Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreements with a single county can affect an entire region, immigration advocates say. In East Tennessee, Knox and Greene counties maintain such agreements, while larger metropolitan areas have backed away from them. In 2018, an ICE raid in a Bean Station, Tennessee, slaughterhouse made national headlines. […]
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An Immigration Ban Would Have Doubled Rural Population Loss
New residents from foreign countries were the bright spot in rural America’s population picture from 2010 to 2019. Without them, rural counties would have lost more than half a million residents. Instead, they lost only 200,000. Who will President Trump’s order halting all international migration into the United States hurt […]
Read MoreW.Va. Faces A Direct Care Workforce Shortage — One Possible Solution? Immigration.
In 1965, Charleston, West Virginia, was home to about 85,000 residents — now, that number has almost halved. The people who are left look a lot like the population in the rest of the state — namely white and older. And as they age, those older folks need someone to […]
Read MoreA National Survey On Immigration Led Me To A Rural Iowa Town Changed By Immigrants
This article was originally published by Ohio Valley ReSource. On a Monday night, a week before the Iowa caucuses, about 20 residents gathered at the Norelius library in Denison, Iowa, for a mock caucus. Latina activist Alma Puga, the organizer, called the caucuses the “Disneyland of politics.” Rather than caucusing […]
Read MoreLosing It All: Natural Disasters and America’s Immigrant Worker
We’re in the midst of the 2019 hurricane season, and people in the Bahamas are still recovering from Hurricane Dorian, which is considered the country’s worst natural disaster to date. In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit the coast of North Carolina, which left 51 people dead and caused $24 billion in […]
Read MoreLISTEN: A Discussion on Immigration and Poultry in Moorefield, W.Va.
For more than a decade, more than 100 migrant and refugee families from countries like Myanmar (formerly Burma), Vietnam, Ethiopia, Guatemala and others have come to Moorefield, West Virginia. They’ve done so to work at Pilgrim’s Pride – a large poultry plant that is Hardy County’s biggest employer with 1,700 […]
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