SALUDA — There’s a familiar refrain among longtime residents in Saluda, South Carolina: “This town is changing.”

A tiny community surrounded by cattle pastures, pine forests and peach orchards, Saluda had a singular claim to notoriety: two defenders of the Alamo, James Butler Bonham and William Barret Travis, were from here.

Until the early 2000s, most of the people who lived in Saluda were Black or white. The town was shrinking. Most of the brick buildings on Main Street were vacant.

That was then.

Now, downtown is home to churches with names like “Iglesia Apostolica de la Fe en Cristo Jesus” and “Iglesia De Dios Sanidad Y Liberación.”

Taquerias, Guatemalan bakeries and stores like Flor de Nica are now just as much local fixtures as the Bojangles and Dollar General.

At Food Lion, the only grocery store in town, new items like frozen taquitos and Las Ricas puffed wheat snacks fill the shelves.

Today, city officials say, most businesses in Saluda’s city limits are owned by immigrants from Mexico or Guatemala.

“If it weren’t for the Mexicans, the town would be closed down,” said 77-year-old George Forrest, a retiree who has spent his life in Saluda. He talked at length about record high immigration at the nation’s southern border, which, he said, has both hurt and helped Saluda.

“The government is also letting more and more immigrants in here,” he said, adding that he believes most of them are “illegal.”

Jerry Daniels, chair of the local Republican Party, believes that undocumented immigrants are a burden on local taxpayers. “If you want illegals running in and not being checked and all this other stuff, then you pay for ’em,” he said. “Don’t force people that don’t want them here to pay for them.”

Such sentiments were echoed in nearly two dozen interviews with longtime residents of this overwhelmingly Republican community. Local Democratic party chair Sharon Holloway declined to speak for this story.

Immigration once was a regional issue, mostly concentrated in states along the U.S.-Mexico border. But this election year, the immigrants who make up nearly one in six of the nation’s residents have put down roots in every state. Immigration is a top issue for South Carolina voters.

A close look at Saluda’s demographic transformation helps explain how the issue has come to dominate the nation and its politics.

A City in Transition

Over the past two decades, this crossroads an hour west of the state capital of Columbia has dramatically transformed. In 1990, Saluda County was about two-thirds white and one-third Black — mirroring South Carolina as a whole, then and now.

Over the decades, many older Saluda residents have passed away, and their children and grandchildren have drifted toward cities for more lucrative jobs. Fifty-nine percent of the people living in Saluda earn less than $25,000 a year, according to Census estimates. Businesses closed and homes were left empty or sold.

But unlike other struggling rural areas, Saluda’s overall population has held pretty steady. That’s because Latinos have moved in.

Today, Saluda County is 16% Hispanic, more than double the average in South Carolina as a whole. And in the town of Saluda, population 3,214, more than half of residents are Hispanic and Latino. Whites make up 16.3%, Blacks 30%.

Some in Saluda put the town’s Hispanic and Latino population count much higher. It’s hard to be certain since the Census often undercounts minority and undocumented communities.

It’s also difficult to get a precise count of undocumented migrants, but in 2022, the American Immigration Council said, the number among immigrants in South Carolina was about 72,000 — or one in four. Local officials and advocates estimate that most of the immigrants in Saluda are undocumented.

The change happened gradually, with little fanfare.

In the late ‘90s, Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants started coming to Saluda for affordable housing and jobs in nearby poultry processing plants and produce farms, repeating a pattern seen in other parts of the U.S., but still relatively new to South Carolina. The first wave came for work, then settled and raised families. As the years passed, more immigrants followed.

The town’s growth has been good for barber Karl Paige, who has run a downtown barber shop for eight years — and says business has improved.

“White, Black, Hispanic. I cut them all,” he said. “I have more customers because I’m diverse.”

Saluda’s institutions are also working — often struggling — to adapt.

The public library has new offerings of books in Spanish. The sheriff’s office and police department each have one Spanish-speaking officer. When they need a translator, the county court calls in one by special request.

But there are no Spanish-speaking case workers in the county’s social services department, and no Hispanic or Latino members of the city or county councils.

However, Saluda County Council Chairman Jim Moore predicted, “It won’t be long before there is a Spanish-speaking mayor of Saluda.”

Saluda County Schools Expand Amid Immigration Controversy

The population change has made some longtime locals feel like there’s less to go around. Take, for example, what’s happened with schools. Even as the town’s white and Black populations have declined, there are 436 more students enrolled in the Saluda County School District than there were a decade ago. Nearly half of the 2,600 students are Hispanic or Latino.

On a warm August afternoon, teacher Pamela Buzhardt sat across from four Hispanic kindergartners on blue, yellow, purple and green stools. On their first day of multilingual instruction, they have practiced introducing themselves and describing their families.

Buzhardt showed the students a picture of her grown children. Her son works at Amick Farms, a local poultry processor, while her daughter works for Chick-fil-A in Charleston.

“This is my son,” she told them in English, smiling. “This is my daughter. They both work with chicken. Have you tried chicken before?”

“I like chicken,” one little boy said enthusiastically in English. He danced on his stool, flapping his arms like a bird.

When the students guessed a letter correctly, Buzhardt handed them a Skittle.

Saluda School District has hired multilingual teachers since the early 2000s to help children learn English and transition into the classroom. They have spent $600,000 over the past five years on multilingual teaching staff salaries, Superintendent Harvey Livingston said.

Livingston has also pushed the district to use its cadet program, a nonprofit arm that raises funds to pay for Saluda graduates’ college education in exchange for them to return to the district to teach. The district has hired about 25 former graduates to come back as educators over the past seven years, Livingston said. Importantly, there are six bilingual Hispanic students who graduated in 2023 and will return to instruct in the district.

The district’s elementary, middle and high schools also each have two translators who help with administrative duties. The district has spent around $285,000 to staff translators over the past five years, Livingston said.

Not everyone believes that is money well spent. Some taxpayers have complained that the resources should be going to American-born students.

Vintaria Holloway’s four-year-old son, Mason, has mostly Hispanic and Latino children in his pre-K class. It’s hard for him to relate to other children who aren’t from here, she said.

“I feel like your child should be around a variety of people. But it’s not a variety of people,” she said. “It’s just them.”

Livingston is aware of the complaints, but said it’s the district’s job to help children succeed regardless of where they come from. He added, “We welcome all kids.”

Although he does not speak Spanish well, Livingston makes an effort to connect with Spanish-speaking families in the district. He tries to maintain eye contact with parents in conversation, even when relying on a translator. The district sends out notices in both English and Spanish. And this year staff made “newcomer kits,” book bags and hygiene kits for children who had just arrived in the U.S.

The extra effort made a difference for parent David Cifuentes, who came to Saluda in 2014 from Guatemala. The teachers and district staff have been very kind, he said, and helped the eldest of his 11 children learn English at school.

Cifuentes, a construction worker, said Saluda is a good place to raise a family. The town is peaceful, the weather is good and the schools are close to their home near downtown.

“My children are happy here,” he said.

Buzhardt said she has found her new students smart and eager to please.

“I’ve fallen in love with my little ML (multilingual) students. They didn’t choose to be here, their families chose for them to be here. They can’t help that,” she said. “So I don’t even think about it, personally.”

And the kids keep coming. Enrollment has increased 20% over the last decade, and the district has 100 more students enrolled this year than last, Livingston said. For a small rural district, that is significant. Now, the school buildings need updating.

For the second time in the school district’s history, residents voted to raise taxes to update and expand the schools. In November 2022, voters approved a $49 million bond referendum to fund new construction and renovations at Saluda Elementary, Middle and High school, as well as Hollywood Elementary School, which were built in the 1940s. The rest of the $90 million-plus project will come from state funds.

In addition to classroom space, the high school will have a bigger career and technology wing where students can learn skills from firefighting to welding to cosmetology — jobs that officials hope will benefit Saluda.

The project is slated to be completed in February 2025. The tax increase, lower than originally anticipated, hit residents’ bills in September. For a $150,000 home, that is about a $290 annual increase, according to the county auditor’s office.

The bond, which passed narrowly, sparked debate over who would benefit from the expansion — and who would pay for it.

Daniels, the local GOP leader, said many in Saluda believe property owners are shouldering a disproportionate share of the school costs, and “everybody else is having to support the schools for their (immigrants’) kids.”

He said he hopes that if former President Donald Trump is re-elected he will crack down on the border and stop the flow of migrants into the country.

68-year-old Bettye Nelson, a retired plant worker who grew up in Saluda, said she’s also frustrated that the county is raising taxes to pay for services that will mostly serve non-citizens.

“I don’t like it. There are so many illegal people here and so many people know this, but nothing is done,” she said.

Others like 33-year-old mother Alicia Buckner said she doesn’t mind the growth because it attracts more opportunities. Besides, the children deserve a new school, she said.

“The town is changing and there are more immigrants, but they’re working,” she said. “The more that’s getting added, the more they bring jobs.”

A New Life in Saluda

It was a long day for single mother Lucrecia Lorenzo.

She works night shifts in a poultry processing plant. Each night she is responsible for checking over the chickens — lifting wings, touching talons — to make sure none are sick or deformed. She’s paid $16 an hour.

By the time she comes home to her dimly lit wood-paneled apartment, her three children, Brandon, Abner and Evelyn — all under the age of eight — are still brimming with energy: bouncing on the couch, running around the room and tugging at her clothes with questions.

Lorenzo arrived in the U.S. in 2012 from Guatemala with her parents. She met her husband here, but she said he was deported, and being a single parent has been a struggle.

“I didn’t expect with three kids how hard it would be,” she said through a translator.

But Lorenzo has good support in Saluda. Her church, Iglesia Adventista Del 7 Día, is helping her pay five months’ worth of rent. The Potter’s House, a local nonprofit, provides her children with clothing and toys. They also check in on her regularly to see how she is doing and help where they can. Today they brought pastries from the local Mexican bakery.

Lorenzo believes her children will have a better life in Saluda. They can go to school, learn English and go to the doctor because they have Medicaid. And most people in Saluda have welcomed her, she said.

Integrating into the community is no small feat. Immigrants often face a language barrier which makes it difficult for them to communicate with authorities, said Shanna Myers, founder of The Potter’s House. Those who are undocumented are particularly vulnerable to workplace discrimination and abuse, and they often cannot access health care.

And they are often reluctant to speak out, whether it be to police, teachers or the media.

“There’s a lot of bad things that happen in the community because they’re scared to report them because they themselves are there illegally, so the needs were just great,” Myers said.

The Potter’s House has worked steadily with the school district, local law enforcement and social workers to build inroads. Myers and her small team of interpreters help with food, clothing and housing, often advocating to landlords on behalf of families who do not speak English. They also help people get medical and dental care.

Myers described the immigrants she works with as “the most grateful people I’ve ever met.”

“They’re just very easy to love and serve, for sure,” she said.

Immigrants Underpin the Local Economy

The promise of a better life attracts thousands of immigrants to the U.S. The promise of good work draws them to Saluda where farms in the surrounding region grow peaches, soybeans, row crops and poultry.

One of South Carolina’s largest peach growers, Titan Farms, is located in Saluda and Edgefield counties and relies mostly on federal H-2A foreign workers. Poultry processing plant Amick Farms and Palmetto Gourmet Foods, which makes instant ramen noodles, are also here.

Palmetto Gourmet Foods has 300 employees at its 220,000-square-foot plant and plans to hire an additional 700 within the next five years. Amick Farms, the biggest employer in the area, has more than 2,000 employees, 400 family farm partners and two poultry production complexes — one in Saluda County and one in Hurlock, Maryland. A company spokesperson declined to share what proportion are Latino.

All day long, trucks full of chickens in steel cages rattle down Batesburg Highway toward the Amick Farms complex before heading to feed U.S. appetites.

Some of the recent arrivals work in produce fields harvesting fruits and vegetables from sunup to sundown. Others are electricians that keep the chicken coops cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Still more go out around 2 or 3 a.m. to collect chickens by hand and ship them off on trucks, said local accountant Hector Ortiz.

Some work more than 14 hours a day, and wages for poultry work are competitive. The hardest workers can earn upwards of $60,000 annually, Ortiz estimated from his tax return work, depending on the number of chicken coops the workers can work through. But it’s hard work.

Ortiz can tell by their hands.

Some appear the size of baseball gloves, he said, because they’re so swollen from infected lacerations from the rough chicken feet. When you’re picking up two birds between each finger, gloves only slow you down.

Ortiz, who is Puerto Rican, moved to Saluda in the late 1990s with his now-husband, Javi, to take over the Saluda Insurance Group company.

Immigrants, he said, are often willing to work demanding jobs that no one else will do — particularly agriculture jobs that are essential to America’s food production but risky for workers, who are isolated out in fields and exposed to harsh weather elements. Temporary H-2A visa agriculture workers in South Carolina earn $14.68 hourly on average, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

“Everybody benefits,” Ortiz said. “You will have to pay like $20 an hour to somebody just to encourage them to work those long hours.”

Ortiz’s clients are crucial to keeping food production industries afloat that have struggled to find enough workers.

The number of self-employed and family farmworkers declined 74 percent from 1950 to 1990 across the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More recently, an April study from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute predicted that a staggering 1.9 million U.S. manufacturing jobs — more than five in 10 — will remain unfilled by 2033.

Saluda has been losing the brunt of its workforce to larger cities like Columbia as young people relocate in search of higher wages, better working conditions or college education. That echoes a trend the U.S. has struggled with for decades: fewer people now want to work grueling agriculture and timber jobs, historically the backbone of rural economies.

The Saluda County unemployment rate in July was 4.4% — above the state average of 3.9% — and some American-born workers in the area say immigrants make it harder to find blue-collar jobs.

Bettye Nelson said she worked at a local processing plant for five years, until the workforce was reduced. She claimed that it was mostly the non-Hispanic workers who got cut. “It knocks the people that grew up here out of jobs, livelihood,” said Nelson, who is Black.

None of the major food processing plants in town would agree to interviews. But Tom Super, senior vice president of communications for The National Chicken Council, which represents most of the poultry industry and some local employers, said the industry “wants a stable, legal and permanent workforce.”

He said NCC does not have statistics on worker demographics, although there are many Hispanic and Latino employees. Like others, poultry companies recruit workers through career fairs and advertising, he said. And they try to use “every available measure to verify prospective employees’ identities and legal immigration status.” But he said that the tools available are “wholly ineffective.”

‘Paying Their Fair Share’

Whether it is schools or jobs, many in Saluda said they felt immigrants are not paying their fair share. But the reality is more complicated.

As an accountant, Hector Ortiz does insurance and taxes for many in the Latino community. While not all of his clients are U.S. citizens, they work as contractors with assigned tax ID numbers so they can pay what they owe.

Undocumented immigrants in South Carolina paid $213,800,000 in state and local taxes in 2022, according to a study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-partisan group.

Those tax dollars come from sales and excise taxes levied on purchases, property taxes on homeowners and renters, and personal and business income taxes. In a large majority of states, including South Carolina, undocumented immigrants actually pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1% of households, according to the report.

To help officials collect more tax revenue, Daniels, the local GOP leader, suggested the county pass a retail tax specifically on Hispanic businesses or collect fees on money orders sent from Saluda to countries across the border. But neither option would be allowed by law, an official with the South Carolina Department of Revenue said, because taxes have to be applied equally.

‘Grow or Get Out’

Gregg Coats, an army veteran from Batesburg-Leesville, believes more diversity is a good thing.

Coats met his wife, Nelle, who is from Mexico, at Amick Farms in 1996. They married a year later. In 2017, the Coats decided to open a food stand near downtown Saluda: 3 Maria’s Authentic Mexican Food, named for their three daughters. The restaurant serves beef tongue tacos, tamales rancheros wrapped in banana leaves with red sauce and homemade tortilla chips and salsa.

Most people in Saluda County were accepting of Gregg and Nelle’s marriage, Coats said. But their daughters Marian Hezabel, 26, Elizabeth Marie, 32, and Maria Cassandra, 21, have sometimes had a different experience.

People at their school assumed Coats, who is white, was the girls’ stepfather. When Cassandra ran for class president, a competitor told Cassandra she had an unfair advantage because “all your people will probably vote for you.” Cassandra was ultimately elected vice president.

Still, the girls are proud of their heritage, Coats said. The Coatses have been to Mexico many times to visit family. Gregg speaks a little Spanish now. “Enough to get me into trouble,” he joked.

To his neighbors who have mixed feelings about how their community is changing, Coats said: “Either grow or get out.”

Local contractor Jerry Carson thinks the new residents are benefitting Saluda’s once-stagnant population. Just last week he installed four septic tanks for a Hispanic family who is expanding their home on several acres of land.

As Carson watched his children play on the courthouse lawn, he admitted he thinks the U.S. immigration system is too complex for any one president to fix.

As Carson gathered his children to head home, a truck full of chicken crates rumbled through the nearby stoplight. Saluda, he said, will keep growing.

“But it’s not gonna grow how everybody else wants growth. It’s gonna grow more Hispanic.”

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