The IndyStar recently published an opinion piece by Michael Hicks, which has since been republished elsewhere. Hicks, Associate Professor of Economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University, is concerned about the declining population of Indiana’s small towns, and has a “magic elixir” to counter it: international immigration.
Compared to both the Republican and Democratic position on immigration, particularly across the southern border, Hicks’ stance may seem downright radical. After all, Democrats in the highest positions of power have fully embraced the Republican border policy, uniting behind a border bill earlier this year that included a wishlist of Republican policies. Readers should not be fooled, however; the veneer of progressivism rapidly grows thin.
Per Hicks, almost three out of every four Indiana counties are forecasted to have their populations either shrink or stagnate over the next quarter century. The real problem though is that it’s the people with relatively better health, better education, and a “higher chance of starting a business” who are leaving. In other words, poor areas get poorer over time because wealthy people leave for greener pastures. As wealthy residents leave, public services that rely on income taxes for funding—such as schools—find themselves underfunded and unable to provide the services that enrich people’s lives.
The “magic elixir” that Hicks suggests does not address the lack of AP calculus, chemistry or biology courses offered only by every one out of every five Indiana school corporations, nor does it address the inherent inequity of a system which provides better services to wealthier communities. Rather, Hicks’ solution requires the exploitation of largely Black and brown immigrants from the global south, which, like one domino falling into the next, drives down wages for the rest of the working class.
To be sure, immigrants of all origin and documentation status should be welcomed, but Hicks is primarily interested in the “high human capital” of international immigrants. How exactly he measures this human capital is unmentioned, though he does clarify that this human capital is not measured in education. One might assume that Hicks views this as another upside to his solution. As he notes in the opinion piece, “Immigrants are also less sensitive to many of the quality-of-life considerations that drive native-born migration.”
What Hicks is arguing is essentially do nothing and let time sort it out. Because some studies have shown that a significant proportion of second-generation immigrants achieve a higher salary level and standard of living than their first-generation parents, we should expect international immigration to small towns to result in a booming population of higher-income earners. This will presumably result in larger city budgets for public services, making people less likely to leave.
There’s a lot of questions to be asked in this potential scenario that Hicks doesn’t bother exploring. For example, what’s going to keep those higher-income children from leaving?
Or, why would a Guatemalan make the decision to walk 2,588 miles from their home country to Logansport, Indiana? For someone capable of walking for 12 hours each day it would take at least 78 days to make that journey by foot alone. Even if you have other modes of transport, it’s a long journey, far from home, and to a destination that might as well have been plucked out of thin air.
Immigrants come here because U.S. imperialism wrecks their homes
That last question is of paramount importance. As the Washington Post recently reported, sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department have cost hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe their jobs in the past decade. Since Biden took office in 2021, the Treasury has imposed over 9,000 sanctions without care for the human consequences.
In 2022, three Guatemalan nickel mines were sanctioned, supposedly to curb international migration by cracking down on “corruption.” Two of the mines were owned by subsidiaries of a parent corporation, Solway; the third was independent. As a result of these sanctions, 2,000 miners lost their jobs, one-third of whom eventually attempted to move north for “economic opportunity.” Of the roughly 600 miners who attempted to migrate north in search of jobs, at least four have died.
As the Post lays out, after the mines shut down due to the sanctions, they stopped making payments to the local governments. As a result, teachers and sanitation workers were the next to be laid off. The ripple effect of these sanctions, imposed in a room thousands of miles away by people who had no connection to or knowledge of the people who would be impacted, was devastating to the local economy.
And this is only one example. The U.S. has attempted hundreds of regime change operations around the world since the beginning of the Cold War, including the 1954 coup in Guatemala that triggered a decades-long civil war that killed 200,000 Guatemalans. In calling for our small towns to “welcome” international immigrants, what Hicks is really calling for is the exploitation of victims of U.S. imperialism.
The solution does not lie in further embracing imperialism and exploitation
Hicks does not acknowledge it—perhaps, somehow, he’s genuinely unaware of it—but the cost of his “magic elixir” for our small towns is paid in blood, in more ways than one. The U.S.-Mexico border is the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record. Decades of neoliberal foreign policy has left the global south under-developed and vulnerable to the hegemonic rule of American imperialism, pushing migrants to make desperate journeys—only to be subjected to anti-immigrant policy from both the Democratic and Republican parties once they arrive.
We should welcome immigrants to our communities not for the profit that can be exploited from them, but with a spirit of solidarity. Our small towns are suffering the impact of decades of capitalist rule, and instead of coming up with real solutions, we’re told that taking advantage of people fleeing even worse conditions—conditions created by U.S. imperialism—will eventually improve the situation. As workers, we can recognize the similarities of our experiences, despite the difference in severity, and we can recognize the flaws in this cruel logic.
As the ongoing climate catastrophe continues to worsen, climate refugees—again primarily from the global south, which has been and will be most impacted despite contributing far fewer greenhouse gasses to the environment—will arrive in increasing numbers. We should welcome them, but more than that we should unite with them to build a just society. U.S. imperialism has displaced millions of people around the world, many of whom choose to make the treacherous and often deadly journey to the U.S. in hopes of not just “economic opportunity,” but the stability that our government denies them in their home countries. To reduce these people to a “magic elixir” which can improve the lives of Americans is a vile insult.
There is no magic solution to the problems facing our small towns, just as there is no magic solution to the problem of U.S. imperialism. The solution to our problems requires that we see our immigrant neighbors not as sources of “human capital” but as workers capable of organizing for a better world. Together, we can save not just our small towns; we can save our future.
Featured image: Diego Rivera’s “La gloriosa victoria,” depicting events surrounding the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, which culminated in immense violence and repression, including massacres of the indigenous population. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
