Georgia’s Latino Population Set To Double In 8 Years
Members of a Georgia Kiwanis Club were shocked to hear recently that Georgia is now California. Or, as The Albany Herald reported, the Latino population in that state is set to double in the next eight years, which would mean going from about 854,000 Latinos to about 1.7 million. The report continued:
The state’s fastest growing ethnicity, the Hispanic populace in Georgia grew by more than 96 percent between 2000 and 2010, Warren Brown, director of Applied Demography at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government, said.
Brown and his contemporary, Matt Hauer, explained various conclusions that demographers have drawn about Georgia population, race and immigration trends using the newly released 2010 census data.
“Georgia is the new California,” Hauer said. “Because when we think about immigrant destinations you think of places like California and New York. … But what we’re seeing is that there are new places where there are rising immigrant gateways, and there are four Georgia counties that are some of the fastest-growing in the nation.”
This will be an interesting culture clash, harkening back to California in the early 1990s (Operation Gatekeeper, Pete Wilson, Prop. 187…), to Arizona now, and really, to where Georgia as a state is right now. The fight is already one, as we see from lawsuits against anti-Latino laws, cops who go “Hispanic hunting,” teachers calling their students racial epithets, lazy racism by legislators and general Latino bashing.
The hard reality is that Georgia, and Georgians, cannot change the course of demographic history in that state. Latinos are a growing force, and will be, no matter how many racist laws they pass in that state. What would probably be best for Georgians to do is figure out how to pull in the talents of Latinos in that state to help Georgia move forward with the rest of the U.S. as we all look forward to an increasingly international world.
Learning from history so as not to repeat it anyone?
Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD
