Como Estas, Des Moines?

By TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND

Iowa, 2015. Old people wander aimlessly through virtual ghost towns. Interstate 80 is a wasteland of derelict grain silos and abandoned farms. Buildings stand empty; most factories have shut down.

A postapocalyptic scenario? Hardly. But this grim vision must cross Governor Tom Vilsack's mind when he looks at Iowa's demographic trends. The population, 96% white, is aging at an alarming rate, with younger people moving away and those who remain too old to work the farms and factories. By 2020, 20% of Iowans will be 65 or older. And even if every high school student were to stay, the work force would still decline 3% in the next five years.

Vilsack has a solution: he wants to give Iowa an injection of new blood, in part by attracting immigrants to the state. It may seem an innocuous idea, but in Iowa it is highly controversial.

Iowa grew just 3.3% in the 1990s, compared with 9.6% for the nation as a whole. Part of the state's growth was fueled by the migration of 21,000 immigrants, many of them Hispanic. The 2000 Census figures released last week show that Hispanics, now poised to replace African Americans as the nation's largest minority group, saw their numbers explode in Midwestern states like Wisconsin in the 1990s, while Iowa enjoyed an increase of less than 1% over that time. Vilsack wants to change that by accelerating the arrival of Hispanics and other immigrants.

He says it's a matter of survival. "To give you a sense of the magnitude of the problem," Vilsack says, "the fastest growing segment of our population is people over 100."

But a lot of Iowans, it appears, don't want to live in Vilsack's melting pot. This is the fourth whitest state in America, and some people want it to stay that way. Just last week the Iowa legislature began debating a proposal to make English the state's official language. A Des Moines Register poll last year found that 58% of those surveyed oppose Vilsack's plan to bring in more immigrants. "Do we really want to be another California, with all of its immigrant problems?" says Roger Harrison, 68, a retired lawyer from Marshalltown. Given such opposition, Vilsack's move is risky for the first-term Governor, the first Democrat to lead the state in 30 years. But Vilsack, whose approval rating is 65%, says he has little choice. Young people have been fleeing since the farm crisis of the mid-'80s, and there aren't enough bodies in the pipeline to replace the 368,000 soon-to-retire baby boomers. "If we want to save the family farm," says Vilsack, "we have to have people to farm the land."

In 1999, Vilsack appointed a bipartisan group to figure out what to do. The Strategic Planning Council urged officials to use all available means to increase Iowa's population. "We've got to fire every bullet," says council chairman David Oman. And so in hopes of adding 310,000 new residents to the population over the next nine years, Vilsack is trying to lure expat Iowans back home. He is hosting receptions around the country for Iowa university alumni. But so far, only about 300 families have returned.

That's what makes the immigrants so important. Vilsack has designated three towns as Model Communities. Their mission: to come up with a blueprint for recruiting immigrants from other states and refugees who might be attracted by Iowa's low cost of living. But that part of Vilsack's plan has run into a prairie fire of opposition. Part of it is prejudice. But that's not the whole story. Iowans have reason to be leery because of unplanned immigration in the mid-'90s, when thousands of Hispanics came to Iowa communities like Marshalltown to work in meat-packing plants. Marshalltown (pop. 26,000) became 12% Hispanic overnight. The monocultural town was totally unprepared. Schools struggled to cope with non-English speakers. A methamphetamine industry sprang up, which police blamed on Mexican gangs. Most of the new arrivals, like Gilberto Ortega, 36, from El Salvador, toiled long hours at jobs nobody else wanted. Ortega, a meatcutter, supported his wife and two children on $9 an hour. He says he has been too busy to learn English.

But native Iowans resented new arrivals who didn't assimilate. A group of vets pushed through an English-only resolution. "The tension came because the change was so rapid," says Ken Anderson, president of the Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce. Vilsack hopes to avoid repeating past mistakes by taking things slowly.

He has opened two New Iowan Centers--referral agencies providing immigration help and job tips--in Muscatine and Sioux City. Rosa Mendoza, 44, the deputy director of the Muscatine center, says Iowa has come a long way since she moved to the Mississippi river town in 1977. "Everywhere I went, people stared," she says. "It was so bad, I didn't want to go out." Today the town of 23,000 is 12% Hispanic. On Mulberry Avenue, Mexican groceries compete for customers, and the El Cabrito restaurant dishes up taquitos. It's a glimpse of Vilsack's vision for a multicultural Iowa. He just has to win over all his citizens.