Evelyn Rawls: ''My opinion is that this country was built on immigration. Each group of people have helped improve the country.''

Randy Boone: "They let people come over here for all the wrong reasons. They take jobs and you've got too many Americans here who can't get none and don't have none."

By ANITA WADHWANI Staff Writer

More in Midstate perceive immigrants as making life worse

A new poll shows that negative feelings about Hispanic immigrants in Middle Tennessee are increasing.

Forty-one percent of those who took part in the Middle Tennessee State University poll said Hispanic residents were making life worse here. Just 28% responded the same way in 1998.

The telephone poll of 605 residents statewide was conducted in late October and early November by students at the university. It has an estimated error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The poll, released yesterday, showed that Middle Tennesseans were more likely than others in the state to have negative perceptions of Hispanic immigrants. In East Tennessee, 28.2% responded that Hispanic immigrants were making life worse. In West Tennessee the number was 31.7%.

That may be because of the larger number of Hispanic residents here than elsewhere in the state, said MTSU pollster Robert Wyatt.

The Nashville metropolitan area is home to the highest concentration of Hispanic residents (3.3%) in the state, according to Census 2000.

The MTSU poll also found that nearly 39% of the Middle Tennessee respondents felt that Middle Eastern residents had made life worse. About 15% of the Middle Tennessee poll respondents said Asian immigrants had made life worse — an increase from 10% in 1998.

No 1998 numbers were available for attitudes about Middle Eastern immigrants. The poll also found that 74% of Middle Tennessee respondents feel that U.S. immigration policy is ''too open.''

''They let people come over here for all the wrong reasons,'' Randy Boone, 40, a produce salesman from Cheatham County, said yesterday. ''They take jobs and you've got too many Americans here who can't get none and don't have none.''

Boone said that, although no one he knew had lost a job to a Hispanic or other immigrant, his daily life at the Farmer's Market in Nashville was negatively affected by immigrant customers who often want to pay below the asking price for the fruits and vegetables he has been selling there for 20 years.

Other immigrants, such as refugees, are able to get government assistance unavailable to American citizens. That isn't fair, Boone said.

Others said that they made a distinction between illegal and legal immigrants, which the poll did not.

''The question of immigration, in my view, is not one about the different ethnic backgrounds of the immigrants,'' said Karen Helgesen, 48, a Brentwood resident and self-described full-time mother of 25 years.

''It is a question of whether those people have entered the U.S.A. in a legal manner. If they have, I have no problem and I certainly don't care what nationality they are. Immigration laws need to be enforced, and we should celebrate the diversity of people who have legally entered our country.''

Other residents said that immigrants had been good for the Nashville area.

''My opinion is that this country was built on immigration,'' said Evelyn Rawls, 60. ''Each group of people have helped improve the country.''

The negative feelings about immigrants in the poll may reflect the newness of the immigrant population to Middle Tennessee rather than just poor opinions about Hispanics and other immigrants, said Wyatt, who has conducted the poll for the past four years.

''Immigration is a really new thing in Tennessee,'' said Wyatt, a professor of journalism and director of the School of Journalism and the Office of Communication.

''It's been a black and white area for most of Tennesseans' lifetimes, so seeing or being able to identify large numbers of Hispanic residents or seeing signs written in Korean is a very new thing. I wouldn't wonder if that's one factor, just the strangeness of it.''

In Davidson County the Hispanic population grew more than fourfold in the past 10 years to about 26,000.

Those numbers, as well as an easing of identification requirements for driver's licenses, have put the issue of an immigrant influx to the area into the headlines in the past two years.

Some pollsters cautioned that drawing any conclusions about the way people respond to questions about race and ethnicity is hard.

''Trying to assess people's attitudes toward issues like race or ethnicity are difficult because individuals are usually unwilling to give their true preferences on these matters,'' said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2002