Can an Immigrant Workforce Save Dying Factory Towns?

“Beardstown…exemplifies the opposite of the falsehood that is being spread about Ohio.”

When Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were vilified in a campaign of politicized fabrications about eating pets, Faranak Miraftab's mind went to a place she knew well. A professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she had spent a decade writing a book about Beardstown, Illinois—a once struggling Midwestern community that has seen its population rebound since the 1990s, lifted by an immigrant population from around the world.

"I thought of Beardstown and how it exemplifies the opposite of the falsehood that is being spread about Ohio," she said. "Towns around Beardstown are boarded up and are ghost towns. Beardstown shines thanks to its immigrants."

For three decades, newcomers have flocked to Beardstown for opportunities in the hog slaughterhouse that anchors the local economy, and Miraftab was drawn to their stories as a lens to study globalization. Her research about them culminated in her 2016 book, Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking.

In 1987, June Conner and her husband had just bought a Beardstown radio station when Oscar Meyer closed its pork plant and laid off some 800 local workers. Around the same time, two other large industrial employers and the only local hospital closed. 

"It was like, you know, here we just bought this radio station, and what effect is all of this gonna have on the business in town?" Conner recalled. "What a scare that was to the community, and what an effect it had on all the properties and the housing and everything."

The plant, only 20 years old at the time, was still functional. A subsidiary of agricultural processing giant Cargill soon bought and reopened the slaughterhouse, and set about boosting productivity. "They wanted to create a second shift, and they didn't have enough workers to do that," said Conner, who produced and broadcast recruitment ads for the plant.

The second shift got started, and throughout the 1990s, the company cast a wide net across Central Illinois, even running commuter buses from 50 miles away to ease hiring. 

Meanwhile, in the early '90s, workers from Mexico turned up at the plant, willing to take jobs that were often tough and uncomfortable. Cargill sent recruiters to the Mexican border, according to local lore: "we'll give you a bus ticket to come to Beardstown," in Conner's telling. Other versions described immigrants first gaining experience in the meat industry in Iowa before relocating across the Midwest through personal networks to places like Beardstown.

Founded in the 1820s on the eastern bank of the Illinois River, Beardstown was always a little rougher around the edges than the more prosperous farming communities that sprang up from the black soil above the bluffs. As a circuit-riding lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's exploits included the 1858 acquittal in a Beardstown courtroom of a defendant from a drunken brawl, using an almanac to disprove eyewitness testimony of a fatal blow by moonlight. River bottoms on the Illinois frontier tended to be settled by Southerners arriving by water, especially from Kentucky, while the prairies between the rivers were filled by New Englanders and Northern European homesteaders who came overland. 

That pattern echoed into modern political cultures, including Beardstown's well-known status as a "sundown town," where nonwhites were unwelcome. One Beardstown native described a sign at the edge of town in the 1960s that threatened, "Darkies: Don't let the sun set on you." Through the mid-20th century, gritty industrial employment including the slaughterhouse cemented Beardstown's blue-collar identity.

Beardstown reached a peak of more than 6,300 residents in 1980 but within a decade withered by 17 percent to a 90-year low of fewer than 5,300 people (still 99 percent white). The slide was halted in the early 1990s as Cargill upgraded the plant's sewer infrastructure—partly with incentives from state and local government coffers—and invested in modernization and expanded capacity. Demographic change came, and by 2000 the population was approaching 5,800. The non-Hispanic white population had continued to fall, but the Latino population was now more than 1,000 people.

According to the 2020 census' imperfect categories, Beardstown was about 50 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic of any race, and 11 percent African American. 

Officially, the current population is near 6,000, but Katie Vitale, executive director of the Beardstown Chamber of Commerce, says there are estimates that the real number is thousands larger, given the mobility of newer immigrants. "Just because of people in and out," she said. "And a lot of undocumented workers don't want to answer the census." 

The arrival of Mexican workers—followed over the years by immigrants from Africa and Asia, even domestic migrants from Puerto Rico and Detroit's shattered car industry, and most recently Haitians—didn't happen without social unrest that sometimes burst into the open. Miraftab counted some 30 countries of origin represented in her Beardstown ethnography. The early years of this in-migration were the most tense, with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) agitation in surrounding communities, culminating in a 1996 KKK rally and cross burning in Beardstown.

In her book, Miraftab documented longstanding complaints about local police, as well as interracial tensions on the production line, which she alleges were exploited by management despite United Food & Commercial Workers representation. In 2007, dozens of workers from an overnight cleaning crew were rounded up in a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

"There probably is a segment of the community that wants to complain about all of that. However, I was always in business and always tried to work with business. And I'll tell you, the immigrants have been an asset to this town," Conner said. "Beardstown would be dried up if it wasn't for that plant out there….I, for one, am very happy to see the change in our community, because I know what it would be if it hadn't changed."

In 30 years, Beardstown has gone from housing glut to shortage. The first waves of immigrants snapped up fixer-uppers and often cordoned larger houses into modest apartments. "A lot of the Hispanics will take better care of them than people who have lived here," Conner said. "And they may paint them bright colors—you know, that's one thing they're known for. But they do make 'em better."

Having been homogenous until the 1990s, Beardstown presented a blank slate to new immigrants, and the emergent order across the town's 3.6 square miles was completely unsegregated by ethnicity or income. "The fact that it was a sundown town with no preexisting ethnic neighborhoods made it possible to have a complete mix of neighbors," Miraftab wrote. "The affordability of the housing market and the relative ease with which new immigrants become homeowners in the 1990s also played a role in creating a new generation of Mexican homeowners who could rent to newcomers, who happened to be by and large West Africans."

Rising property values have given local government and schools added revenue—even after favorable tax adjustments granted to the plant—allowing Beardstown to build a new library and new schools, even as most rural Illinois school districts continue inexorable consolidations. Globalization even extended to ownership of the plant, which was acquired in 2015 by the U.S. subsidiary of Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS.

As immigrants sink deeper roots in the community, many have left the plant behind and started their own businesses, including Latino and French groceries. Cato Institute immigration economist Alex Nowrasteh pointed out that immigrants are twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, an entrepreneurial boost that fuels even greater demand for labor.

Nowrasteh called it "a very familiar story" in communities from Beardstown to the Big Apple. New York City in the 1970s suffered a vicious cycle of decline: falling population, crumbling infrastructure, epic budget problems, and public disinvestment. "Then the population turned around in the '80s, which was driven by foreign-born migration—that's a ton of the reason why that city renewed," Nowrasteh said. "You had greater demand for goods and services in the city. That's all good for the economy….With immigrants you have more taxpayers. They use some benefits of course, but just by increasing the property values, which is an enormous factor, the surge in property tax revenue to maintain at least the infrastructure helps significantly."

A particular problem for small, rural communities is that locally born young people tend to "leave for greener pastures," Nowrasteh said. Beardstown's own ambitious children often gravitate to St. Louis or Chicago. But the new arrivals are themselves ambitious, which is why they left Michoacan, Togo, or Burma, bringing a new vibrance to Beardstown. "It's just good for the economy all around," Nowrasteh said.

Has immigration saved the pork plant and, with it, Beardstown? "Yes, I would say that's very fair," Conner said. Thirty years ago, Beardstown was notorious in Central Illinois for rundown houses and racism. Today, its Cinco de Mayo and Africa Day celebrations attract foodie day-trippers from surrounding cities. "People come from other areas to eat in our restaurants, because they enjoy the authentic food," Conner said. "I kinda like the margaritas myself."