Can immigrant labor save dying factory towns?

When Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were vilified during the campaign politicized fabrications about eating domestic animals, Faranak MiraftabHer thoughts went to a place she knew well. A professor of city and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she spent a decade writing a book about Beardstown, Illinois, a once-struggling Midwestern community that has been repopulating with immigrants since the 1990s. from all over the world.

“I thought about Beardstown and how it exemplifies the opposite of the lies that are being spread in Ohio,” she said. “The towns around Beardstown are boarded up and are ghost towns. Beardstown shines because of its immigrants.”

For three decades, newcomers have flocked to Beardstown for opportunities to work in the hog slaughterhouse that is a mainstay of the local economy, and Miraftab was drawn to their stories as a lens through which to study globalization. Her research on them culminated in a 2016 book: The Global Center: Displaced Labor, Transnational Life, and Local Placemaking.

In 1987, June Conner and her husband had just purchased a radio station in Beardstown when Oscar Meyer closed the pork plant and laid off about 800 local workers. Around the same time, two other large industrial employers and the only local hospital closed.

“It was like, we just bought this radio station, what impact is this going to have on businesses in town?” Conner remembered. “What a horror it was for the community and what an impact it had on all properties, housing and everything.”

The plant, which was only 20 years old at the time, was still in operation. A subsidiary of agricultural processing giant Cargill soon bought and reopened the slaughterhouse and began improving productivity. “They wanted to create a second shift, but they didn’t have enough workers to do it,” said Conner, who produced and broadcast hiring ads for the plant.

The second shift began, and throughout the 1990s the company established a wide network throughout Central Illinois, even sending commuter buses 50 miles away to make recruiting easier.

Meanwhile, in the early 90s, workers from Mexico came to the plant, ready to take on work that was often difficult and uncomfortable. According to local lore, Cargill sent recruiters to the Mexican border: “We’ll give you a bus ticket to Beardstown,” according to Conner. Other versions said the immigrants first gained experience in the meatpacking industry in Iowa and then moved across the Midwest through personal connections to places like Beardstown.

Founded in the 1820s on the eastern bank of the Illinois River, Beardstown has always been a little rougher than the more prosperous farming communities that sprang up on the black soil above the bluffs. Abraham Lincoln’s exploits as a traveling lawyer included 1858 acquittal In a Beardstown courtroom, a drunken brawl accused uses an almanac to disprove an eyewitness’s account of a fatal moonlight punch. The river bottoms along the Illinois border were generally populated by Southerners who arrived by water, especially from Kentucky, while the prairies between the rivers were filled by New Englanders and Northern European settlers who arrived by land.

This pattern was reflected in contemporary political culture, including Beardstown’s renowned status as a “sundown town” where non-whites were unwelcome. One Beardstown native described a sign on the outskirts of town in the 1960s that threatened: “Brown Women: Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You.” In the mid-20th century, harsh industrial work, including slaughterhouses, strengthened the identity of Beardstown’s workers.

Beardstown peaked at more than 6,300 residents in 1980, but within a decade its population had declined 17 percent to a 90-year low of fewer than 5,300 people (still 99 percent white). The decline was reversed in the early 1990s when Cargill upgraded the plant’s wastewater infrastructure—partly through incentives from state and local government coffers—and invested in modernizing and expanding capacity. Demographic changes occurred, and by 2000 the population approached 5,800. The non-Hispanic white population continued to decline, but the Hispanic population now numbered over 1,000.

According to 2020 censusBy imperfect categories, Beardstown was about 50 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic of any race and 11 percent African American.

Officially, the current population is about 6,000, but Kathy Vitale, executive director of the Beardstown Chamber of Commerce, says the real number is estimated to be thousands more, given the mobility of new immigrants. “Just because of the people coming and going,” she said. “And many undocumented workers don’t want to participate in the census.”

The arrival of Mexican workers, followed over the years by immigrants from Africa and Asia, even internal migrants from Puerto Rico and Detroit’s shattered auto industry, and more recently Haitians, did not come without social unrest that occasionally erupted. Miraftab counted some 30 countries of origin represented in her ethnography of Beardstown. The early years of this immigration were the most tense, with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) agitation in surrounding communities culminating in the 1996 KKK rally and cross burnings in Beardstown.

In her book, Miraftab documented long-standing complaints about local police, as well as racial tensions on the production line, which she claimed management took advantage of despite Association of Food Industry and Trade Workers representation. In 2007, dozens of night cleaning crew workers were detained in a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“There is probably a part of society that wants to complain about all this. However, I have always been in business and always tried to work with business. And I’ll tell you, immigrants have been a valuable asset to this city,” Conner said. “Beardstown would have dried up if it weren’t for this plant… I, for one, am very happy to see the change in our community because I know what it would be like if it didn’t change.”

In 30 years, Beardstown went from a housing glut to a housing shortage. The first waves of immigrants snapped up renovation workers and often filled large houses with modest apartments. “A lot of Latinos will take better care of them than the people who lived here,” Conner said. “And they can paint them bright colors—you know, that’s one thing they’re known for. But they make them better.”

Homogeneous until the 1990s, Beardstown was a blank slate for new immigrants, and the resulting order within the 3.6-square-mile city was not entirely segregated by ethnicity or income. “The fact that it was a sundown town without any pre-existing ethnic neighborhoods allowed it to have a complete mix of neighbors,” writes Miraftab. “The affordability of the housing market and the relative ease with which new immigrants became homeowners in the 1990s also played a role in creating a new generation of Mexican homeowners who could rent to new arrivals who turned out to be primarily from West Africa.”

Rising property values ​​gave local governments and schools additional revenue (even after favorable tax adjustments given to the plant), allowing Beardstown to build a new library and new schools, even as most rural Illinois school districts continue their inexorable consolidation. Globalization has even extended to owning a factory, which acquired in 2015 by the American subsidiary of Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS.

As immigrants become more deeply rooted in the community, many have left the plant and started their own businesses, including Latin American and French grocery businesses. Immigration Economist at the Cato Institute Alex Nowraste noted that immigrants are twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, providing an incentive for entrepreneurship that drives even greater demand for labor.

Nowrasteh called it “a very familiar story” in communities from Beardstown to the Big Apple. New York experienced a vicious cycle of decline in the 1970s: population decline, crumbling infrastructure, epic budget problems, and declining public investment. “Then, in the 80s, the population changed, which was caused by the migration of foreigners – this is the main reason why this city has renewed itself,” Nowrasteh said. “You had greater demand for goods and services in the city. This is all good for the economy… With immigrants you have more taxpayers. They certainly enjoy some benefits, but just by increasing property values, which is a huge factor, a surge in property tax revenue to at least maintain the infrastructure helps significantly.”

A particular problem for small rural communities is that local youth tend to “move on to greener pastures,” Nowrasteh said. Ambitious Beardstown kids often gravitate toward St. Louis or Chicago. But the newcomers are ambitious in their own right, so they left Michoacán, Togo or Burma, bringing new life to Beardstown. “It’s just good for economies around the world,” Nowrasteh said.

Did immigration save the hog plant, and with it, Beardstown? “Yeah, I would say that’s very fair,” Conner said. Thirty years ago, Beardstown was known in Central Illinois for its dilapidated houses and racism. Today it is Cinco de Mayo And Africa Day holidays attract gourmet travelers from surrounding cities. “People come from other places to eat at our restaurantsbecause they like real food,” Conner said. “I kind of like margaritas myself.”