CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A small, rural community in central Illinois draws immigrants from Latin America and Africa to work in the local meatpacking plant. These displaced workers have made a new home in Beardstown, Illinois, but in many ways, they’ve also made a new town.
Many immigrants coming to the U.S. for factory jobs are taking advantage of opportunities in small towns like Beardstown, rather than big cities. In her new book, “Global Heartland,” published this month by Indiana University Press, University of Illinois urban and regional planning professor Faranak Miraftab looks at how this workforce is produced for the global labor market, how the workers maintain their lives and families on low-wage jobs, and how they’ve transformed the places they now call home.
She weaves the voices of the immigrants and the families they left behind into her analysis of the larger picture of globalization of the labor market.
Beardstown has drawn its large immigrant population mostly from Mexico, Togo and Congo. Global economic and trade policies that destroyed the livelihoods of these workers in their home countries contributed to their displacement, Miraftab said. The jobs available to them in the U.S. are increasingly in rural communities, as a pattern of rural industrialization moves jobs such as those in meatpacking out of cities, she said.
The immigrants accept low-wage U.S. jobs that many American workers would not take; they are being assisted by those they left behind, Miraftab said. Back home, other family members are caring for the elderly relatives of the Mexican workers and the children of the Togolese workers, allowing the workers to remain here.
“Also, in their imaginations, they believe that they can eventually go home and be set for life,” she said.
Further, if the immigrants become injured in the high-risk jobs they take, they return home where a whole range of institutions – public hospitals and nonprofit organizations – must provide the medical care they need. Knowing they’ll be taken care of helps, Miraftab said.
It is tempting to consider the immigrant laborers as exploited or as victims, Miraftab said. “To the contrary, they’ve been able to redefine racial relationships and renegotiate the racial and ethnic dynamics of the town.”
There was some violence against immigrants initially, she acknowledged. But, she noted, the Beardstown schools offer dual-language programs, there is no housing segregation that separates the immigrants from their American-born neighbors, and the library offers services in three languages. Soccer brings together immigrant and American children.
“There are lots of examples of how they’ve been able to transform socially this (previously) racist, all-white town,” she said. “The story that sees them as victims doesn’t quite fit.”
The book also looks at the later movement of African-American residents from Detroit to Beardstown and the racial dynamics between the black Americans, black Africans and Latin Americans.
The immigrants’ presence has helped transform Beardstown economically, as well.
“It’s amazing – in the middle of the Rust Belt, rural Illinois, which is being depopulated because they are losing younger folks – when you get to that landscape in Beardstown, they have a new school, a new library. It’s completely different from the rest of the depopulated Midwest,” Miraftab said.
The book title, “Global Heartland,” makes the point that “places assumed to be so isolated are so intensely connected to the rest of the world” – and not just economically, but also culturally.
Miraftab traveled to the towns in Mexico and Togo where many immigrants came from. In one Mexican village, upon her arrival she found a dozen people who knew about Beardstown or knew people who lived there. In contrast, almost none of her students know about Beardstown, a small city about 115 miles west of the Urbana campus.
“For (the Mexican residents), in a way, Beardstown becomes local,” Miraftab said.
Editor’s note: To reach Faranak Miraftab, email faranak@illinois.edu.
