The New York Times has uncovered the secret to saving rural towns struggling with disappearing jobs and population loss: repeated waves of low-skilled immigration.
In a May 29 report, “Immigrants Keep An Iowa Meatpacking Town Alive And Growing,” TheNYT took a deep dive into the demographic changes that have occurred in Storm Lake, a town of about 11,000 nestled in the rolling farmland northwest of Des Moines.
The Times report details how Storm Lake has avoided the fate of similar rural communities — “an aging population, abandoned storefronts, and shrinking economic prospects” — by importing thousands of immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa to work in its local industry, which is anchored by Tyson Foods meat processing plants.
Continued immigration is a panacea for small town decline in Middle America, the NYT concludes:
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“They [immigrants] fill most of the grueling, low-paid jobs at the pork, egg, and turkey plants; they spend money at local shops, and open restaurants and grocery stores; they fill church pews and home-team benches.”
While it praises the immigrants who have replaced the “farm boys and farmers’ daughters,” TheNYT report is more circumspect in detailing any possible negative effects of immigration.
Schools fall behind
Storm Lake’s public schools, for example, perform well below the Iowa state averages across a range of educational measures, according to a school district profile from Iowa State University’s community indicators program. In 2012, just 45 percent of Storm Lake sixth graders achieved a “proficient” score in the reading component of the Iowa Assessment Reading and Math Tests. The statewide average that year was 65 percent.
Students fared slightly better in math, with 66 percent of sixth graders attaining a proficient rating compared to the Iowa average of 72 percent. The gap was much wider among high school juniors: 68 percent of Storm Lake’s 11th graders were proficient versus 83 percent statewide.
The Storm Lake School District also lagged behind the state in college entrance scores. In 2016, students scored an average of 19.1 on the ACT composite, while the statewide average composite score was 22.1.
Substandard educational performance has accompanied a stunning demographic transformation over the last two decades. In 2000, Storm Lake was split about 80 percent white and 20 percent Hispanic, with a smattering of Asian and other minorities. The most recent U.S. census figures for 2015 show a dramatic reversal: just 48 percent of the city’s residents identified as white alone, 36 percent described themselves as Hispanic, and about 10 percent were Asian.
Mark Prosser, the Storm Lake director of public safety, told TheNYT that immigration presented “all sorts of problems over a period of 30 to 35 years,” but the community has “embraced” the change. As the report describes the process, “The immigrants and refugees bought homes, opened businesses and saw their children graduate from school.”
However, data shows that Storm Lake High School is having difficulty graduating students on time. From 2011 to 2105, the school’s average four-year graduation rate was just 59 percent, while the statewide average over that period was 90 percent.
A spike in crime
Educational achievement is not the only measure of civic health to have worsened as immigration has increased. Arrest data gathered by the Iowa Department of Safety show that crime in Buena Vista county, where Storm Lake is the largest city, has spiked in recent years.
The overall county arrest rate in 2000 was about 5,800 per 100,000 residents, or 5.8 percent. By 2011, the rate had jumped to nearly 11,000 per 100,000 residents, or 11 percent. Arrests have since declined, but the rate was about 7 percent in 2015, well above historical averages.
Prosser attributed the period of surging crime to the influx of immigrants from rougher urban environments, both in the U.S. and abroad, who have been recruited to work in Storm Lake’s meatpacking plants.
“Primarily the recruitment is in large urban areas,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Sometimes we’ll get a spike [in crime] as perhaps they’re recruiting in an area that’s bringing in folks that kind of have a tough background, and some of the people struggle in a more conservative or smaller-town environment.”
Crime rates have declined and stabilized, Prosser says, but they remain well above average compared to Iowa and the U.S. as a whole. In 2014, the violent crime rate in Storm Lake was 471 per 100,000 residents, while the state and national averages were 273 and 365 per 100,000 residents, respectively. “Serious crimes” reported by Storm Lake police to the FBI jumped by 10 percent in 2015, the Storm Lake Times reported.
TheNYT may have given scant attention to the effects of mass immigration on Storm Lake, but it did shine a light on the causes. Most salient among them is the active recruitment of migrants from Mexico and recent immigrants in Texas and California.
As TheNYT report notes, first Iowa Beef Processors and now Tyson Foods Inc. preferred to supplant unionized workers with cheaper immigrant labor. Today, native white workers can’t find plant jobs that offer the same standard of living their parents enjoyed, and they face negative stereotypes from newcomers even when they do get hired.
One Tyson plant manager told TheNYT that Mexican workers on the line complained when he hired a white employee:
“This guy is not going to last as long,” the workers said. “He’s young and he’s not going to work hard.”
Why TheNYT preferred to cast the statement as a “common negative stereotype” rather than overt racism is unclear, but it falls in line with the overall attempt to minimize any disagreeable aspect of the immigrant influx.
In any case, Storm Lake’s native sons and daughters have left and and stayed away. They have largely been replaced with immigrants, who give the town an “economic dynamism President Trump promised to restore to the struggling Midwest and South,” TheNYT claims.
But as education and crime data show, that demographic transformation has not come without social costs.
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