The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Talking About Immigration in Madison

As we've reported earlier, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs sponsored a major report on comprehensive reforms in immigration law, acknowledging the moral component of reform but stressing the economic benefits -- that rational reform would bring a huge economic payoff to the Midwest and its people.

My colleague, Juliana Kerr, organized this project. She went to Madison, Wisconsin, recently to speak to different groups there on immigration law reform. She has turned what she said and heard in Madison into a report on her trip, and she agreed to let me reprint it here. 

Letting Detroit Go

Let’s talk about Detroit. But first, let’s talk about Potosi.

You’ve probably never heard of Potosi. In its heyday, it was the biggest city in the western hemisphere. That heyday was 400 years ago, when Potosi – a silver mining city 13,000 feet up in the Bolivian Andes – supplied the Spanish conquistadores with a fortune in silver.

By 1800, the silver mostly played out and Potosi’s economy went away. There was some tin but little else, and Potosi faded into a backwater. It’s still there. It still produces a little silver, giving work to miners laboring in such awful conditions that the average longevity is about 40. It still supports (more or less) a population of 130,000, about half as many as when it was the silver city of the Americas.

Is this Detroit’s future? History is full of surprises but, on present evidence, the answer has to be yes.

A Global Revolt Against Globalization

Recent travels have taken me to two places that would seem to have almost nothing in common – southeastern Iowa and England. Southeastern Iowa is centered on Ottumwa, an old manufacturing and mining town that is struggling to make its way in the post-industrial world. England, of course, is centered on London, which may be the glitziest, most dynamic city anywhere.

But I found in both places a growing resentment, even a fear. It’s a fear of a new, complicated, globalizing world that many people don’t understand and don’t much like. Basically, I think, it’s a feeling that they are losing control of their lives.

The Irish And Other Immigrants

Not all illegal immigrants into the U.S. are Mexican and there’s more to immigration law reform than getting the Hispanic vote.

I learned this at a program in Chicago sponsored by an organization called Ireland Network Chicago, or IN-Chicago, where the fervor for reform matched that at any gathering in the city’s Mexican neighborhoods.

There are some 50,000 undocumented Irish in the United States, according to the best estimates, most in New York, Chicago and other major cities. There may be as many as 70,000 undocumented Poles in Chicago alone. Altogether, the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country include no less than 650,000 European citizens.

A Sea Change in Midwestern Immigration

Just as President Obama and Congress are moving to solve the nation's immigration problem, the shape of the problem is changing.

Across the Midwest, companies -- mostly agriculture-related -- are hiring many fewer Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants. The reason: half or more of these immigrants were undocumented, and employers were both tired of verifying documents and afraid of the penalties if they slipped. Some highly-publicized raids by federal immigration agents reinforced their fears, as did a new policy of "silent raids" targeting employers themselves.

These Hispanics are increasingly being replaced in packinghouses and on farms by a spectrum of immigrants -- apparently legal -- from other countries. These include immigrants under national quotas, refugees, and winners of the government's visa lotteries. They come from around the world, mostly Africa and Asia, and include Pacific islanders, Congolese, Sudanese, Somalis, Vietnamese, Burmese, Ukrainian Pentecostals and others.

Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, gleaned from visits and calls to Midwestern towns that once were on their way to being majority Hispanic: I'll fill in some of these details later. So far as I know, there's been little media attention to this shift. At the moment, it's a big story waiting to be reported. 

After The Vote

Some post-election thoughts:

The solid Midwest abides, mostly. Nobody expected Indiana to stay in the Democratic column, where it landed in the Obama landslide four years ago, or Missouri to swing Democratic. But the other six Upper Midwest states voted again Tuesday for Barack Obama and three of them -- the swing states of Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin -- helped put the president over the top.

The four Great Plains states -- the two Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas -- remained solidly Republican, as expected.

The election provided a graphic demonstration of the basic split, economic and political, between the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest. Take a map and draw a vertical line from the Canadian border down through Minnesota and Iowa, passing somewhere to the west of the Twin Cities and Des Moines. Most of the region to the east is industrial, urban, more unionized and more likely to vote Democratic. Most of the region to the west is agricultural, rural, with a drier climate, more sparsely populated, more religious and more likely to vote Republican. 

In this split, we're seeing the decline of the west. The votes were close but Iowa and Minnesota, like most of the other Upper Midwest states, voted Democratic. Only Indiana, perhaps the least Midwestern of the Midwestern states, bucked the trend.

Chicago: What's Changed? What Hasn't?

A few years ago, The Chicago Council published a book called Global Chicago, with two goals in mind. The first was a wake-up call to Chicagoans that their old industrial City of the Big Shoulders was gone, replaced by a global city with new strengths and challenges. The second was an attempt -- probably the first anywhere -- to study globalization's impact on cities by looking hard at one of those cities.

I was talking recently with the editor of the book, Charles Madigan, then a writer and editor at the Chicago Tribune (as was I), now Presidential Writer in Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We were exploring what's changed in Chicago since the book came out, and what is unchanged -- or still undone.

A Skeptic's View on Midwestern Politics

With the mid-term elections a week away, some thoughts on the state of politics in the Midwest seem timely. This blog, like its sponsor, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, is non-partisan, so don't look for any endorsements. But I'm a journalist by trade and I spend a lot of time driving around the Midwest, so it might be useful to contribute some impressions from all this traveling and listening.

The Midwest, for the first time in years, went solidly Democratic for Barack Obama two years ago. Now the conventional wisdom, in the Midwest as elsewhere, predicts sharp swings back to the Republicans, perhaps even a landslide that would contribute to a GOP capture of both houses of Congress.

Well, maybe so. But put me down as a skeptic. It seems certain that the Republicans will make gains but possibly not as many as they expect. Polls throughout the Midwest are tightening. There remains a strong sense of independence, almost an ornery refusal to make up one's mind too soon. The results could be much closer than anyone expects.

Race and Racism in the Midwest

The Shirley Sherrod affair has ignited new charges of racism from left and right and raised the issue of whether -- and to what degree -- racism survives in a nation led by an African-American president. Let's take this issue and bring it home. Does racism survive here in the Midwest which is, after all, Barack Obama's home turf?

Well, sure. Racism survives in the Midwest, just as it does in the rest of the country (and, as any traveler knows, around the world). The real question is where it survives, and to what degree, and is it affecting the way people think and vote?

Any report on this has to be pretty impressionistic. If there any accurate studies on Midwestern racism, I don't know about them. But I've been traveling the Midwest constantly for several years now and have tried to take the region's pulse on racism, as well as on other issues. So let me take an admittedly imperfect stab at this.

Immigration and the Midwest

One of the most draconian immigration laws has just been signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. The bill reflects the fact that different parts of this country have different vital interests and different views on big national issues like immigration. With anti-immigration politicians in places like Arizona grabbing the headlines, it's even more important that the Midwestern voice be heard on immigration policy.

The bill would require police to demand proof of legal entry into the United States from anyone suspected of being here illegally. Citizens could sue police departments that didn't enforce the law. The potential for racial profiling is obvious: any Hispanic who left all his legal papers at home could find himself across the border by nightfall.

I can't speak for the people of Arizona. The state lies on the Mexican border and apparently has been an increasingly important entry point for undocumented immigrants crossing the frontier. It's an emotional issue there, especially since the killing of an Arizona rancher by an apparently illegal immigrant.

Democrats there by and large oppose the new, tougher bill: so do most police chiefs, whose association issued a statement saying that the need for policemen to enforce the immigration law will hurt their ability to stop more important crimes. But the bill passed the Arizona Senate with unanimous Republican approval. A local poll shows that 70 percent of Arizona voters approve it. Some 82 percent of Tea Party members like it. Radio pundit Glenn Beck has called for armed militias on the border to start shooting at immigrants. And even Sen. John McCain, once a leader in immigration reform, has come out in favor of the bill.

Immigration -- especially illegal immigration -- is an emotional and political issue everywhere. Perhaps immigrants really add nothing to the culture and economy of Arizona. But in this issue, Arizonans do not speak for Midwesterners. With anti-immigrant fervor running amok in Arizona, Midwestern leaders need to look at what immigrants do for this region and state their own case for more -- not less -- immigration.