Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South

2. “El Nuevo South”: The Case of North Carolina and the Community Health Center Program

21 2 “El Nuevo South” The Case of North Carolina and the Community Health Center Program La Nueva Carolina del Norte Newcomers from Mexico and other Latin American countries have long served as flexible, low-wage agricultural labor in Florida and California. Recently, these newcomers have been incorporated into expanding low-wage industries, like poultry production and other food processing, in rural areas of North Carolina and Georgia (Cravey 1997), as well as into the rapidly increasing service and construction sectors in “Sun Belt” cities like Atlanta and Durham, North Carolina (Johnson, Johnson-Webb, and Farrell 1999). In these areas the arrival of new immigrants complicates binary understandings of racial categories as “black” and “white,” giving rise to complex shifts in cultural understandings of what it means to belong to a community in the new “transnational South.” Newcomers to North Carolina, mostly from Mexico, have been described as one of the mainstays of the agricultural workforce, and they are disproportionately employed in hazardous industries, such as construction, or in low-paying jobs. . . . Almost two-thirds of North Carolina Latinos (64.2 percent) are foreign-born, with almost half reporting that they do not speak English very well. Over half of the Latinos in the state are noncitizens (58.3 percent). doing good 22 . . . Most North Carolina Latinos are recent immigrants from Mexico (65.1 percent). (Silberman et al. 2003, 113) According to Kasarda and Johnson’s report for the Kenan Institute (2006), Latina/o fiscal impact on North Carolina’s budget totaled an estimated $817 million in 2004, which included the costs of education , health services, and corrections. But those costs were balanced to a large degree, according to this report, by direct and indirect tax contributions of $756 million, resulting in a net cost to the state budget of $61 million—approximately $102 per Latina/o resident. Meanwhile, despite the perception among North Carolinians that these newcomers are taking away residents’ jobs and “their” (very limited) social and medical services, Latina/o immigrants’ important economic contribution, through purchases, taxes, labor, and contributions to Social Security and Medicare (from which they will never receive benefits), has been shown to surpass their estimated cost to the state budget. As for the African American population in North Carolina, Kasarda and Johnson estimated that the fiscal impact of African Americans on the state budget totaled $4.5 billion in 2004, which included the costs of education, health services, and corrections . Those costs were balanced, according to this report, to a large degree by direct and indirect tax contributions of $3.8 billion, resulting in a net cost to the state budget of $759 million—approximately $420 per African American resident. Despite the perception among North Carolinians that these newcomers do not pay taxes, all newcomers pay sales taxes when they purchase goods and pay property taxes if they own property. Many newcomers also pay income taxes. Newcomers who are legally employed have wages withheld for tax purposes. In addition, between one-half and three-quarters of unauthorized immigrants are estimated to pay federal and state income taxes, Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes (Economic Report of the President 2005), as they use false Social Security numbers to work “on the books” and, as a result, pay payroll taxes when their wages are withheld. A study by the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that in 2002 these unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $7 billion in taxes to Social Security and Medicare, federal programs from which they cannot receive benefits (Camarota 2004). As noted above, a Kenan Institute study found that “El Nuevo South” 23 Hispanic residents in North Carolina—US–born citizens, authorized immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants—paid an estimated $756 million in state and local taxes in 2004 (Kasarda and Johnson 2006). Between 1995 and 2005, Latina/o newcomers contributed more than $9 billion to North Carolina’s economy, filling one in three new jobs created in North Carolina, with significant concentrations in the construction industry (29 percent of the labor force) (Kasarda and Johnson 2006). Latinas/os were also employed in the forestry and agricultural industries in rural areas, as well as in the traditional (and declining) North Carolina manufacturing industries: meat processing , textiles, and household furniture (Acury et al. 1999). Within these industries, the Latina/o labor force is primarily concentrated in operative, labor, and service jobs (Skaggs, Tomaskovic-Devey, and Leiter 2000). The Latina labor force is overrepresented...