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Iowa is new port for many immigrants

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By Deirdre Cox Baker | Wednesday, December 6, 2006 12:13 AM CST | () comments

State policy must be more welcoming to immigrants if Iowa and two other Midwest states are to thrive economically, a trio of experts said Tuesday.

“We need people in Iowa, and we need them now,” said Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration and a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.

Grey joined with colleagues from Minnesota and Nebraska to write a report, “Immigration’s New Frontiers: Experiences from the Emerging Gateway States,” sponsored by the Century Foundation, a think tank based in New York City. Davenport native Jim Leach, longtime congressional representative, is a foundation director.

Grey, Katherine Fennelly from the University of Minnesota and Lourdes Gouveia of the University of Nebraska at Omaha joined in a Tuesday teleconference to discuss the report’s findings with 22 reporters.

Iowa is one of six states that has seen explosive growth in the number of immigrant residents in the past 10 years or so. Some small communities have had a 1,500 percent increase in population because of this, Grey said, with many of these people coming from “older gateway” states such as Illinois and California.

The number of Hispanic immigrants in the Quad-Cities has grown 82 percent since 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Small towns such as West Liberty and Columbus Junction, Iowa, have experienced double-digit immigration growth because of the location of food-processing plants in those cities, officials said.

“Many of these Iowa communities were predominantly if not exclusively white, and then suddenly turned multi-ethnic,” Grey said.

But support for immigrants has recently eroded in Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota, the experts agreed, with much of the public concern centered on immigrants who are in the United States without the proper documentation.

The fix for many of Iowa’s economic problems could come by making the state a more welcome place for newcomers, Grey argued. This could be accomplished by passage of the Dream Act, which would give immigrant students a pathway to college in the state and repeal of the state’s “English only” policy.

Both moves would help increase positive trends in a state with problems that include both a rapidly aging population and young residents who tend to move from Iowa for employment opportunities elsewhere, the professor said.

Positive factors for immigrants in places such as Nebraska and Iowa include plenty of lower-level jobs and a lack of racial history such as found in Southern states, Gouveia said.

“Other states also have crowded immigration job markets where we don’t,” she said, explaining that most immigrants compete with each other for jobs.

Deirdre Cox Baker can be contacted at (563) 383-2492 or dbaker@qctimes.com.