NYT Opinion: In My Iowa Town, We Need Immigrants

[ehrnst]

These Dreamers are our vitality, our future. They want to stay here with family, unlike so many of us who push our children off to Chicago or the Twin Cities. As our neighbors, they have prospered with our embrace. In our prairie pothole, a place glaciers left with natural abundance, nine out of 10 students at the elementary school are immigrants — the schools here are a micro-city where you can hear 30 languages.

World trade and culture come together, mostly peacefully, in our little town. Now, that peace is threatened by our politics — the politics of President Trump.
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The rest of us know that without them, Buena Vista County could fade away, losing population as 71 of Iowa’s 99 counties have over the last decade. Here, young immigrant families seed a positive birth-to-death ratio. Storm Lake is the rare blue oasis in Representative Steve King’s Fourth Congressional District that is growing organically — with brown babies. The crime rate here has been falling over the decade.

Mr. King is the congressman who was for building a wall before Donald Trump knew we needed one. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” Mr. King said in 2013. He says that we should take care not to dilute our culture with immigrants, even though their culture was here before Columbus brought his.

People around here voted for Mr. Trump and Mr. King, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. They like Mr. King because they think he is a straight-talker willing to be blunt, just like President Trump. But they don’t like making soybean prices nose-dive for no understandable reason. And they don’t want to run the Julio Barrosos off to Guadalajara when we need young workers in Iowa.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/trump-immigrants-iowa-farmers-workers.html

[rurallib]

1. My Iowa town is (or was) the first minority majority town

We have the top high school in the state, the lowest crime rate and are one of the few small towns in Iowa not attached to a major city that is growing on its own.

I believe we also had the first all female city council in Iowa. Cool little town.