An Immigrant Workforce Thrives in Georgia’s MAGA Heartland
As Dalton’s carpet industry relies increasingly on Latinos, migrants and their children are moving up into management positions.
Emiterio Fraire (right) and sons Juan Carlos (center) and Jose Egui (left).
Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg BusinessweekCarpets have been good to Juan Carlos Fraire. At age 18, lacking even a high school diploma, he started as a forklift operator at a mill in the northwest Georgia town of Dalton, the floor-covering capital of the world. Over the years, Fraire worked his way up to various administrative positions, finishing high school and getting a BA in computer science along the way. Now 43, he leads a team in the human resources department of Engineered Floors Inc., one of a dozen or so carpet makers in the town of 35,000. “I was kinda doing everything,” he says. “Friday, Saturday, Sunday at the plant, and throughout the week I went to school.”
Fraire’s success is hardly unique in Dalton—or even in his family. His father, Emiterio, got a job in 1976 driving a forklift at a Dalton carpet plant, after a decade working on farms across the US. For Emiterio the factory gig was repetitive, grueling—and a total relief compared with what he’d been doing. “I never made so much picking chiles or cherries,” he says. “I started working 12-hour shifts and felt like I was in heaven.”