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The Los Angeles Times on February 16, 2004 profiled six brothers from Los Cerritos, Michoacan who migrated to Oxnard, California to pick strawberries in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1993 began to move to Rogers, Arkansas to work for Tyson Foods. They moved out of California despite subsidized housing in Oxnard, food stamps and other benefits. The six families are very large, with a total of 52 children, including one with 11 children.

About 20 percent of the 40,000 Rogers residents are Hispanics, and many of those who moved to Rogers from California note that their annual earnings rose from $8,000 a year to $20,000 a year, wives could also work, and low-cost housing enabled them to become homeowners. In unincorporated areas of Arkansas, there are few building codes, and many Latino immigrants build their own homes. California's share of US immigrants fell from 38 percent in the 1980s to 25 percent in the 1990s.

In 2003, for the third year in a row, Missouri led the nation in the number of seizures of ingredients, equipment and hazardous waste related to the production of methamphetamine, some 2,857, compared to about 1,240 seizures each in California and Iowa. Meth, also known as speed, ice or crank, is very popular in agricultural areas because it is cheap and easy to make using ingredients like anhydrous ammonia, a common fertilizer; some is sold to workers in meatpacking and poultry processing.

Amish settled in Pennsylvania are moving to southwestern Wisconsin to continue farming and to help their children avoid "urban temptations." The US has several hundred thousand Amish in Ohio (54,000), Pennsylvania (50,000) and Indiana (36,000), and Wisconsin (12,000). Some Wisconsin residents complained that the influx of Amish did not promote economic development, since they do not send their children to local schools. Under a 1972 Supreme Court decision, the Amish are exempt from local compulsory school attendance laws. Generally, they halt their education after eighth grade.

St Paul. Some 15,000 Hmong from a camp 60 miles north of Bangkok are expected to arrive in the US in summer 2004. St Paul, Minnesota, with the largest concentration of Hmong in the US, has 25,000 of the 200,000 Hmong and Hmong-Americans in the US. During the Vietnam War, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited Hmong in Laos to be part of a secret war against the Pathet Lao Communists, rescuing downed American pilots and fighting North Vietnamese soldiers.

The federal government gives $800 to local resettlement agencies for each refugee they resettle, but state and local governments absorb most of the remaining integration costs (some of the extra costs of, for instance, teaching English are paid by the federal government because most of the new arrivals are poor, and federal funds are available to assist poor students and residents).

Plains states continue to lose farms and residents. In North Dakota, there were 84,000 farms in the early 1940s and 30,000 in 2003.

Southeast. Day laborers on the outskirts of Atlanta were offered jobs by high-school students and then taken to isolated locations and beaten and robbed. Five students from Cherokee High School in Canton, Georgia, 30 miles north of Atlanta, were charged with the assaults on day laborers from Guatemala. Local residents said that the boys assumed they would not be caught.

The Charleston, South Carolina paper http://www.charleston.net/) ran a series of articles on the Latinization of South Carolina in April 2004, emphasizing that word-of-mouth networks moved Hispanic migrants from farm work to construction and then to manufacturing and service jobs. The Census estimates that there are 110,000 Hispanics in South Carolina, while local activists put the number at 400,000. According to the Charleston paper, almost 90 percent of the state's Hispanics have been in South Carolina fewer than five years.

Kari Lydersen, "For Amish, the Grass Is Greener in Wisconsin," Washington Post, April 19, 2004. Monica Davey, "Decades After First Refugees, Readying for More Hmong," New York Times, April 4, 2004. Ellen Barry and Rennie Sloan, "Case Hints at Split Between Longtimers, Latinos," Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2004. Daryl Kelley and Carlos Chavez, "The Carranza family, like many Latino immigrants, found its way into the American middle class by leaving the Golden State," Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2004.