Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard has been writing outstanding stuff on immigration, particularly in the European context, for a while (I see he’s got a book coming out on the subject) – some of you might remember his articles on Muslim immigration into France, in particular.

He’s got an excellent piece in the WS on the impact of immigration – predominantly Guatamalan – on a small Deleware town over the past decade. It is impressively thorough, historically rooted, tracing the economic ups and downs of the area over the past half-century,  and absolutely fair. He puts everything in helpful context and busts some myths:

The problem for poultry processors has been retention. Today, the companies have 3 percent monthly turnover in their workforce. This is a sea change. Two decades ago, a plant would lose 10 to 15 percent of its workers per month–that is, at any given moment, most of the workers in a plant would have been hired in the past four or five months. This is how immigrants wound up dominating the poultry industry. It is not that corporations sought to unload their local workers wholesale and replace them with cheaper and harder-working ones. It is that every time a local worker quit, he was replaced by a Guatemalan who didn’t, and the job changed from a stopgap into the lifeline for a family.

Complicating this adjustment is that Delaware is not just a land of old industries. The general trajectory of immigrants in Delaware is from the industrial economy, which does not require English, into the service economy (mostly landscaping, construction, and restaurant work), which does. The service industries are highly developed on the coast, just ten miles away. There, a boom in real estate, retail, and restaurants is changing life in Sussex County more than immigration. The median age in most states, including Delaware, is 36 or 37. In Sussex County, it is creeping towards the mid-40s. New development, the tendency of people to retire to summer houses, youth flight, and a state tax code with a generous "pension exclusion" are all turning Sussex into what real-estate agents refer to as a NORC, a "naturally occurring retirement community."

In such places, it is easy to understate the demand for immigration by mixing up "workforce participation" and "employment." Why, many people ask, does southern Delaware need immigrants when its unemployment rate is in low single digits? The answer is that even in communities made up disproportionately of retirees, there’s still work to be done. In Rehoboth and Fenwick, the retirees are not "unemployed," but they’re not paving the roads they drive on or cutting their own grass, either.

The juxtaposition of these two economies has created the single largest problem faced by immigrants and by Georgetown. It has made moderate-income housing unprofitable. In the center of Georgetown, crowding persists, even as townhouse developments and suburban subdivisions and "active adult" communities for the 55-and-older set spring up on its outskirts. When the decade began, no house in Georgetown had ever sold for more than $200,000; today there is a development just east of town where the prices start in the high $200s. According to Lucia Campos of NCALL, a nonprofit that gives financial advice to the working poor, the going rate to rent a so-so house in Georgetown is $1,200 a month. So when $9.70 an hour is also supporting a family and relatives back home in Guatemala, it is not surprising that families double and triple up. There ought to be opportunities to build and renovate for this market. But immigrants had the bad fortune to arrive in Georgetown at exactly the moment when the retirement of the Baby Boomers was transforming Georgetown from a "hick town" into a "destination . . . just minutes from the beach!"

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Given their vulnerability, their high levels of illiteracy, and the language barrier, one naturally expects the children of these immigrants to be struggling a bit. They are not. They are doing extremely–almost shockingly–well. Latinos make up 40 percent of the student population at Georgetown North elementary school, and that percentage is steadily rising. They will make up 55 percent of the first graders who arrive on the first day of school next month. Thanks to No Child Left Behind laws, there is a bevy of data broken down all sorts of ways on school progress. Hispanics in the third grade at Georgetown North are outscoring both whites and blacks in reading comprehension.

This should not surprise us as much as it probably does. Obsessed as we are with upward social mobility, Americans harbor a sneaking assumption that only educated parents can have educated children. Learning, the thinking goes, is a matter of playing Mozart in pregnancy and keeping the Classic Children’s Books strewn tastefully about the bedroom. This is quite wrong. You don’t learn by aping the learned classes–you learn by taking the work of learning seriously. Latino children come to school as ready to work as their parents do at the plant. Asked if Latino parents did anything differently, James Hudson, the principal at North Georgetown, says, "The first question parents ask at parent-teacher conferences is not ‘How are my child’s grades?’ but ‘How is my child’s behavior?’"

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We should be aware of what we’re doing, though. If the border is controlled–and if the book is thrown at all those Mam-speaking chicken workers with their phony IDs and their alcoholic binges and their unusually hard-working children–there will be a price to pay. There is not a demand in Georgetown for a certain quota of different-looking poor people. There is a demand for people from Tacaná who have two decades’ experience in the peculiar Delaware economy of chicken, soybeans, and retirement homes, and two decades of ties to the community out of which that economy grows. It is not, in fact, certain that the economy of Sussex County could survive without them, for Delawareans have gotten too old and too rich to maintain it on their own. Those who maintain it for them are a conservative force, made necessary because, as Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, "If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change."