Thanks, Timothy Walch, on your well timed, essential, and apropos visitor column June 24 that showcases “Meatpacking America,” a brand new e book by a professor of spiritual research on the College of Iowa, Kristy Nabhan-Warren. I too have learn this chronicle of the resilience of Iowans and their welcoming of potential and confirmed very expert immigrant laborers to our state’s meatpacking vegetation.
An article in The Washington Put up appeared on the identical time, “A rural county in Iowa that supported Trump turns to Latinos to develop,” Could 14. It recounts how Iowa’s Greene County “is sinking right into a demographic gap” with waning residents. There “factories have dozens of job openings, colleges have closed, and villages are crumbling. Deaths have outpaced births for therefore lengthy that the hospital stopped delivering infants.”
This situation will not be distinctive to Greene County. Different rural Iowa counties are experiencing the identical state of affairs “the place falling birthrates, an growing older inhabitants and an exodus of younger individuals to the cities have depleted the inhabitants.” Greene County’s answer? This largely white, largely Republican stronghold has concluded that the one option to develop is to recruit Latino residents. What a distinction to Iowa’s Republican management’s inconsiderate quip about Latinos coming to Iowa: “That’s the president’s drawback.”
William Mulcahey
Cedar Rapids