DES MOINES, IOWA (AP) — Iowa needs people. Its aging workers are retiring in droves and its young people are heading elsewhere for better jobs.
So, in a pitch echoing the words of on the Statue of Liberty welcoming the world’s “huddled masses,” Gov. Tom Vilsack wants to aggressively recruit immigrants to settle in Iowa.
“There are people all over the world who are suffering, some from famine, some are orphaned as a result of disease or war and there are still people being persecuted because of their religious beliefs,” Vilsack said. “In this state, we have a tradition of opening our hearts and homes to people in those kinds of situations.”
The first-term Democrat’s Iowa 2010 strategy, developed by a team of business and civic leaders, calls for an additional 310,000 workers by 2010. He may need to ask the federal government to designate Iowa an “immigration enterprise zone” that would provide exemptions to immigration quotas.
With an unemployment rate of 2 percent, nearly every employable worker in Iowa already has a job.
But opponents of the governor’s plan fear immigrants would take jobs from people already here.
“We don’t give the American worker the opportunity to learn that job. We just bring somebody in from the outside and bring them in cheap,” said Mark Smith, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor. “That’s what it really comes down to, bringing them in cheap.”
And a majority of Iowans say they don’t want the state to encourage immigrants, according to a poll in the Des Moines Sunday Register. It said 58 percent of respondents said they would oppose a policy of encouraging immigration, while 34 percent approved; the rest weren’t sure. The poll, conducted over eight days ending Sept. 6, has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
Ana Maria Sequra, a 19-year-old from Guadalajara, Mexico, likes living in Iowa. “It’s very tranquil, peaceful here,” she said through an interpreter.
She has helped run her brother’s grocery store in Ottumwa, a southern Iowa community of 27,000, for more than a year.
But in a predominantly English-speaking state that’s 96 percent white, she still speaks little English and occasionally has trouble with Iowans.
“Sometimes they are difficult to get along with and I’m not sure what it’s all about,” she said. “I wonder if they have racist thoughts.”
Ottumwa Mayor Dale Uehling said more than 400 immigrant workers have brought families to his city in recent months to work at the Excel Inc. pork processing plant. That created challenges for housing, schools, public health and other agencies and services.
“What I keep on stresisng is that integrating the new cultures into the community is very critical,” he said.
The state will need to prepare communities to handle immigrants’ basic needs, said Sister Irene Munoz, a Roman Catholic nun in Ottumwa.
“They’re looking for food, shelter, pots andP pans, sheets, winter clothing and children’s clothing,” she said.
Munoz said she herself has experienced uncomfortable stares and long waits at store counters.
“It’s easy to instantly think you’re being singled out because you’re different,” she said. “I think there are some rumblings under the surface and people say things here or there.”
Iowa’s population problems began 20 years ago when a recession led to farm foreclosures and foundering factories. Fewer jobs meant graduates left to find work elsewhere.
“That had a profound effect in the decade that followed. We were left without those young folks entering the work force,” said State Economist Harvey Siegelman.
Over the past year, the state has held receptions in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Chicago inviting native Iowans who left to return home.
Iowa was one of only two states — West Virginia was the other — recording population declines from 1980 to 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The bureau estimates that Iowa reversed the trend by growing 3.3 percent from 1990 through mid-1999.
The Iowa Workforce Development Center projects that the state will see a growth of 56,700 jobs a year through 2006.
“If every single graduating high school senior stayed in Iowa, we would still have a labor shortage,” Vilsack said. “If our businesses are going to expand, we’re going to need people.”