U.S. Border Town, 1,200 Miles From The Border

Georgia's Immigrants

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While Nancy and Jorge's parents are here legally, industry officials say they know that some workers are probably using fraudulent papers, which are widely available for a price. But the law does not require employers to verify whether official-looking documents are valid.

"If there's no reason to question the validity, we don't. If there is, we do," said Louis Fordham, vice president of human resources at J&J Industries.

The Mohawk workers' lawsuit invokes a 1996 law that made knowingly hiring illegal immigrants a potential racketeering offense. It alleges that the company recruited illegal workers and paid bonuses to employees who transported and housed them and supplied them with fake papers. It also alleges that the company effectively winked at obviously fake documents. The alleged scheme suppressed the wages of U.S.-born workers, according to the lawsuit.

Mohawk denied the allegations and has challenged the racketeering theory all the way to the Supreme Court, which last month sent the case back without a ruling to the federal appeals court in Atlanta for reconsideration.

"Mohawk is proud of the fact that it has a diverse workforce," said its lead attorney, Juan Morillo of Sidley Austin LLP. "It didn't do anything intentionally to generate that."

Several researchers say the 1996 Olympics are the reason Georgia has more illegal immigrants than any Southern state except Florida -- 350,000 to 450,000 in 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Atlanta's former Mexican consul general, Teodoro Maus, said thousands of illegal workers from Mexico suddenly appeared on construction crews when preparations for the Olympics fell behind schedule, and federal immigration officials assured him they would not interfere -- and they didn't.

"You'd see 40-foot-high girders, and up top, all these brown faces, right in the middle of Atlanta," Maus said. "Everyone agreed the Olympics never would have been finished on time without them."

Another turning point came in 1998, when immigration agents raided the Vidalia onion fields, putting the valuable harvest in jeopardy, only to be called off after Georgia congressmen protested to the Clinton administration. One protest came from then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R), now a senator and an advocate of deporting illegal immigrants.

Soon afterward, periodic immigration raids came to a halt in Georgia and nationally. The Government Accountability Office found that the federal government filed notices of intent to fine only three companies in 2004, compared with 417 in 1999. The Pew center and UCLA's Hernández-León estimate that more than half the Latinos who arrived in Dalton after 1995 were illegal.

The government recently conducted several highly publicized raids of companies with illegal workers and has promised more.

Even when the raids were going on, Dalton's civic leaders were sending a different message. When Latino parishioners overflowed Dalton's 130-seat St. Joseph's Catholic Church -- even after pews were extended and aisles narrowed -- industry executives helped pay for a new, 600-seat church whose bilingual priest now leads both masses and misas. Parishioner Carl Burkhardt, president of Dalton's No. 3 carpetmaker, Beaulieu of America Inc., gave $1 million while Shaw Industries chief executive Bob Shaw "godfathered" the project, according to Father Daniel Stack, the priest at the time. "He said we were taking care of his workers, so he wanted to help take care of us," Stack said.

And as Latinos increased from 4 percent of Dalton public school students in 1990 to 44 percent in 2000 and 61 percent in 2005, help came from the industry, the city government and a $500,000 federal grant, all at the behest of a prominent local attorney and former congressman. The Georgia Project, founded by attorney Erwin Mitchell in 1996, brought bilingual educators from Mexico to teach Latino children and to instruct local teachers in the Spanish language and Mexican culture. It also sends Dalton teachers to a summer institute in Mexico and provides after-school tutoring for Latino children whose parents don't speak English.

"We're not about immigration; we're about education," Mitchell said. Commission Chairman Anderson said the county would have to raise property taxes to cover rising costs for schools and indigent health care, but he argued that paying for immigration is cheaper than not paying for it.

"People will say if it wasn't for these darned Mexicans, we wouldn't have a tax increase," Anderson said. "But would you rather have a little increase in property taxes because our industry thrives and we all benefit, or would you rather the industry left and we had no jobs here?"

Our United States

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To Betty Motley, who retired last year after 21 years with six carpet companies, the choice is not that simple. Standing on her porch in a mill workers' neighborhood, she pointed out a green, two-bedroom house across the street where she said five Mexican men live.

"They don't spend anything, they're just saving," she said. Around the corner is Morales Market and a branch of Sigue Corp., the leading transmitter of money from the United States to Mexico.

Down the street, a woman named Diane, who would speak only on condition that her last name not be used for fear of retaliation from her supervisor, has worked 15 years for Mohawk said most of her white co-workers have retired, quit or been laid off.

She said that her new Latino co-workers work faster than she does and that she can't meet the new production quota, meaning she now makes less money.

"They're taking our United States and making it their United States," Motley said. "Mohawk and Shaw used to be our companies."

Rep. Nathan Deal (R), whose district includes Dalton, said he hears constantly from constituents upset about the Spanish-speaking majority in their children's schools, about hospitals where disproportionately uninsured Latinos increase the cost of care.

Deal is considered a hard-liner on immigration. He has introduced legislation to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children whose parents are illegal immigrants, and he wants to deport illegal immigrants, secure the border and establish a fraud-proof guest-worker program.

But when asked where this would leave Dalton and the carpet industry, he sounded more open to negotiation.

"To say we'll seal the border and enforce the law is not something we can do by snapping our fingers," he said. "That's no more realistic than those who say we should just have open borders."

Staff researchers Richard Drezen and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.