[Sherry_Giskie]

Originally Posted by Made in the USA

The Voice » Texas, Kansas, Iowa

Did anyone read that?!?!?!

The New York Times on August 27, 2007 profiled the six counties of the Rio Grande Valley that are home to 400,000 Latinos living in colonias, which are lots sold without sewer and water hookups. After tighter regulation and state and private aid, about two-thirds of the houses in the colonias now have water and sewer connections. In 1995, the Texas Legislature required developers of new colonias to install electricity, water lines and sewage pipes or septic tanks.
Migrant farm workers bought many of the first colonias, but today more are owned by those working at minimum-wage retail jobs, in construction or in housecleaning.
Kansas. Dodge City, Kansas, the home of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, is increasingly Hispanic. The beef packing industry began to move to rural areas of the Midwest in the 1960s, and the trend accelerated in the 1980s. The wages that attracted immigrants have been associated with falling poverty rates- the poverty rate in Dodge City was 28 percent in 1980 and 14 percent in 2000, but per capita income of $15,500 was below the US average of $21,600.
The National Beef plant in Dodge City is not unionized, but the United Food and Commercial Workers is trying to organize the largely Hispanic work force. The UFCW has called for congressional hearings into tactics used by ICE during immigration raids, citing the December 2006 raids at six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants. ICE agents arrested more than 1,200 workers at the Swift plants.
About 70 percent of the 5,800 students in Dodge City schools in 2006-07 were Hispanic, and 44 percent are limited English proficient.