Odilio Perez aches for a life beyond Buford Highway, a six-lane stretch of strip malls and ethnic diversity that cuts through three counties in Georgia.
The Guatemalan man settled along the artery leading out of Atlanta more than a decade ago, answering the call of local officials who used the springboard of the 1996 Summer Olympics to make immigrants a centerpiece of the community's rebirth. Vacant car lots and whitewashed stores gave way to affordable apartments, an eclectic mix of shops and towering business signs that are a study in polyglot.
"I've lived and worked here for 10 years without a problem," Mr. Perez, 33, said recently in the English he has learned since entering the country illegally. "I'd love to be a citizen, if I had a chance. But I went to a lawyer but he told me there's just no way."
Mr. Perez is part of a massive movement of immigrants who have bypassed traditional destinations in favor of the South.
Perhaps no place captures the transformation as vividly as Buford Highway.
People on both sides of the immigration debate say the highway is unique in its array of groups, and even more significant as an 8-mile example of the conflicting signals immigrants receive about whether they're wanted.
The highway was born when the Olympics peppered the Atlanta area with construction jobs, fueling a 300 percent increase in the Hispanic population in Georgia.
Officials in the working-class suburb of Chamblee saw opportunity and tailored their municipal codes to harness the convergence of newcomers.
The industrial businesses that were the highway's main employers had shut down in the 1980s and early 1990s. As the Games approached, Asian merchants attracted by inexpensive leases and a steady traffic conduit established restaurants and shops along the highway.
Latino workers added to the dynamic. They lived in dilapidated apartments along the road. A few squatted in the woods.
Tension surfaced at City Hall meetings. Longtime residents didn't want empty lots, but they didn't want foreign encampments either.
In response, Chamblee hired its first city manager, Kathy Brannon.
She cracked down on flophouse landlords and strictly enforced loitering rules. Then the city enacted sweeping zoning that permitted retail and new apartments in the same area.
By the end of the 1990s, Chamblee had established a zone dubbed the "International Village," home to nearly 1,000 people, mostly immigrants.
Ms. Brannon, who is to retire this year, has left her successor with an outline for the next vision of Buford Highway: more green space and fewer strip malls, all meant to make the area not just a destination for immigrants but for Atlantans hungry for diversity.
Since the year Ms. Brannon established the International Village, nationwide workplace arrests on immigration violations have increased fivefold, and deportations of suspected illegal immigrants have doubled, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
In 2006, law enforcement agencies in the Southeast enlisted in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement partnership that allows local officers to interview and fingerprint foreign-born people they detain.
The stepped-up enforcement has contributed to a decade-long backlog in legal residency applications and, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a wait list of about 1 million for citizenship.
Nikki Nguyen, 54, a Vietnam war refugee who petitioned for years to enter the U.S., filed to sponsor her sister to join her in the U.S. 12 years ago. The case is still pending.
Construction has dried up, and Buford Highway sometimes looks like it did in the old days.
But few immigrant workers plan to leave. With families here, a network of employers and several years invested in Chamblee's immigrant vision, their fortunes are aligned with the highway's.
"This country says it doesn't want us, but when there's a job to be done, it needs us," said Mr. Perez. "We see the two faces of this country up close, and it's sometimes hard to know which is the real one."
(AP)
