New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration

7. Prejudice Toward Immigrants in the Midwest

Chapter 7 Prejudice Toward Immigrants in the Midwest Katherine Fennelly The literature on contemporary immigrant-host relations in the United States has generally focused on large urban areas, yet during the past ten to fifteen years rural communities in many states experienced a large influx of immigrants attracted by job prospects in the food-processing industry (Fennelly and Leitner 2002; Stull 1998; Griffith 1999; Fennelly 2005). Especially in the midwestern United States, the relocation of meat and poultry processing plants out of urban centers into rural towns spurred the diversification of formerly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian-origin communities. This movement was accelerated by business tax incentives, the proximity of water and grain supplies, and the opportunity to recruit non-union, low-wage workers (Benson 1999; Cantu 1995; Fennelly and Leitner 2002; Griffith 1999; Yeoman 2000).1 In the Midwest, most of those working on meat and poultry industry “disassembly lines” are documented and undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America, though some towns also contain refugees from Africa and Asia. During the 1990s, foreigners moved to rural communities in such numbers that they helped reverse population losses of the previous decades (Minnesota Planning 1997). In some cases the arrival of large numbers of culturally different residents revitalized rural communities and led to the formation of pro-immigrant coalitions of local citizens and nonprofit agencies, but in other cases immigration led to xenophobia and prejudice among natives, who perceived them as threatening competitors for resources, group identity, and power. The relatively rapid change from predominantly white, European-origin populations to diverse communities with sizable percentages of immigrants 151  offers a natural laboratory for analyzing the perceived threats. In this chapter I present qualitative data gathered in the summer of 2001 for a closeup view of the attitudes of American-born residents toward immigrants in a rural town with a large meat-processing plant. In doing so I compare perceived symbolic and economic threats across three groups of EuroAmericans : community leaders (CL), middle class citizens (MC), and working class residents (WC). Participants’ own explanations of their attitudes are used to describe native sentiments within a context of rapid demographic change. The analysis sheds light on the nature of anti-immigrant prejudice and the kinds of public policies that might foster greater empathy. BACKGROUND Prejudice, broadly defined, is the acceptance of negative stereotypes that relegate groups of people to the category of “other” (Sniderman, Tetlock, and Carmines 1993). Racism is the extension of prejudice to an ideology or belief system that ascribes unalterable characteristics to the “othered” groups. Such belief systems are used to justify negative attitudes and social avoidance of out-groups (See and Wilson 1988). Prejudicial beliefs can also enhance a sense of positive group distinctiveness (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior 2004). Conversely, perceived threats to cultural unity are both a product of prejudice, and a source of reinforcement for prejudicial beliefs. Such “symbolic threats” to national identity have a long history in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were kindled over concerns related to the integration of European immigrants (Castles and Miller 2003; Conzen et al. 1992; Nevins 2003). John Higham (1955) describes how notions of racial superiority and exclusiveness that characterize racism were developed in the nineteenth century and emerged in the early twentieth century as fully formed nativist ideology (131). Contemporary nativists compare the difficulties experienced by recent waves of immigrants—particularly Latinos—with the mythical success of previous generations of Euro-Americans (see, for example, Huntington 2004). These contrasts feed stereotypes that attribute a lack of initiative and talent to contemporary immigrants. Both historically and currently, immigrants’ perceived linguistic challenges to English as the national language constitute an important component of their symbolic threat, both as a determinant of prejudice and as a justification for preexisting xenophobic attitudes. A related symbolic threat in the Midwest is what might be termed “rural nostalgia”: the belief that demographic changes are a primary cause of the demise of pristine rural areas. Part of this nostalgia has to do with 152 New Faces in New Places notions of ethnic solidarity, or what Caroline Tauxe (1998) describes as a “normative, self-reliant European-American community.” The sentiment is notably prevalent in rural areas where increases in immigrants coincide with other dramatic economic and social changes, such as losses of population , school closings, and the displacement of small and mid-sized farms by large agribusinesses...