When residents of Wynscape apartments wanted phone cards to call Mexico, El Salvador or Honduras, they didn’t need to leave the north DeKalb County complex: A woman sold them out of her unit.
They could buy beer, too. All it took was a knock on the door of another of the 272 apartments.
Here, where many residents don’t drive and cash is king, an underground marketplace has thrived.
But two murders at the complex’s unofficial convenience store - a second-story unit that offered items from batteries to lime-flavored potato chips - has shed a tragic light on the shadow economy familiar to new immigrants in Georgia.
Not only do they disregard our immigration laws; they also scoff at zoning, taxing, and health codes. But that’s OK - it’s just a part of their culture. I just don’t understand why criminal invaders bust their asses so hard to sneak into this country “for a better life” and then proceed to transform their neighborhoods into third-world cesspools like those from whence they came.
The attacks come amid grim times within Georgia’s underground economy, said Jeffrey Humphreys, director of the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth. Roughly half of the state’s nearly 1 million immigrants are estimated to be in the country illegally. And more than a few have been filling unofficial jobs in construction and landscaping, Humphreys said.
But 2007 saw a historic drought and a downturn in the home-building industry. “That’s a very cruel combination for the underground economy right now,” he said. “People are desperate.”
Hey, didn’t their madres tell them not to put all their huevos in one basket?
SondraK, unapologetic Lympian Slayer 01/10 at 07:29 AM •
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