There’s a good chance that if you’re hearing about Iowa Congressman Steve King, it’s not about legislation that he’s passed. In his nearly 15 years in Congress, King has managed to get only one bill he’s been primary sponsor of signed into law, and it was to name a post office. Nope, if you’re hearing about King it’s because he said or did something incredibly racist, because King is a racist asshole. For example, here he is quoting a man ThinkProgress has called “white nationalism’s newest hero”:
Here’s the thing, though: if Steve spent half as much time working for and in his district as he does trying to make an international name for himself among white nationalists, he'd know that Latino and Asian immigrants have revitalized entire Iowa towns and kept farming and meatpacking industries alive. Diversity has helped Iowa (though I’m sure the post office renaming ceremony was nice).
But Steve doesn’t have to listen to this coastal elite. Here’s the Eagle Grove, Iowa superintendent defending teen athletes who were recently targeted in a racist attack: “As a school district, we expect our athletes, students and community to be treated with respect no matter where they go …. Let’s look at the positives of diversity. Without diversity, we have a lot less students, we aren’t as vibrant. Diversity has been something that has saved our community.”
“Iowa is currently home to more than 160,000 immigrants—a population larger than the city of Cedar Rapids,” notes research from New American Economy. “Between 2010 and 2016, Iowa’s foreign-born population grew by more than 15.2 percent. This helped Iowa stave off the sort of sluggish population growth that has hurt so many other areas in recent decades, depriving communities of needed workers and taxpayers. Iowa’s largely working-age immigrants serve as everything from meatpacking workers to college professors, making them critical contributors to Iowa’s economic success overall.” The Atlantic in 2013:
Rural Iowa has lost population every decade since 1920; there are fewer people in rural Iowa than there were a century ago. But immigrants have sustained some Iowa towns that otherwise would disappear. Between 2000 and 2010 Iowa's Latino population increased by 84 percent, even as the total state population increased only 4 percent over the same decade. As other cities in southeastern Iowa have declined, towns like West Liberty (population 3,742) have a stable population and economy due to immigration. West Liberty recently became the first town in the state to have a Latino majority.
In addition to supporting communities that are experiencing overall population loss, immigrants — including low-skilled ones — are making disproportionate contributions to Rust Belt economies.
“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.” The meatpacking town is in King’s district and is home to giants like Tyson, where a majority of the 2,200 plant workers are Latino, followed by Asians, and then whites. “Walk through the halls of the public schools and you can hear as many as 18 languages.” To King that’s probably a frightening thought. To decent people, it’s what makes America America:
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.
“Other communities our size are shrinking and consolidating school districts,” Storm Lake police chief Mark Prosser told the New York Times. “We have schools bulging at the seams. There are expensive challenges, but which one do you want: a dying community or one that has growth?” You could almost say that diversity actually is your strength, Steve.