How a Guatemalan immigrant and a 4th-generation farmer see immigration issues in Worthington

Immigration is a big topic in this year’s presidential race.

Former President Donald Trump is aggressively taking on Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, for being too lenient on people coming across the southern border. 

And Harris accuses Trump of “tanking” a bipartisan immigration bill. 

But for people living in Worthington, immigration is far more nuanced and complicated.

There, immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa fuel the area’s meatpacking industry, a major economic driver for the area. And over the last few decades, Worthington has transformed from a predominantly white community to one where newcomers are in the majority. 

Political rhetoric around immigration so often doesn’t match reality in the communities most affected by it, even when they’re in conservative parts of the country, said David Peters, a professor of rural sociology at Iowa State University.

“They support very conservative political parties, but then you go in and talk to people in these small towns, and they’re very pragmatic,” he said. “They’re doing a lot of work to try to integrate those people into their communities because they care about their town moving forward.”

As part MPR News’ Talking Sense reporting project, reporters and volunteers from Braver Angels, a nonprofit that helps people bridge political divides, invited long-time Worthington residents and relative newcomers from Latin America to share personal immigration stories as a way to talk about this fraught topic without getting angry. 

Change can be hard

Peters said that many small towns struggle when immigrants arrive in their communities. 

“People are often related, and have deep, dense ties,” he said. “So they become a little bit insular and haven’t really changed as much as more dynamic urban communities.”

In many cases, Peters said, the employers that attract new workers from abroad don’t do much to help with integration. 

Towns that successfully integrate newcomers do so because local leaders make it a priority, cultivating younger leaders in immigrant communities and encouraging them to run for elected office have been two successful strategies, said Peters. 

“They created this community ethic of long-term residents wanting to devote their time and energy to bringing people together as much as possible so that the town can move forward,” he said. “And the Latinos are thinking, ‘Hey, I can have a future here.’”

But change in Worthington hasn’t always been easy, said 20-year-old Riley Widboom. His family has farmed in Worthington for generations, though Widboom recently became a real estate agent. 

“For older people or in my grandpa’s case or you know, anybody that grew up in this community, it’s way different than it is now,” he said. “Some people aren’t very open to change.” 

Widboom was speaking with Eligio Ramirez, who emigrated from Guatemala in 2007. He’s a school bus driver, but says it was hard to find work initially.

“[It was hard to know] how to apply, where to go, how to fill out an application because everything was in English,” he said.

Peters said that influxes of immigrants can lead to stress on infrastructure and public services like schools; for instance, it can be hard to find English language teachers. 

But when immigrants are successfully integrated into their new communities, it can lead to positive outcomes, too, like better health care systems and upward mobility for first generation residents, said Peters. 

Finding common ground

Widboom said that while the effects of immigration are all around him in Worthington, he rarely gets to hear specifics of how his neighbors arrived in the United States. For him, it humanized an unfamiliar situation.

“It’s good to hear someone in this community’s story of how they got here. I’ve had to work with people that might not understand English the best and I’m gonna look at as more of ‘I don’t understand them the best,’” he said. “There’s no right language to have.”

For his part, Ramirez said that despite his previous experiences feeling ostracized in a new country, Widboom showed him that there are good faith efforts in Worthington to be accepting of immigrants like him.

“I learned from him that he wants to accept all the people here. He wants to accept everybody,” said Ramirez. “Now, we have the opportunity to work together.”

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