Guest Column

Are you tired of the hysteria and attacks on the newcomers who are filling jobs we won’t take?

The following editorial first appeared in the Storm Lake Times of Saturday, November 24, 2007. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. —Chuck Offenburger

By ART CULLEN
November 29, 2007
STORM LAKE, IOWA

Anti-immigration sentiments are being stoked by a barrage of TV ads connected to political campaigns hoping to lock up the nativist “Know Nothing” vote. (The Know Nothing Party was active in the 1850s, campaigning against the wave of Irish Catholic immigrants during and after the Potato Famine.)

If you did not know better, you might think that America is being overrun by a wave of lawless Mexicans and terrorists.

Storm Lake is often used as an example of what immigration does to a rural Midwest community.

Thousands of immigrants have worked in our town’s two meatpacking plants, working hard, hoping for a better life for their children, sending money home to Mexico and other nations to help their families left behind. They build businesses and churches, they add color and richness, they learn English as they can and they help an isolated rural community grow and prosper.

They take the place on the kill floor of previous generations of immigrants from Eastern Europe and, yes, Ireland, the homeland of my own folks. Those earlier meatpackers sent their children off to college hoping that they would become doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers and business owners. The new wave of immigrants is just starting to send their children to Iowa Central Community College, Buena Vista University and Iowa State University. We hope they come back some day.

Storm Lake is the American story.

Yes, we need secure borders. We need to know just who is living and working in Storm Lake. We also need workers in our meatpacking plants as the first generation moves up the economic ladder. If we don’t cut the meat here, be assured that the meat will get cut somewhere else and those jobs are lost to us.

What we really need is to open up the immigration quotas to fill our low-skilled, medium-skilled and high-skilled job shortages. This is especially true in Iowa, which is aging rapidly and badly needs workers in the agri-industrial sector. It’s basically simple arithmetic: How many meatpackers and landscapers do we need? Let that many in. For those already here, pay a fine for entering illegally, get on a path to citizenship, learn English and keep your nose clean.

This is what most Americans want, according to the polling we have seen. They want a way for people to escape poverty, fill unfilled yet important jobs, and live safely and out of the shadows. Most American citizens do not think it practical to ship out 15 million illegal aliens, the great majority of whom have never been in trouble here and have no idea what a dirty bomb is. Most good Christians we know find it an offense to their values to separate families, consign people to a life of poverty under corrupt regimes, and to identify people as criminals based on their appearance or country of origin. As Christ said, “What you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.”

To our new neighbors who see all these frightful ads, we say: You are welcome here. We need you. We want you to become successful Iowans. Without you our community would be diminished.


Art Cullen, 50, is editor of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-a-week newspaper serving the diverse and growing community of Storm Lake, which in the 2000 Census topped 10,000 for the first time in the town’s history – while all other county seat towns around it continued to decline in population. Cullen grew up in the community when it was nearly all-white. He went on to St. Thomas College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In his journalism career of nearly 30 years in Iowa, he first served as editor at the Algona Upper Des Moines and Kossuth County Advance, then managing editor at The Daily Tribune in Ames, and news editor/editorial page editor at the Globe-Gazette, before returning home in 1990 to help his brother John Cullen launch the Storm Lake Times. John Cullen is the paper’s publisher. Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer Michael Gartner, of Des Moines, has said that Art Cullen is one of the two best editorial writers working now in the whole state. The other one? Douglas Burns of the Carroll Daily Times Herald. We’re pleased to know them both. You can write Cullen at times@stormlake.com.

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