My New Kentucky Home

Route 77 is a small road, an east Texas highway that runs north from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, past the spring break resorts of the Padre Islands. There it connects to Route 37, which takes you to San Antonio. If you turn on Route 35, you'll pass Dallas en route to Oklahoma, following a sagebrush express highway built to cut across nearly empty counties and link the far-flung commercial centers of the Southwest and heartland to one another. From Oklahoma City, you get a choice of destinations, each of them places where Middle America dwindles out into the countryside: west to the panhandle, north to Kansas, east to Arkansas or Missouri, and, eventually, Kentucky. Drive long enough on this route, and you begin to remember the value big interstate roads like these had in allowing farmers to bring their products to market more easily. Step off the road now and then, though, and you begin to notice something else: This set of ur-red state roads has become a main artery for immigration.

When they were not following the harvest, immigrants from south of the border once clustered in a few big cities: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Denver. By the 1990s, that roster had expanded: meat-packing plants in rural parts of the country, unable to seduce native labor, starting hiring workers off the streets of Veracruz and Morelia, and little Mexican communities started popping up in places like Kennett Square, Pa., and Dalton, Ga. But during the last decade, Mexican immigration has gone through a third iteration: Mexicans are now simply everywhere in the United States.

They are in places with no established Hispanic communities, meat-packing plants, or need for temporary agricultural workers. They are becoming a fixture in middle America. Alabama's Hispanic population more than tripled during the 1990s, for instance. Georgia had 108,922 Hispanics in the 1990 census, 1.7 percent of the population; by 2000, that population had tripled, and Hispanics now account for more than 5 percent of the state's population. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of Hispanics more than doubled in states from Kansas to Oregon to South Carolina. A decade ago newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News were experimenting with Spanish-language editions. Now Dallas Morning News has one, and Orlando Sentinel, too.

Changes this profound in the make-up of the heartland communities are unlikely to happen in the political dark, and, indeed, are beginning to make themselves felt in the national debate. Red state, largely Republican lawmakers are going home to districts where their constituents are shocked and concerned that communities that were once 99 percent native-born suddenly have 10, 20, 30 percent immigrants, most of whom are undocumented. They speak different languages, have a different culture, and are competing, or at least seeming to compete, for lower-level jobs.

The alarm is so high that these heartland legislators are willing to go up against their own president on key immigration policy matters, even though his policies are driven at least in part by an effort to win Republicans a permanent, larger share of the Latino vote. We saw that most recently when the president's intelligence reform was nearly derailed over demands by conservative house members for stronger crackdowns on the border. Meanwhile, there's a growing revolt by House Republicans against the president's plan to create a guest-worker program. (The Bush plan would allow immigrants to apply for a three-year work visa if they are offered a job by a specific employer, an employer who can certify no U.S. citizen is available for the job. One three-year renewal would be allowed, but the worker could not switch employers if his sponsor no longer needed him.) Bush's guest worker program not only ticks off his party's conservative base, it fails to fix the problem it's supposed to solve. The truth of this is no better illustrated than by visiting the places that are the cutting edges of immigration. Ten years ago, that was southern California. Today, it's Kentucky.