When the McDonald's patron in suburban Johnson County ordered a coffee and got a Coke, he came face to face with a Midwest labor pool truth. Non-English-speaking immigrants are an increasingly large part of the labor force -- not just in the Sun Belt states but in the upper Midwest as well. The fast-food worker, who spoke Spanish and had trouble understanding the man's order, was one of tens of thousands of Hispanics who entered the Midwest job market in the past decade. Without them, economists say, the long-running labor shortage, particularly in entry-level jobs, would be even more severe than it is. For some business patrons, the immigrant influx means occasional difficulties in communication. For some business owners, immigrant labor -- both documented and undocumented -- is the only way to fill jobs that otherwise would go begging. The most recent measure of unemployment in the Kansas City area, taken in May, was 2.8 percent. Missouri's jobless rate was 2.6 percent; Kansas' rate was 3.2 percent. Unemployment throughout the Midwest is well below 5.5 percent, which is considered full employment. Michael Barrera, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, said the chamber had charted an explosive growth in the metropolitan area's Hispanic, blue-collar, minimum-wage work force, especially in Olathe and northeast Kansas City. Also, Barrera said, the 1990s brought a large increase in the number of entrepreneurial Hispanic immigrants, seen particularly in the blossoming of small stores and restaurants in Kansas City, Kan., and northeast Kansas City. The Hispanic chamber has no estimate of the size of the area's Hispanic work force, but Barrera said the Hispanic population may have grown to as many as 100,000, up from 58,000 in 1996. Throughout the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are finding work. Census data, updated in 1998, found that 220,000 workers in the West North Central states were of Hispanic origin, up...
