The future. Shame they don’t have a Jewish Community Center they can join.
Boston Globe: A generation ago, this Atlanta suburb was 95 percent white and rural with one little African-American neighborhood that was known as “colored town.’’ But after a tidal wave of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who were attracted to Norcross by cheap housing and proximity to a booming job market, white people now make up less than 20 percent of the population in Norcross and surrounding neighborhoods. It’s a shift so rapid that many of the longtime residents feel utterly disconnected from the place where they raised their children.
“It’s not that much anger, but you don’t feel comfortable knowing that all this is around you,” said Billy Weathers, 79, who has lived in the area for his whole life and doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish.
Many say they feel isolated in their own hometown, pushed to change their ways, to assimilate to the new arrivals instead of the other way around. They resent the shift, even knowing it’s nobody’s fault, really. And they have mostly kept their feelings to themselves. Who, they wonder, would listen to folks like us, anyway?
But this year, in Norcross and places like it, resentment has found its voice. The concerns of a white citizenry feeling displaced have been reinforced by the rhetoric of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who swept most of the state in the Republican primary.
His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” appeals to people here who don’t talk much to their newer neighbors anymore, not out of malice but because they often don’t even share a common language. When Trump talks about building a wall between the United States and Mexico, these largely white, Republicans nod in agreement.
“There used to be a place where we could go out to eat to get southern cooking,” said Billy’s wife, JoAnn Weathers, 79. “Well there’s no more southerners left here. . . . They came from other countries and completely changed our lives.”
It’s an attitude that many in the elites of both parties are quick to dismiss as out-of-date, wrongheaded, and frankly kind of embarrassing. It sounds like racial prejudice, and sometimes is. But to simply ignore or belittle this sense of loss and isolation is to close your eyes and ears to nativist sentiments that predated Trump’s rise, and even if he loses, aren’t going away. The demographic tide all but guarantees it…
Four counties in Georgia signed up for a program that allows local police and sheriffs to check the immigration status of any person charged with a crime, including Gwinnett County, where Norcross is located. Those four places deported more than 1,300 illegal immigrants using the program in the last year, according to federal statistics.
The Georgia General Assembly in 2011 passed a far-reaching law aimed at making conditions inhospitable to undocumented immigrants, with provisions that barred them from using state services and made it easier for more local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials.
“I want to take care of our people. I don’t want to take care of Mexico’s people who are here illegally,” said state Senator Renee Unterman, whose district is close to Norcross, during the contentious legislative debate. “I’m not spewing hate. I’m just talking about reality.”
Trump won all but four of Georgia’s 159 counties in the March Republican primary on his platform of sealing the border and deporting undocumented immigrants. His margins were high in the Norcross area, especially in the older neighborhoods that have seen an influx of immigrants.
