Part 3: Rural areas adapt to immigrants

WARSAW -- The view from Warsaw's busiest intersection is a sadly familiar one in small-town Eastern North Carolina.

Hardee's is boarded up. Western Auto is closed. The Quick Trip gas station at College and Pine streets recently changed hands, and its prospects are uncertain.

But across College Street, a new furniture store called Muebler'a El Nido just sold a twin box spring to Anthony Frederick, a sharecropper's son who works at a car upholstery plant in nearby Kenansville.

A few blocks away at Warsaw Meats, butcher Rodney Best recently hired a Mexican woman named Carmen, and he has placed his first orders for cow's heads and chorizo, popular items among his Hispanic patrons.

In recent years, hundreds of Mexican and Central American immigrants, many of whom entered the country illegally, have helped reverse the population drain in Warsaw, a town of 3,000 residents 70 miles southeast of Raleigh in Duplin County.

For businesses there, the influx has meant new customers with money to spend, and a stable and inexpensive labor pool.

North Carolina is now home to about 400,000 illegal immigrants, most of them Hispanic, and since 2000 they have continued to arrive at a rate of 40,000 or more a year. The majority settle in urban areas such as the Triangle and Charlotte. But certain small towns also have been transformed by immigration.

Warsaw and its county are at the head of that rural pack. In 2004, Hispanics made up 17.5 percent of Duplin County's population, the highest proportion in the state. The Pew Hispanic Center in Washington estimates that about half of North Carolina's Hispanic immigrants are in the United States illegally.

Among longtime residents, sentiments are mixed.

Mayor Win Batten said he hears many people grumble that the immigrants are straining schools and turning neighborhoods into slums by overcrowding houses and rental units.

"They see them sitting outside with their shirts off drinking beer, and that creates an unsightly situation," he said. Companies that hire illegal immigrants should be fined more harshly, Batten said, and the immigrants should be deported.

At the Warsaw Chamber of Commerce, President Jim Harris prefers to focus on the benefits the newcomers bring to local businesses.

Asked to explain how he feels about immigration, Harris held up a July issue of Business Week magazine and pointed to the cover title: "Embracing Illegals."

"That pretty much says it," he said.

Warsaw then

Incorporated in 1855, Warsaw began as a depot along an arrow-straight stretch of railroad track that runs north from Wilmington. By the early 1900s, it had tobacco warehouses, at least two hotels, an ice plant and a canning plant and two cotton gins.

Jimmy Strickland, 85, a lifelong resident and the town's unofficial historian, remembers Warsaw as an energetic place when he was growing up.

"On Saturday night, you couldn't walk down the street there would be so many people," he said. "The streets would be lined with cars."

At that time, families of teachers and clerks and shop owners, most of them white, lived in Warsaw's homes, while black sharecroppers resided on the outskirts working in the tobacco, corn and cotton fields.

Over time, things began to slide. Shops closed. Saturday nights downtown felt lonely. In the 1980s, for the first time in at least a century, Warsaw lost population.

That drain might have continued had it not been for the immigration from Mexico and Central America.

At first, the workers were seasonal and worked mostly on farms, said Batten, the mayor.