As immigrants arrive in the South, border politics come with them

PENSACOLA, Florida ‒ In a wooded suburb of this southern city by the beach, Grace Resendez McCaffery steeled herself for an immigration battle.

She was exhausted from distributing 5,500 copies of her Spanish-language newspaper to newsstands in northwest Florida. But on a Monday morning in June, she drove over the bay to plead with a five-man county commission to reject a resolution saying the county “doesn’t welcome illegal aliens.”

As Republicans get ready to hold their convention in Milwaukee on Monday, the consequences of the party's hardline immigration politics are playing out on stages big and small across the country. In this rural county in northwest Florida, the five Republican commissioners faced a dilemma: to choose their principles of governance or the politics of their party.

“Though we’re growing and thriving, progress takes a step backwards when political stunts use immigration – or rather immigrants – as a platform,” Resendez McCaffery told them, flanked at a lectern by four Latina women.

Resendez McCaffery isn't an immigrant. She was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. But since moving to Pensacola 30 years ago, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants has become a spokesperson for the small-but-growing immigrant community here. These sort of resolutions targeting "illegal" immigrants inevitably fall on the shoulders of all Hispanics, she said.

The United States is reaching its highest level of immigration in a century , and nowhere has the change been greater than in the historical South, where the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow once kept immigration at bay. Today, even anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation in southern states can’t overpower the magnet of the region's growing economy .

Since 2010, the foreign-born population in the South has jumped by nearly 50% , compared to increases of 29% in the Midwest, 19% in the Northeast, and 13% in the West, according to Steven Camarota, director of research for the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies.

This immigration-fueled demographic shift in southern states has altered the country's political landscape. Not because immigrants are voting in large numbers, but because their arrival convinced many Southerners they needed to worry about the U.S. border, said David Bier , director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.

"Before the 1960s the South had very, very little immigration," Bier said. "You could go back 100 years and you couldn’t find a place where the South had more than 5% foreign-born. It’s really the South that is experiencing immigration at scale for the first time in a unique way that the rest of the country has taken for granted."

Along the way, Republican immigration politics have trickled down from the federal level to state and big-city governments , and now threaten to upend races even at the most local levels.

In a wood-paneled board room in Santa Rosa County, the commissioners set aside residents' concerns about poor storm water drainage and neighborhood flooding to discuss the recent appearance at a local truck stop of a bus carrying migrant workers.

Peering over her reading glasses, Resendez McCaffery reminded the commissioners that she knows something about what anti-immigrant rhetoric can inspire.

“Violence against Latinos isn’t uncommon – especially when provoked by fear and hatred,” she said. “I’m haunted” – she paused, swallowing sudden tears – “by the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart store in my neighborhood in Texas. I plead with you to not complicate an already difficult situation.”

James Calkins, the author of the resolution, wore a red tie and an American flag on his lapel.

"Illegal immigration is a serious problem in Santa Rosa County and the United States of America," he said, and then he read off a social media message he received claiming there were "approximately 120 men, what looked like illegal aliens, military-aged men without families."

"We have a major problem in this country right now with illegal immigration," he said.

Southern bona fides in north Florida

Florida may be well-known for its vibrant Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando and elsewhere. But those cities are a world apart from Pensacola and its rural surroundings, where people like to affirm their Southern bona fides by saying, "the farther north you go in Florida, the farther South you get."

The Pensacola metropolitan area stretches across two counties, Escambia and Santa Rosa, with a combined population of roughly 511,000 people, according to the U.S. Census 2022 American Community Survey. Though the immigrant population of the two-county region has more than tripled since 1990, foreign-born persons made up just 5% of the population.

Escambia County was almost exclusively white and Black until 2014, when people identifying as Hispanic or Latino on the Census first topped 5% of the population.

There were the Mexican workers who were drawn to the city after Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

More diversity came beginning in 2013 with a massive relocation by the Navy Federal Credit Union from its Mid-Atlantic and Northeast operations. A diaspora of Puerto Ricans, who are born U.S. citizens, arrived after Hurricane Maria hit the island in 2017.

More recently, and especially since the pandemic, immigrants from Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Honduras and El Salvador have come searching for opportunities away from more crowded parts of Florida.

At the same time, the city and its suburbs have become more Republican . In 2020, 44% of voters were registered Republican in Escambia County compared with 37% in 1995. The percentage of voters registered as Democrat dropped 25 points over the same period, to 33%.

“The magnitude of political change in the South in the last 30 years is monumental,” Bier said. “It wasn’t until 2010 that state legislatures all flipped to be Republican."

Republicans moved into the South as their stronghold, Bier said, where they could "focus on culture issues which have more salience in the South, because the cultural change in the South is much more apparent and noticeable than in the North.”

"I've got two in my house"

At the county podium, Esmeralda Aguilar Quiroz stepped forward.

She had moved to Pensacola from Houston with her Mexican husband, who came to the U.S. illegally as a child, she said. Their attempts to get him right with the law led them to be scammed out of $25,000, before President Joe Biden's latest executive order opened a path to residency.

"What would I do if the resolution passes? Would they see us differently or would they treat us differently?" she asked. "Would we be able to speak Spanish without somebody saying, ‘Get out of our country. You’re not welcome.’?”

Young, white men have repeatedly told Caridad Galán-Rios just that, when she walks to the road to get the mail or put out the trash. The daughter of Puerto Rican parents said the men drive by in pick-ups "with a certain flag that we all know."

Lucía Trejo, who was brought to the U.S. illegally as a child and later received legal status, spoke next. Then Alma McKnight who once was undocumented and later served in the U.S. Navy. Their plea to the commissioners was the same: Vote down the resolution.

Three of the commissioners, all self-described conservative Republicans, took Calkins to task.

He was trying to play national politics in an election year, they said, instead of administrating county business.

But Calkins' proposal had clearly wedged them between a rock and a hard place politically: If they voted yes, they'd be going against their principles of focusing on county governance; if they voted no, they'd most certainly see campaign mailers claiming they supported illegal immigration.

"If you don't vote against illegal aliens, you vote for illegal aliens," Calkins said. "We're about one vote away from this board having a liberal majority."

That drew a laugh from the crowd and the commissioners, who couldn't be confused for liberals in any other room.

Commissioner Colten Wright apologized to the public, warning it was going to be a long meeting.

"This is politics, James, and I'm sick of it," Wright said to Calkins. "As someone who comes from Irish heritage and knows what the Irish people dealt with in this country and the discrimination that happened, that's a problem."

Wright didn’t like Biden’s border policies any more than the next Republican but he also didn’t believe the county commission ought to play any role in immigration, other than to fund the local sheriff's office to handle local crimes.

Ray Eddington, with white hair and a white mustache, spoke with the country accent of his native Chattanooga, Tennessee, and told his fellow commissioners about the immigrant women who care for his disabled grandson.

"I'm not against these people coming in, long as they come in legal," he said. "Matter of fact, I've got two in my house every day, taking care of my grandson. They're doing the right thing, applying for American citizenship."

He'd vote no, he said, because "you don't know. They might be here illegal, but they might be trying to get citizenship. We don't know, James. We really don't know."

Choosing to stay

Many Latinos and immigrants say they have stayed in the Pensacola area for job opportunities, the white-sand beaches, and slower pace of life – despite running into the darker legacies of the Deep South.

When José Perez arrived in 2013 alongside his then-wife Jessica Perez as part of the Navy Federal credit union relocation, "it was a culture shock," he said. He set up a food truck and eventually opened Joe's Caribe restaurant in Pensacola.

"I felt like I went in a time warp when I came here," he said about the often separate white and Black societies and the racism his family encountered. "I thought it was only in the history books. But to experience it hands-on was something to take in."

Immigration has helped nurture a reckoning in Pensacola, as the city confronted its segregated past in the wake of George Floyd's 2021 killing by police, said Teniadé Broughton, a city councilwoman who has promoted local Black history and storytelling.

There was the revelation, weeks after Floyd's murder, that the city’s history museum, visited annually by Pensacola public school children, was named for a local leader of the Ku Klux Klan .

Broughton said she sees in anti-immigrant rhetoric a similar prejudice that her Black community experienced.

"When are we collectively going to put aside this perceived threat?" Broughton said, referring to the immigration debate.

Jessica Perez said she and José Perez "had some experiences that were hard to deal with and may have caused some drama for my kids," she said.

"I will say the good people outnumber the bad people," she added. "I’ve just tried to teach my kids, ‘Be proud of who you are.’"

Two weekends before the county commission meeting, a Puerto Rican mother-son duo organized the first Fiesta Latina in downtown, with food from the island, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru and Honduras and a foam party for the kids.

A week later, thousands turned out for a Latin Salsa Festival organized by Jessica Perez, where bands played salsa music on a soundstage behind the museum that once bore the KKK leader’s name. Now it's called the Pensacola History Museum.

"There were times that you do feel awkward or you don’t feel included in certain rooms," she said. "It’s about how you attack those challenges. I don’t see the Latin celebrations I want to see, ok so how can I change that? Now I can bring my music, my culture, to this area and let me tell you: People want it."

Taking to task, focusing on what's important

Visibly frustrated, Santa Rosa County Commissioner Kerry Smith took the floor and took Calkins to task for multiple interruptions, and for proposing symbolic resolutions that weren't the stuff of governance.

"You have no clue how to govern anything," Smith said to Calkins. "You don't even know what your job is, sir."

The busload of migrant workers? Smith got the concerned calls, too, he said. He made his own inquiry. The workers all held H-2A temporary agricultural visas and were headed to South Florida to pick crops, he said. They had stopped to use the restroom and then moved on.

The debate dragged on for more than an hour, until the crowd started heckling and shouting "Take a vote!" And they did: The resolution failed 3-2, with commission Chairman Sam Parker siding with Calkins.

Resendez McCaffery and the other Latina women walked out of the hall after the vote, relieved but unsettled. Was the battle really over? She wondered: Could this be the beginning of being able to have real conversations about immigration?

The commissioners voted down the resolution, but they suggested preparing a joint letter to Biden stating their discontent with illegal immigration at the border.

"I did feel like they were talking as if we weren't in the room," she said.

"Demonizing immigrants is where the line should be drawn," she said. "They're trying to rile up their constituencies and that's where it starts to get ugly."

Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As immigrants arrive in the South, border politics come with them