Here in Storm Lake, Iowa, where the population is about 15,000 and unemployment is under 2 percent, Asians and Africans and Latinos are our lifeline. The only threat they pose to us is if they weren’t here...More here.
One part of the rural condition in American today is that, after college, our young people go to Des Moines or some city beyond for a job in finance or engineering... As rural counties are drained of young people with higher educations, immigrants flow into the vacuum. The influx began 40 years ago and continues today...
So long as there is corn, there will be hogs and turkeys and eggs in Iowa. Somebody will have to do that work. Now, the Storm Lake Elementary School is 90 percent children of color, and about three-fourths of those are Hispanic — mainly from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. We could employ 500 more workers easily if we could find, and find housing for, them...
The demand for meat cutters seems endless. Smaller towns run buses to Storm Lake to pick up immigrants for day work in those factories. They’ll pay you $18 an hour at Tyson to slice pork, plus a hefty signing bonus. The workforce is overwhelmingly immigrant, well over half Latino. Tyson insists they are all legal, yet we figure about a third of the immigrant community in general here might be without papers — who knows?..
In keenest demand here are health-care workers — orderlies, nursing assistants and cafeteria workers to toil for about $12 to $15 an hour in one of Iowa’s largest industries: nursing homes...
Storm Lake’s crime rate last year reached a 27-year low. It is more diverse than ever. Some 30 languages or dialects are spoken here. But the community knows it will wither up and blow away without its young people. Like it or not, legal or not, our young people are predominantly Latino. If there is to be a wall, there will have to be a door for immigrants to find their way here as the better-educated leave for the brighter lights and greener urban pastures.
17 February 2019
Rural America needs immigrants
As explained by the editor of the Storm Lake Times in northern Iowa:
I sincerely wish the ignorant would read things like this, and correct their behavior. Sadly, many of them have made the decision to close their minds, which is the point where ignorance becomes stupidity.
ReplyDeleteHoping every day for things to get better, and loving that this blog and a few others can provide proof that there is still good in the world.