What you don't know about the role of immigration in revitalizing small communities helps Trump/Vance to hurt you (and your community)

Nancy LeTourneau's blog, Horizons, has a wonderful post on the truth about the impact immigrants have on small towns and cities throughout the US. I would call it required reading. JD Vance may have made some headlines about how he needed to make shit up Haitian immigrants to get Springfield OH in the news, but the truth is that journalists have been writing about how small communities have been impacted beneficially by immigrants for quite a while now. Read for yourself.

I can add my own personal perspective. I lived in a town called Goodwell, OK during the aughts. It's practically in the middle of Oklahoma's panhandle. There is a small university there where I was employed for about a decade before I moved to my current location. Goodwell is located about 10 miles southwest of the Texas County seat, Guymon, OK. I very quickly learned a few things about Guymon and the surrounding area. At some point in the 1990s a meat packing facility owned by Seaboard Farms opened for business and a small city with an imploding population suddenly began to come back to life. Believe me when I say that not all the locals were thrilled by the influx of Hispanic residents, but the reality was that Guymon and the surrounding towns and villages dependent on its businesses and services would have dried up and blown away like tumbleweeds in the high plains wind. 

During the last years I lived near Guymon, I noticed that I was getting the children of some of that first wave of immigrants in my classes. It's safe to say that the university I worked for would probably be facing retrenchment and closure without the economic revival that immigrants brought to the area. Hispanics were probably a majority in Guymon even before the 2010 census and continue to be as of the 2020 census. The last time I got to visit Guymon and Goodwell was during the summer of 2015 and I was really pleased with just how lively the business district was in Guymon. Not only had the city's new residents become vital employees in the agricultural sector, but they were becoming entrepreneurs as well. That seemed like one heck of a success story. I think that city's success is also worth covering, and I would definitely invite journalists to check out how Guymon is thriving in a region that is otherwise struggling. I am not kidding: check out the near ghost towns not far away from Guymon. Where the xenophobes won the battle, they lost their communities anyway.

The city I live in currently (Fort Smith, AR) has somewhat flat population growth, but we would actually be losing population without an influx of immigrants. We've had thriving Vietnamese and Laotian communities in Fort Smith since the 1970s. In recent years, Hispanics have propped up our population and again have contributed in ways to expand the economy of our city that would not have been possible otherwise. My current employer is well on its way to being designated a Hispanic-serving university. That's great for us and it's great for the future of Fort Smith and the surrounding towns. The truth is that there is no down side to embracing immigrants, and for small cities and towns that are barely clinging to life, being accepting of immigrants is crucial for survival. Springfield, OH is one of those success stories, too.

For me, the bottom line is simple: immigrants can and do breathe life in moribund agricultural and industrial towns and cities around the US. I've experienced it first-hand, and I would strongly urge those in power or seeking elected office to stop with the fear-mongering because it is based on lies and those lies will hurt real people and real communities. Those engaged in that sort of fear-mongering deserve to be voted out of office and their racist and hateful rhetoric should disqualify them from any public office going forward.


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