The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State by Hannah Gill (review)

Book Reviews problem is mitigated to some extent by the Mexico-specific analysis of the concluding chapters. Along similar lines, the authors focus too little attention on the exogenous factors that have compelled LAC policy. Despite these minor weaknesses, The Dragon in the Room is a must-read text for researchers and policymakers, Latin Americanists, Caribbeanists and China watchers. Indeed anyone interested in China’s rise and the implications for global economy and development will find it useful. Gallagher and Porzecanski make a convincing and compelling series of arguments about the meaning of China’s economic growth for LAC, as well as implications for policymaking. Jonas Gamso Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh THE LATINO MIGRATION EXPERIENCE IN NORTH CAROLINA: NEW ROOTS IN THE OLD NORTH STATE. By Hannah Gill. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010, 208 pp., $18.95. The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina examines migration to the U.S. South by focusing on the experience of Latinos seeking to make a place for themselves in a traditionally Black-White state, and on community reactions to an increasing Latino presence. Gill’s contribution helps fill a research gap on the growing migration of Latinos to new destinations in the U.S., especially the New South, and brings to the foreground the effects of global forces on local communities. Gill states that she hopes the book will be particularly useful to people living in North Carolina. Because many of the conditions examined are found regionally and nationally, her findings are certainly also significant more broadly as they may help debunk myths within, and add needed data to, national discussions of Latino immigrants. To underscore the state’s significance for national immigration debates, Gill provides several statistics throughout the book. While the individual stories she tells are particularly effective in humanizing immigrants (for example, through stories of the difficulties undocumented Latino students face in pursuing higher education and of living in fear of deportation ), these statistics may be especially necessary to place North Carolina, and more broadly the U.S. South, as worthy of significant attention in discussions of immigration. A few points that may interest readers include that between 1990 and 2000 North Carolina’s Latino population grew faster than the Latino population in any other state; today of the approximately half million Latinos living in North Carolina 41% are native-born US citizens; the state has more agricultural guest workers than any other state; and it has a very young Latino population, with three-fourths under thirty-four years old. It is also the state with the ninth 189 The Latin Americanist, June 2012 largest undocumented population in the country. While Latinos are concentrated in construction and service work in urban areas, in rural areas many Latinos work in agriculture and meat and poultry industries. As is the case nationally, within North Carolina Latinos cannot be considered a local-only issue, but rather a widespread and diverse population that contributes to all aspects of society in a range of contexts. One of the strengths of the book is that Gill discusses (albeit briefly) the history of migration to North Carolina as a way to underscore that Latinos are not the only immigrants to the state. This simple fact of history is too often overlooked not only in national debates on immigration but also in scholarly works. Latino migration, which began as a result of jobs in agriculture in Alamance County in the late 1970s and 1980s, is better understood in the context of a much longer history of immigration to the state: from Spaniards in the 1500s to the forced migration of Africans as slaves from the 1660–1800s to the waves of English, French, Swiss, and German immigrants to the arrival of Vietnamese, who now make up the largest East Asian group in the state. Perhaps also little known is that North Carolina has been at the forefront of deportation policy. In 2006, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Department became the first to implement the 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement offices to check the immigrant status of anyone arrested and to begin the process of deportation. The...