Emiterio Fraire (right) and sons Juan Carlos (center) and Jose Egui (left). Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
Carpets 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.”
The Dalton area produces about half of the world’s floor coverings. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
People like the Fraires have been instrumental in a dramatic turnaround for Dalton. Two decades ago, the city—90 minutes up Interstate 75 from Atlanta—was at risk of losing its primary industry as the carpet factories struggled to find workers and considered moving overseas. But while a few Dalton companies decamped to China or Mexico, the strongest carpet makers snapped up smaller rivals and invested in local production. And over time, migrants from Latin America became the heart of the workforce.
Today, Latinos make up more than half of Dalton’s population, and they represent a big share of the carpet industry’s labor force. Manufacturers have spent untold time and energy helping to train those employees—many second-generation citizens, born in the US—who frequently move up from entry-level millwork to supervisory positions. Rather than chase native Georgians out of the mills and into the unemployment lines, they’ve helped the place prosper. Surrounding Whitfield County posted an unemployment rate of 3% last fall (before ticking back up to about 5% now), and the median income has risen to $30,700 from $22,000 in 2014.
Not long after he started in the mills, Emiterio Fraire persuaded three of his brothers to make the journey to Georgia from their home in Jalpa, a village a full day’s bus ride northwest of Mexico City. His wife, four sons (including Juan Carlos) and dozens of cousins, aunts and uncles got jobs in the industry. Today about 200 people named Fraire live in the area, working as teachers, software coders, engineers, biologists and much more.
Dalton is MAGA country, deep in Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 14th Congressional District. Voters in the district supported Donald Trump overwhelmingly in 2016 and 2020. While the area is thriving because of the influx of migrants, that hasn’t tempered Greene’s anti-immigration rhetoric. “The Democrats ripped open the border, allowing millions of illegal aliens to pour in, driving up the cost of housing and health care while slashing wages and eliminating jobs,” she said in a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention this summer.
Dalton lies deep inside MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene’s US House district. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
But some longer-term residents see Dalton as an example of the renewal that immigration can foster, not bringing an erosion of US culture, but highlighting its diversity and enduring strength. The local high school has won the state soccer championship multiple times, fueling local pride. The two dozen-plus taco and burrito joints easily outnumber diners serving burgers and fries, and places offering other ethnic foods are popping up as well.
The north Georgia city is home to dozens of restaurants serving Latino fare such as tacos and burritos. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
On a winding road south of town, the elegant new Dalton Islamic Center welcomes a later generation of migrants, mostly South Asian shopkeepers and high-tech manufacturing engineers. “This is truly a multicultural small town,” says Rob Bradham, a former head of the local chamber of commerce who now works for a nonprofit promoting clean energy. “You’ve got to build a pipeline to bring workers into your plant.”
Dalton’s carpet industry traces its roots to the 19th century, when local women began producing quilts on their porches. By the 1930s, Highway 41 earned the nickname “Bedspread Alley,” with entrepreneurs showcasing their wares along the roadside to attract early Northern motorists traveling to Florida. The quilting expertise helped attract textile mills, which rode the post-World War II boom to prosperity, weaving carpets for living rooms, corporate offices, automobile interiors and just about everything else.
Local women began producing quilts on their porches in the 19th century, expertise that seeded the carpet industry. Here a local museum exhibit displays the history of Dalton’s textile traditions. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
By the 1960s almost half of the planet’s factory-made carpeting came from northwest Georgia, with hundreds of manufacturers in the region. Today, after decades of consolidation and attrition, their ranks have declined more than 90%, according to the Carpet and Rug Institute, a trade group, though they still account for about half of global output.
Even as the industry has grown, automation has cut the number of jobs by 60%. In 1990 employment in the industry around Dalton peaked at about 50,000. The workers were overwhelmingly native-born, with just over 1,000 immigrants, according to the US Census Bureau. Today the local industry employs about 21,000, and about a quarter of them are foreign-born (with many more the children of immigrants).
Migrants offered the carpet industry a steady stream of low-cost workers, preserving blue-collar jobs as well as hundreds of higher-level positions. “The immigrants allowed the industry to survive,” says Boston University professor Patricia Cortes. “If you keep the company alive, you keep the other jobs: supervisory, research, management.”
Dalton’s well-developed supply chain, easy access to the huge US market and decades of experience trumped any advantages producers might have gained from moving overseas. But progress hasn’t always been smooth. Following the US financial crisis and the subsequent real estate slump, demand for floor coverings plummeted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment in the Dalton area reached 14.3% in 2009, more than triple the level two years earlier.
As mill owners increasingly turned to Spanish speakers to fill jobs, native-born locals grew resentful. In 2010, Mohawk Industries, one of the biggest manufacturers, agreed to an $18 million settlement with employees who claimed the company had hired immigrants as part of a scheme to reduce their wages. Although Mohawk didn’t admit any wrongdoing, the agreement ended six years of litigation, offering compensation to some 48,000 current and former employees.
A carpet retailer in Dalton. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
When business started to bounce back, around 2015, the industry—increasingly dependent on immigrants for entry-level jobs—worked closely with local Latino civic groups to ensure newcomers felt at ease and complied with immigration laws. Mohawk invited Dalton’s Latin America Association to operate from the plant where the company places most new hires—a move that helped cut turnover among first-year workers in half. Out on I-75, Spanish-language billboards picturing Latino workers extol the opportunities available at the mills. And manufacturers seek new talent by leaving stacks of flyers at Latino groceries and in taxicabs, often used (and driven) by Latinos.
A key to the industry’s success has been its willingness to educate its workforce. Ray Morales started on the extrusion line at Shaw Inc., another big producer, then shifted to machinery repair while joining a training program. Later, Shaw paid for him to study at a nearby technical college, and Morales today produces step-by-step instructional videos for maintenance staff. “I still get out there and turn wrenches with the guys,” says Morales, a second-generation industry hand whose mother and uncles worked in the mills.
For many workers, the training begins much earlier. This summer marked the 13th year the carpet companies have sponsored a summer program to introduce sixth, seventh and eighth graders to manufacturing. Other initiatives bring education majors from Dalton State College onto factory floors for two-week “externships” in hopes they might reach out to the mills for ideas on curriculum, field trips and mentoring future employees. The goal is “to showcase the wide range of careers available within our business and to help students identify their strengths and the options they have,” says Brian Cooksey, Shaw’s director of workforce development.
Other industries have started taking root in Dalton. This Hanwha Solutions solar panel facility has created thousands of jobs. Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg
In 2023, Dalton’s chamber of commerce began offering high school seniors coaching on how to find a job, as well as guaranteeing employment in carpets or other local industries to anyone completing the course. Nine seniors began the program, and seven—all Latinos—saw it through to a job contract. In 2024, that number rose to 29.
The thriving carpet mills and their efforts to train the local workforce have drawn other industries. South Korean solar panel maker Hanwha Solutions Corp. in 2019 began investing $2.8 billion in plants manufacturing panels, bringing 3,800 jobs to the region. SolarCycle Inc., a Hanwha supplier that recycles old panels, says it will invest $400 million and create more than 600 jobs. And Germany’s Gedia Automotive arrived in 2020, providing 200 jobs in an $85 million plant making auto parts. A big part of the appeal, Gedia said: “the magnificent pipeline of talent in the area.”
Emiterio Fraire. Photographer: Kendrick Brinson for Bloomberg Businessweek
Emiterio Fraire’s family and thousands like it are the embodiment of that pipeline. By signing up for those early 12-hour shifts, Fraire knew he’d earn more than he would have in the fields, with less physical toll. And he felt he’d be able to provide a better future for himself and his children. “We wanted our kids to study,” says his wife, Elva. “And they did.”