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Residents of Springfield, Ohio, have been shaken by recent events, including the glare of negative national publicity fed by preposterous claims that Haitian immigrants there are eating pet dogs and cats. The city’s notoriety got a further boost in this month’s vice presidential debate.
The people of Springfield might take comfort from the experience of a Minnesota town which, although smaller, also had to give up its former identity as an enclave of homogeneity. That town is Worthington in the southwestern corner of the state. It’s now part of the First Congressional District, which I represented decades ago in the U.S. House.
Coincidentally, it is also the district once served by former U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, who went on to become governor and is now the Democratic candidate for vice president.
Like Springfield, Worthington experienced a dramatic influx of immigrants. The immigrants in Springfield are mostly Haitian, numbering as many as 15,000 in the past few years and representing up to 25% of the community’s population. In Worthington, an earlier wave of immigration brought thousands of Latino residents who now constitute an estimated 40% of the town’s people. When viewed as a portion of their respective populations, Worthington’s Latinos are more prevalent than Springfield’s Haitians. But in Worthington, the change occurred more gradually over a number of years. In Springfield, it has been over a much shorter timespan.
In both cities, immigrants were attracted by the prospect of jobs and opportunity. Businesses in Springfield and Worthington alike were in dire need of workers to fill open positions. In Springfield, Haitian immigrants have been credited with saving manufacturing; in Worthington, Latino immigrants have filled critical workforce gaps in meatpacking and agriculture.
In fact, those immigrants in Worthington “have become our salvation,” said Bill Keitel, a 52-year resident who attended a town-hall-style meeting last month organized by the Rural Voice, a series that some of my colleagues and I organized two years ago. The series is based on the idea that people in rural communities can offer perspectives that are relevant to the problems faced by broader populations.
