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News Stories / Editorials/Opinions
A Give and Take on Immigration
One year after the largest raid in U.S. history, we rarely hear stories of small towns suffering in the absence of immigrants.
The dominant anti-immigrant narrative in this country -- despite paeans to the mythical "melting pot" we read about in grade-school social-studies textbooks -- is that immigrants take. They come here to take our jobs. They take up social services. They take formerly pristine street corners and make them disorderly by standing around looking for work. They take their earnings back home rather than spend them in the local community. These are the things I hear repeated on crap cable shows like Glenn Beck's or when I sit down to dinner with my conservative relatives.
Several years ago I did some reporting in a small town -- Milan, Missouri -- where around 50 percent of the 2,000 or so residents were recent Latino immigrants who had come for jobs at the town's pork-processing plant. The fascinating thing about Milan (pronounced Mi-lan, not Mi-lan like the city in Italy) was that, prior to the pork plant opening and the immigrant influx, the tiny burg had been all but dead. A small chicken processor provided jobs for a few hundred residents, but most businesses were shuttered, young people were moving away to find work in other cities, and the downtown consisted of a series of empty storefronts. While it was by no means a seamless transition from a town of mostly white, longtime residents to one that was nearly half Latino newcomers, at the time of my visit it was undeniable that Milan was more alive and more vibrant because of its new residents -- despite what some of the old-timers said about immigrants "taking" resources from their community...
April 22, 2009
Posted on Thursday, April 23, 2009By
tinaelizabeth
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