“Somebody else’s babies” are keeping the communities and factories in and around Steve King’s Iowa district alive and well, as shown in a must-read New York Times profile on the booming Latino, Asian, and immigrant communities in the area. “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,” with immigrant workers filling backbreaking jobs at meat-processing plants and building businesses in the communities. In fact, as two-thirds of the counties “are shrinking in population,” its immigrants who are staying and working to keep the area thriving:
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.
“I was so blessed to get into Tyson,” he said, sipping coffee at Grand Central Coffee Station. “I remember looking at the first paycheck and thinking, ‘There is free money going around.’”
Rural Organizing writes that the “‘Latino boom’ hit rural northwest Iowa in the early 1990s when Latinos began moving to Iowa primarily from California, Illinois, New York, Texas and other states” in search of factory work. In Storm Lake today, “walk through the halls of the public schools and you can hear as many as 18 languages.” It seems like a contradiction in a district that keeps electing a self-avowed fan of white supremacists, but as Rural Organizing states, “statistically, he's an outlier. Voters in King's district support a path to citizenship for undocumented residents by a 2 to 1 margin.”
King may not get it, but many residents seem to. “Other communities our size are shrinking and consolidating school districts,” said Storm Lake Police Chief Mark Prosser. “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?”
Interestingly, while both King and Donald Trump have blamed immigrants for falling wages for native-born Americans, one retired Iowan that the New York Times talked to blamed the plant owners themselves for initially undercutting workers out of anti-union animus:
First was Hygrade Food Products Corporation, an old-style meatpacking house that introduced Ball Park Franks to the Detroit Tigers’ stadium in 1957 and operated the Storm Lake plant when Mr. Smith went to work there. Faced with competition from new companies that had developed a faster, more efficient method of boxing beef and selling it to supermarket chains and fast-food outlets, Hygrade in 1981 asked its workers to take a pay cut of $3 an hour. When they refused, the plant closed.
With vigorous support from town leaders, the upstart Iowa Beef Processors (later known as IBP) bought and reopened it a few months later — slashing wages by more than half and shunning the union.
At that point, Mr. Smith returned to do night cleanup, earning $5.50 an hour with no benefits, but a vast majority of his former co-workers were turned away, he said, because the new owner did not want to hire union supporters. Instead, the company began actively recruiting in Mexico and in immigrant communities in Texas and California.
“They learned real fast to keep a sharp knife and didn’t complain if they had a sore arm,” Mr. Smith said.
While companies like Tyson have offered starting pay for new hires at more than twice the state minimum wage, “workers can be hard to come by. Standing in the same spot for eight hours or more at a time, in near-freezing temperatures, slashing at carcasses that swing by at a fast pace, can numb body and soul.” Smith told the New York Times that’s a main reason why he doesn’t think raising it to $20 or above will make much of a difference when it comes to trying to hire more native-born workers: “I don’t think you could get white guys.”