Mankato Free Press night editor Doug Wolter turns in a thoughtful column today about the ICE raids in Worthington. Until he was hired by the Free Press last summer, Wolter spent 22 years in Worthington, working at the Daily Globe. He had a ring side seat as the town began to change:
I’ve seen the beginnings of the cultural experiment, when letters to the editor included hurtful comments directed at minorities, but I’ve also seen how most of the community bought into the concept of disparate groups living together in harmony.
At first, minorities came and went. Few of them put down actual roots in Worthington, and many who stayed chose not to fully integrate. We all knew the town contained people with immigration issues, and I spoke with local law enforcement leaders who were very concerned about identity theft and the widespread problems associated with false identity. But I was proud to note the local police were still serious about helping minorities to feel as safe and as comfortable in Worthington as any lifetime resident.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, as minorities appeared in greater numbers, Worthington began to get a reputation in some circles as a crime-ridden gang-infested community. A regrettable percentage of area residents believed the public school system contained an unacceptable level of violent students.
But Worthington’s so-called high crime rate was never true, and that was verifiable through statistics supplied by the local police.
On the positive side, after several years, new minority-owned businesses began to transform a dull and lifeless downtown. It was particularly refreshing to see various minority-owned restaurants thrive and to see the way in which traditional Worthingtonians became regular customers of those establishments. As longtime residents began to accept the newcomers, more of the newcomers began to reach out to the community at large. And more of them stayed. More of them began to give of themselves to make Worthington a better place to live and raise a family.
The change was in part by design, Wolter writes:
In the 1990s, the city embarked on a grand experiment in multiculturalism, welcoming minorities by the hundreds to save what was becoming a dry, stagnant town. Most of the newcomers were lured by low-paying jobs available at the meat-packing plant. And together, traditionalists and newcomers began a long and winding road toward acceptance.
Worthington is a unique place. It is basically conservative in its politics; its senior citizen population is large, and the soul of the city consists largely of responsible church-going types who embrace traditional values. Yet, there is a progressive strain that has cascaded through the town like a ribbon, infusing the place with a prairie populism that achieved national prominence during the farm crisis of the 1980s. Worthington remains a mixture of stoic traditionalists and forward-looking progressives, struggling together to solve an economic picture that, all too often, appears stuck in neutral.
Read the whole thing for a glimpse into the changing faces of rural Minnesota. The column fills in the details for some of the content of the letter from Minnesota's Catholic bishops about the raid:
The raids did nothing to advance needed reform. Instead, the raids heartlessly divided families, disrupted the whole community of Worthington and undermined progress that that city had made toward bridging racial and cultural differences.
Providing historical background about the changes Worthington faced, the Strib examines the transformation of the American meatpacking industry:
A wave of automation in the 1970s cast off jobs such as skilled meat cutting. That was followed by the crumbling of powerful unions in the 1980s -- not just in meat plants, but at air traffic control towers, auto plants and steel mills. Minnesota was briefly a stage for the union battle: The National Guard descended on the Austin, Minn., Hormel plant for several tense weeks during the worst of the strikes there in 1985 and 1986.
In the decades since, immigrants -- legal and illegal alike -- have filled the void as U.S. workers flocked to better-paying jobs. The meat industry now makes some of the cheapest food on the planet, with Americans spending less of their total incomes on food than those in almost any other country.
But the Dec. 12 immigration raids that nabbed 1,282 workers at six Swift & Co. plants nationwide -- 230 of the workers at the company's pork processing plant in Worthington, Minn. -- have exposed the strains of the system, prompting a fresh round of finger-pointing. Who's to blame? Meat companies? Illegal workers? Or consumers?
The effect of this on Worthington:
The loss of coveted jobs led to an exodus of young people from rural communities such as Worthington, said Katherine Fennelly, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Even worse for the meatpacking companies is that the state's 3.6 percent unemployment rate is considered full employment by most economists, so there are few people looking for work.
A study last year by the Pew Research Center estimated that about 27 percent of all butchers and food processing workers are illegal immigrants.
Overall, immigrants make up 50 percent of the workforce today, according to the union.
Recent immigrants, many of whom are Mexicans fleeing a languishing economy at home, have remade places such as Worthington over the past 15 years.
While the state's population remains overwhelmingly white -- about 89 percent, according to the 2000 census -- these newcomers have made their mark on schools and churches and on main streets. At Worthington-area schools, the enrollment of minority students grew by 547, or 189 percent, during the 1990s. One out of three Worthington kindergartners is a minority student.
On Friday, the town's mayor was still grappling with the fallout from the immigration raids.
The meat company has not replaced all of the workers it lost in the raid, and has told Mayor Alan Oberloh that it wants an immigration reform bill to provide guest workers. Oberloh, who met Friday with representatives for Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Rep.-elect Tim Walz, D-Minn., said everyone agreed on the need to bring in legal workers. Now they just have to figure out how.
On the future of his town though, he was unequivocal.
"There are people who say Worthington is a defeated community," Oberloh said. "To them I say, 'Look down the street at all the activity. There's not a parking spot on the street.'
"The people who have jobs here, stay here," he said.
The Strib also published a very short article about federal immigration reform that's shallow on details: Lawmakers gear up for new bill on immigration. The sketchy outlines suggest that the Congress may be thinking along some of the same lines as these guys.
Could be worse.
The debate over immigration policy seems stuck between two ways of thinking. On one hand, some argue that both documented and undocumented immigrants pose security and health risks, as well as being dangers to public safety and "our way of life" and burdens to taxpayers. Others see the economic benefits of having a larger work force from which to drawn, along with the cultural and economic vitality immigrants create themselves.
Could this be a false dilemma? Little public discussion gets directed toward other perspectives, especially those that seek to examine the broader economic and trade policies that have brought about the hardships so many undocumented immigrants flee.
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