“We need those immigrants. Our survival depends on them. How do we treat these people new to our community with the decency and respect all people deserve.” 

What kumbaya fairytale is this? Who says stuff like that anymore? Gotta be the libs.

Well, no. People who say these nice things about immigrants are conservatives, often old and white. They’re the kind that sets off visions of the Tea Party and white privilege. But when push comes to shove, they have the economic presence of mind, loyalty to place and just plain decency not only to accommodate legal and illegal immigrants but also to – get this! — appreciate the diversity they bring.

So, let’s see about those mysterious pro-immigrant, elderly white conservatives, once known as “town fathers.”

That pro-immigrant conservative view is not so exceptional if you know where to look, which James and Deborah Fallows did when they spent a few years crisscrossing the country looking at communities doing surprising and worthy things.

Consider two communities. One is Dodge City, Kansas, which the Fallowses have written about. 

The other is Whitewater, a town of 15,000 in southwestern Wisconsin that, much to its surprise and disappointment, has very recently become a part of the national immigration debate.

Both towns are overwhelmingly white. People in both voted for Trump by two to one margin. Both were solidly GOP before Trump. Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker, used to represent Whitewater in Congress. Now his former aide does.

Dodge City

Here is what Dodge City looks like right now. The younger the age bracket, the larger the Latino population. The schools are about three-quarters Hispanic. The business and political leaders are mainly white, often from old-line Dodge City families.

Instead of fighting a last-ditch battle against immigrants, the white establishment has embraced them. Instead of refusing to allocate money to the schools, a common response by older voters everywhere, the town has developed school programs that meet immigrants’ special needs.

The reason? It’s all about the meat. Dodge City has always been a big-time livestock and slaughterhouse town. If those big companies left, the town would die.

Even though slaughterhouse work pays fairly decent wages, non-immigrants don’t want the jobs. The work depends almost entirely on immigrant labor.

A meat-packing plant manager described it: “There are some pockets of people here who are ‘old school,’” he said. “They’d like to ‘take America back’ and so on. But by and large, people here — Anglo and Hispanic and otherwise — recognize that we’re in this together. The immigrants are the engine that keeps this community alive.”

I’m a conservative guy, he says, so “If I say it in conservative circles, I might run the risk of somebody heating up the pot of tar, to tar and feather me. But embracing immigration? It’s the reality of our town.”

Whitewater

Over the past few years about a thousand new immigrants, mostly Hispanic, have settled in Whitewater.  For a town of 15,000 that’s a fairly significant amount. 

They did not come en masse. They weren’t bussed by a border state politician trying to stick it to the libs. Maybe not a totally ordinary day in the life of a small Midwestern town, but ordinary enough. 

At least the town thought so. Before they became hostage to national politics.

To get the flavor, here are two headlines. One is from the right-wing anti-immigration Breitbart:

“Biden Floods Small Wisconsin Town with A Thousand Immigrants.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “In Whitewater, an influx of immigrants has leaders determined to welcome newcomers, solve problems.”

The Breitbart story says little about the problems the town now faces, but it’s much more about big picture, national politics and of course Biden. 

Wisconsin’s Republican US senator and the GOP congressman representing Whitewater talked in the same terms.

But, like the local leaders in Dodge City, people in Whitewater did not see the issue that way. They could not afford to. 

Breitbart described Whitewater as a fragile, beleaguered community overrun by mini-hordes of strangers.

In contrast, Whitewater folks don’t feel beleaguered. They feel challenged. That’s a “poor me” versus a “can do.” Crucial difference.

Many in the town might be sympathetic to the big picture, blame Biden, shut the boarder anti-immigration story, but  it’s not relevant to their present situation: dealing with an immediate concrete challenge involving real people, the right here, right now.  Preserving the town by helping it change.

A local food pantry, begun five years ago, has expanded its services. Schools have changed their curriculums and methods to be more attentive to children whose first language is Spanish and who have had little schooling before. 

The police have changed their policies and training to deal with this new reality. The library has ordered more books to its existing Spanish-language collection. Private individuals and big companies like Walmart have donated time and money.

Two weeks ago, the Whitewater police chief sent a letter to President Biden asking for more resources to deal with immigrants. He listed the strains the influx has put on his department and the challenges the newcomers pose for themselves and for the town generally.

I see it as rare nuggets of hope and light in a dark world.

But he also said this: “None of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people. We see great value in the increasing diversity that this group brings to our community. We simply need to ensure that we can continue to properly serve this group.”

Diversity, sympathy, changing a place while also keeping a sense of place, that sounds like Dodge City and no doubt other places trying to make things work in an atmosphere where political hot air and unwillingness to compromise makes things worse for people trying to do right.

Sure, these are small places. The exact same approaches won’t work in big cities. 

Even so, it might help to break down large general problems into smaller more concrete ones. As David Brooks once said, there is a difference between homeless policy and doing something for a specific homeless person you see all the time.

That helps explain how a person who voted for an anti-immigrant demagogue like Trump can at the same time support immigration in her own community.

There is a crisis at the border for sure. National immigration policy, which really is way too generous a name for something that manages to be both inefficient and unjust, is not going to get better for who knows how long.

Given this chaos, much of the real work will need to be done in the way the director of the Whitewater pantry described her work: “There are all sorts of things that would benefit us that I can’t do. What we can do is focus on serving the needs of all of our community members as best as we can.”

You might see what Whitewater and Dodge are doing as farts in a windstorm. I see it as rare nuggets of hope and light in a dark world.