“This is my African village in Illinois!”  exclaimed a Congolese fellow referring to a traditionally all-white rural town in Illinois.  Today many African women and men can be seen in colorful outfits and brightly colored headdresses walking on the sidewalks to attend church services, pick up groceries, or drop off their wash at the Laundromat— simply conducting their lives in their new home. Africans constitute only one of the many ethnic groups who have migrated to Illinois. Mexican and Central American immigrants, for instance, moved to a town adjacent to this “African village” which is why the area is informally known as “little Mexico.” 

The rapid and important demographic changes in the rural Midwest call for careful examination and understanding.  Many areas of the region have become racially and ethnically diverse, as a result of international immigrants who were drawn to these rural towns by job opportunities.   Nationwide, during the 1990s, immigration increased in non-metropolitan counties where populations of native-born residents had declined.  The “African village” referred to above, for example, which is part of an area that I will call  “Hilltop”, went from being an all-White community in 2000 (with the exception of two black residents out of a total  population of 3000) to an area that houses approximately 200 West Africans today.  Similarly, although the adjacent community of 6000 residents, which I will call “Riverbend,” and which locals commonly refer to as “little Mexico,” has remained stable since 1990, its racial and ethnic composition has changed dramatically. The Latin population surged from less than 1 percent in 1990 to more than 30 percent in 2006 (nearly 2,000 people according to the county-level estimates available from the 2006 Census Bureau records).  As such, the Latino population in Riverbend grew by 5,000 percent between 1990 and 2006.

Faranak Miraftab
Mexican Independence Day
celebrated by Mariachis and a car parade in Riverbend, Sept. 2007.

Such demographic change is astounding, particularly considering that both Hilltop and Riverbend are among the towns documented by James Leowen as “Sundown towns” — towns that kept themselves white through much of the 20th century by direct violence or threat of violence against potential minority residents.  In Riverbend, for example, at the same town square where Abraham Lincoln once delivered his anti-slavery stump speech in 1858, a six-foot cross was set ablaze in front of a Mexican-owned bar as recently as 1996.  This process of change from a Sundown to a multi-cultural and multi-racial rural town would have been unimaginable to many local residents even a decade ago.  Such dramatic, intense, and complex changes call for in-depth understanding. 
By way of introduction to the phenomenon, I will outline the trans-local labor recruitment practices of a multi-national corporation in the area—an important force shaping the multi-racial landscape there—and then sketch out the diversity of the immigrant labor force it recruited.  The aim is to highlight the urgency of careful analyses of the complex local and global processes, which interact to reconstitute Midwest rural towns into newly multi-racial and multi-cultural communities.

Corporate strategies of trans-local labor recruitment
Many industries in the Midwest have an unsatisfying thirst for labor, particularly for cheap labor that falls under the category of  “D” jobs (difficult, dirty and dangerous), have adopted a rural industrialization strategy.  This strategy aims to move farm-related industries to rural areas with depressed economies, where they can be closer to their raw material and are more sought after by economically desperate municipalities and the local labor force. 
The industrial plant that has brought the West African and Latino immigrants to Hilltop and Riverbend is a multi-national meatpacking corporation that is benefiting from such rural industrialization.  The region’s original meat-packing company closed down its plant in 1986, shedding its predominantly white, unionized labor, to re-open in 1987 with less experienced workers.  The strategy brought down its cost of labor from $8.75 to $6.50 an hour.  By the mid- 1990s, however, the company’s turnover was close to 100 percent.  At the same point the town had lost 17 percent of its population.  The municipality, pre-occupied with the local job loss, offered the plant a 10-year, tax-free package by designating it as an “Enterprise Zone.”  The plant took advantage of this offer and a state-legislated subsidy for training a local labor force.  But it also shifted recruitment to a yet cheaper, more desperate labor force, more willing to endure the hard and hazardous work of the slaughter house at lower wages and thus having a lower turnover rate than would be the case with the while local workers. 
Racial and linguistic diversity of the recruited labor force
The company’s first wave of transnational recruitment sought out Latino immigrants, predominantly Mexicans, by using the strategy of mobile recruitment.  Mobile recruiters comprised of company staff and a nurse traveled in a van to towns in the South; they tested the wrist and back strength of potential workers and sent the strongest of the willing bodies north to Riverbend with a one-way bus ticket.  Today, however, mobile recruiters are no longer needed to recruit Mexican immigrants, as the workers themselves effectively do that for the plant among their network of friends and relatives, both inside and outside the U.S.  One worker I interviewed said that over the last 10 years he alone had brought 50 of his relatives into town, all of whom were linked to the plant.  Latino workers were also drawn to the area due to tightening control of the U.S.-Mexico border, which made traditional circular migration more difficult.  Consequently, motivated migrants now settling in the U.S., search for affordable areas that offer year-round, stable employment.  Many of the Latinos in Riverbend have relocated from California, Texas, and other more common destinations for Mexican immigrants.
The second wave of immigrant workers were recruited among French-speaking West Africans, predominantly Togolese, but also included workers from Congo, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Senegal.  The recruitment of West African workers started in 2002 and peaked in 2004 and 2005 as those social networks matured and turmoil arose in some African countries.  Today, 204 West Africans work at the plant, and an estimated 350 West Africans live in the area; the majority are Christian, some are Muslim and others are pantheist.  Their salient characteristic is their high level of education.  Among the plant workers I interviewed, there was a veterinarian, a mechanical engineer, a sociology professor, a human rights lawyer, a statistician, a geographer, an accountant, and many other Africans with university degrees, all cutting meat on the line. 

West African workers find their way to Hilltop and Riverbend through a different route than the recruitment process for Latinos described above.  They are almost all legal permanent residents of the U.S., most of who came with lottery visas obtained from Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).  Once lottery winners are notified of winning, they have six months to arrange for visas for themselves and their immediate family — spouse and children.  The cost of the move is backbreaking for an average African resident: at least $3,000 per person for an airline ticket, visa and medical examination fees, and travel within the country to obtain documents.  Such high costs make it impossible for even a mid-size African family to travel intact.  Parents and working-age adults in the household are prioritized, and small children that require a parent’s care remain behind with the hope that upon arrival to the U.S. the parent(s) can quickly save enough for their children to come to the United States before the six-month grace period ends.  That process makes the meat-packing plant, always in need of labor, an attractive destination for lottery visa winners who need an immediate, stable income to save the needed funds to bring their families to the United States within the allotted time.  Unfortunately, not many achieve this goal.  In the homes of many Africans in this Illinois village, the large pictures of loving children left behind are sad reminders of the brutal choices made at the time of departure.  Only seven children of African descent are currently registered in Hilltop’s School District.

As this brief outline indicates, the trans-local labor recruitment strategies of the local multi-national plant has had a powerful hand in changing the social landscape of a small formerly all-White Midwestern community into multi-racial and multi-ethnic communities.  Much of the received scholarship on globalization and cities, however, treat only the dynamics of multi-culturalism in large metropolitan areas.  Immigration research has only begun to shift its focus from the big cities, immigrants’ traditional destination, to immigrants’ new destinations in small communities of the heartland.  The intense social and economic transnationality of these isolated rural towns in the heartland, warrants reflection about the institutional structures created decades ago to foster the University’s international agenda as well as its service and outreach mission as a land-grant institution. What does this changing demographic reality mean for the realignments and synergies that may emerge amongst such units on campus? In the past two years, due to tightening immigration control and the crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Midwest packinghouses, the plant’s trans-local recruitment efforts have focused on workers with documented legal residence in the U.S., such as Puerto Ricans and Cubans.  As such, perhaps we need to rethink the structure of university units and their relevance to the contemporary reality of the university’s hinterland, in an effort to discern how the University can best reach out to the “African villages” and “little Mexicos” of Illinois.