Daily News

Jessica Rocha and Michael Easterbrook, Staff Writers

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. (more…)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 5:26 am and is filed under Daily News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.