Polleyanaish

by Wiliiam J. Polley
June 1, 2006

Immigration and my hometown
Minnesota Public Radio visited my hometown this week. You can read about it and listen to the audio clips on their website. Here's a link to the first article in the series. Click around for the rest of the articles and the audio.

Pelican Rapids is a small town. The population is about 2300. But when I was growing up the population was about 1900. With small towns dying all around, how did this little burg grow?

One word. Immigration.

When I was in about 4th grade, we started to receive immigrants (in that less politically correct time we called them "refugees")--many of them school age children--from southeast Asia. This was in the early '80s when the fall of Saigon was about as fresh in people's minds as 9/11 is today. Before long, most of our elementary and high school classrooms had at least one student from that war-torn region. And for the most part, we got along just fine. They learned English very quickly (by high school, some of them were my teammates on the speech team, math team, etc.). They did all the things normal small town school kids do. It wasn't until about the time that I graduated high school that I realized that our town was different from other small towns. Something unique had started, and as I left for college, it kicked into overdrive.

As the Vietnam era faded into memory, new conflicts arose in the world, and that meant new enthicities in Pelican Rapids. Bosnians, Somalis, and Sudanese began to arrive--just to name a few. Of course there were bound to be some rough spots. With so many languages, cultures, and customs, misunderstandings are inevitable. But by all accounts, it has been a success story. This June, the town will celebrate its 9th annual International Friendship Festival--complete with a citizenship ceremony.

I should point out that one of the things that makes Pelican Rapids (and other towns in Minnesota like it) attractive to immigrants is the turkey processing plant. They can get jobs there. Along with people who have been displaced by war from far flung corners of the globe, there are likely a few who rode up from Mexico hidden in the back of a van. That's what makes the immigration issue difficult. A boy who lost his parents in Sudan has our sympathy, but a man sending money back to his family in Mexico doesn't. At least that is how it comes out in the national debate. But from an economist's point of view, stripping away some of the legal issues that decide arbitrarily how many people get to cross which border, the distinction is harder to see.

When I lived in Pelican Rapids, I didn't hear anyone complain about immigrants--refugees or otherwise--taking jobs from the locals at the turkey plant. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's a small town. You'd think I'd have heard something. The people who worked at the turkey plant 30 or more years ago were mostly locals. Many of them were only a couple of generations removed from Scandinavian immigrants themselves. It was an alternative to farming and required little education. Unlike some of the big corporate meat packing plants subject to the NIMBY phenomenon today, this operation was a cooperative built by the local turkey farmers. But as the older generation retired and my generation went to college, they did need to find a new source of labor. That new source arrived just in time. Today, the members of my generation who remain in Pelican Rapids are far more likely to make their living serving a new group of immigrants than working in the turkey plant themselves. One such person was my neighbor back in the '70s. She was interviewed in the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Fedgazette in 2004.

For her part, Pam Westby of the Multicultural Learning Center in Pelican Rapids takes a multigenerational view of the costs incurred by immigrant patrons. “My great grandfather came here as a Norwegian immigrant,” she said. “He had access to a Norwegian newspaper through the county, just as I'm trying to provide Somali newspapers on the computers for our Somali immigrants. For me it's giving back ... immigration is part of who we are, and this is just another point on the timeline.”

Yes, there are social costs. It costs money to run the library (a.k.a. Multicultural Learning Center). Social services get stretched a little thinner these days. But as the MPR story points out, there are some budding entrepreneurs in this new group of immigrants. They tell the story of a Somali immigrant, Abdi Abdi, who first got a job at the turkey plant, but then opened up a Halal meat shop where the meat is butchered according to Islamic law. Sounds like the same entrepreneurial spirit that has been a hallmark of this country since the beginning. How many little mom-and-pop shops in New York, LA, or San Francisco can trace their history to the entrepreneurialism of an immigrant perhaps a century or more (or less) ago? One can only guess. To suggest that our country isn't capable of reproducing such results in the 21st century is an insult to Mr. Abdi and others like him. And so I believe that in economic language, immigration has brought a Pareto improvement to Pelican Rapids. The immigrants have jobs that are better than they had in their home country. The people of my generation and my parents' generation are providing them with services. And the services they are providing are much more than what my ancestors had at their disposal when they tried to squeeze a living out of a hard new land. My hometown could have died a slow death, but now has a new lease on life thanks to immigration.

For more on the global community of Pelican Rapids, check out the 56572 blog (that's the ZIP code, in case you couldn't guess). The blogger there used to be my school bus driver, and over the years he has been absolutely tireless in his efforts to help new immigrants in town. You can read more about how it all got started here.

And lest anyone get the wrong idea, I'm not trying to generalize too much here. I'm not going to be Pollyanaish and suggest that if only we could all be like Pelican Rapids, we would not have this current furor over immigration. The way they did it worked for them but might not work everywhere. This is, in some ways, a personal story. It's a blog post, not a journal article. I do, however, hope that it gives you some food for thought. Being from that town has shaped who I am and has given me a lot to think about over the years.

Being from 56572, has that shaped anybody else out there? Talk about it by using the comments link below. Folks back home are listening.