino student retention and success. They cite rising drop-out rates and falling age thresholds for when dropouts occur. They see rising non-enrollment among the school age children of Latino families. They are keenly aware of the growing influence of gangs as an alternative to school attendance and achievement. And, they witness growing teen pregnancy, poverty and hardship as the opportunity structures associated with advanced education remain closed to an increasing number of Hispanic youth.

The injustice that flows from the fact that while children-regardless of their status-can access public education at the elementary through high school level, undocumented students-regardless of their academic achievement and potential-are blocked from accessing post secondary education in their home state is a frequently vocalized concern around this particular issue. This "disincentive to learn" placed in front of Latino children is powerful and is a source of escalating concern to many interviewed teachers and CMS representatives.

Another social justice issue currently facing the school system is the distribution or realignment of funds toward Hispanics at a time of frequently shrinking budgets and growing anti-immigrant sentiment. Some years ago CMS established a diversity office whose mandate was to serve all forms of diversity in the system. Recently however, some believe that the needs of...