Boise, Idaho – Three years ago, a tiny financial services office opened in Nampa, Idaho, with just a handful of employees and a focus on Spanish-speaking clientele.
Along with Idaho’s Latino population, the business is exploding – El Centro is opening a second office in Caldwell, with plans to expand to Denver and Chicago soon, said manager David Cahoon.
“We’re looking at hyper-growth areas. In Denver, there’s a huge Latino market there, and the same with Chicago,” Cahoon said. “In Idaho, the Hispanic population is growing. It’s huge, and we don’t really have much competition.”
Most of the United States’ Spanish-speaking immigrants – both legal and illegal – are from Mexico. Statistics from several agencies suggest the number of illegal immigrants in the country is growing, with Bear Stearns in New York estimating between 12 million and 15 million of the nation’s jobs are held by illegal immigrants.
About 95 percent of Cahoon’s clients speak only Spanish, he said, and at least 15 times a week, he turns down a home-loan applicant for not having U.S.-issued identification.
Even as businesses such as Cahoon’s work to find ways to earn immigrant dollars, government officials in so-called new destination states are struggling to deal with the illegal immigrant population. Instead of staying in border states, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, new immigrants are heading to suburbs in Tennessee, Mississippi, the Dakotas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
“Illegal immigrants are not just randomly flowing into places. They’re following jobs,” said Gordon Hanson, an economics professor at the University of California at San Diego. “Look at where the growth in the illegal immigrant population is strongest: It’s in areas with growing populations, where there are more restaurants, grocery stores, construction and retail outlets. And it’s in areas where the native U.S. manufacturing and labor force is aging and disappearing.”
Such as in North Carolina, where the estimated number of illegal immigrants jumped from 26,000 in 1990 to 206,000 a decade later.
Many of those undocumented workers have been drawn to jobs in the textile industry, Frey said.
In Colorado, where Cahoon hopes to open his next office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimates that the number of illegal immigrants has jumped from 31,000 in 1990 to 144,000 in 2000.
Elected officials are turning to the federal government for ways to deal with the influx.
Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, a spokeswoman for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, said the issue has become prominent across the state.
Because illegal immigrants are generally poorer than the rest of the population, they tend to put a greater strain on indigent health care and other social services, officials said.
“We look with great interest to Washington and proposed legislation on guest worker programs that could underwrite services that we’re already providing,” she said. “Our resources are getting stretched by a number of factors, and immigration is only one.”
Undocumented workers have become part of the local economy, she said.
“They’re helping to generate revenue and paying taxes. Legislation could potentially move this shadow world into part of the system,” she said.
Some city governments are moving on their own to bring more people from Mexico into the mainstream economy.
Yakima and Seattle, Wash. – along with about 360 other cities nationwide – now accept ID cards issued by Mexican consulates as valid identification for obtaining library cards, help from community health centers or other services. The cards are commonly used by illegal immigrants who are not eligible for Social Security cards.
About 1.8 million such cards are in use throughout the United States.
In Nampa, businesses like El Centro have considered accepting the ID cards for issuing loans, Cahoon said, but are holding off until big lenders make the switch. That’s because loans granted to illegal immigrants based on alternate forms of identification can’t be sold on the secondary market, he said.
Many of the evolving economic advantages offered by illegal immigrants are offset by social costs, said Hanson. Illegal immigrants tend to be poorer than their legal counterparts, are less likely to be insured and have larger families, he said. That all puts pressure on services.
“Public education is by far and away the biggest expenditure,” Hanson said.
