Mexican immigration may be rural America’s best hope

Image by sillydog via Flickr

When I was passing through Kansas last week, one of the most striking things I noticed was the same thing I’ve noticed on other recent trips of mine through Indiana: Rural America is diversifying rapidly, particularly in terms of Latino population growth.

Whether you’re on the high plains amid little more than grain bins and feed yards in Holcomb, Kansas, or wandering through Amish Country, dodging horse-drawn buggies in La Grange, Indiana, one of the first things you notice is the preponderance of Mexican food greasy-spoons, carcinerias and tortillerias that have come to call Main Street home, in small town after small town. I passed through several towns in Kansas just last week where, indeed, the only restaurant in town was a Mexican food place. Alice’s restaurant was scarcely seen, unless it had been repurposed, or shuttered.

Earlier this year, Rob Paral, a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame and the American Immigration Law Foundation, published “Mexican Immigration in the Midwest: Meanings and Implications,” which points out that (as also noted here, previously) that native-born populations in rural America are declining, while immigrants “remain the most important source of population growth.” In the Midwest, Mexicans now constitute the area’s largest foreign-born population.

At a recent presentation in Kansas City, Paral outlined some of the the key findings of his study, as reproduced here by The Pitch. Among them:

• The increase of Mexican immigrants in Missouri has been tremendous, jumping from 162 in 1900 to 4,763 in 1990 — then rocketing to more than 36,000 in 2006.

• Between 2000 and 2006, the total native population growth in Missouri was a meager .7 percent. Meanwhile, the Mexican immigrant population grew by 7 percent.

• The overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants are undocumented. Of the Mexican immigrants who came to Missouri between 2001 and 2006, more than 70 percent did not come through legal immigration channels.

• Mexicans are also making up more of the workforce in the Midwest. In 1990, Mexican immigrants comprised 0.8 percent of the workforce; in 2006 that had grown to 2.5 percent.

• Though they are just as likely to be employed as their American counterparts, Mexican immigrants are more likely to struggle financially. In 2006, 22 percent of Mexican immigrants lived in poverty, compared to 12 percent of native Midwesterners.

via Kansas City – Plog – The Midwest is becoming much more Mexican.

Maintaining a stable population is important for the social and economic health of any region. Just ask greater Detroit. As Carolyn Szczepanski, at the The Pitch, points out, Mexican immigrants aren’t stealing American jobs. Paral’s research indicates that immigrants are filling service industry and unskilled labor gaps — gaps that educated Americans are leaving behind somewhere in the trail of smoke that follows them as they high-tail it out of Dodge (where, it’s worth noting, I saw the emergence of new ammenities like Thai restaurants, as well).

Those jobs need bodies. If the native-born segment continues to be so compelled to migrate out of rural America, those who’ve stuck around would do well to ebrace the immigration influx, if only to ensure the sustainability of their more traditional, agrarian ways of living.