“Somebody else’s babies” are keeping the communities and factories in and around Steve King’s Iowa district alive and well, as shown in a must-read New York Times profile on the booming Latino, Asian, and immigrant communities in the area. “While more than 88 percent of the state’s population is non-Hispanic white,” according to the New York Times, “less than half of Storm Lake’s is,” with immigrant workers filling backbreaking jobs at meat-processing plants and building businesses in the communities. In fact, as two-thirds of the counties “are shrinking in population,” its immigrants who are staying and working to keep the area thriving:
Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of his family-run newspaper, The Storm Lake Times, acknowledges that processing-plant work is tough. Yet for a refugee or an immigrant without English or skills, butchering livestock at that wage, he said, is a “first rung on the American ladder to success.”
That was the way it worked for Abel Saengchanpheng, who came to Storm Lake from Northern California in 1997, when he was 16, after relatives talked up the job opportunities there. Born in a Thai refugee camp after his family escaped from Laos, Mr. Saengchanpheng, now 36 and an American citizen, joined his parents at the plant after he finished high school. He has been there ever since, working his way up to general foreman in 2013, and he now oversees 300 production workers.
With earnings that place him comfortably in Storm Lake’s upper middle class, he owns two cars, a Subaru and a Honda, and a home.
“I was so blessed to get into Tyson,” he said, sipping coffee at Grand Central Coffee Station. “I remember looking at the first paycheck and thinking, ‘There is free money going around.’”
Rural Organizing writes that the “‘Latino boom’ hit rural northwest Iowa in the early 1990s when Latinos began moving to Iowa primarily from California, Illinois, New York, Texas and other states” in search of factory work. In Storm Lake today, “walk through the halls of the public schools and you can hear as many as 18 languages.” It seems like a contradiction in a district that keeps electing a self-avowed fan of white supremacists, but as Rural Organizing states, “statistically, he's an outlier. Voters in King's district support a path to citizenship for undocumented residents by a 2 to 1 margin.”
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2se0ohT
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