Given North Dakota’s rural hostility to immigration from Mexico, it’s time to recall the days when the sugar beet industry depended on Mexican labor to survive as an alternative crop for farmers.
The idea of growing sugar beets preceded the mechanization that finally began. As sugar beet farms grew in the 1930s and 1940s, local workers could not keep up with demand, so thousands of Mexican immigrants came to North Dakota to do the work.
Whole families – including children – had to work long hours in the heat to earn enough money to survive. Many of the living quarters consisted of one-room cottages with outbuildings and no water supply until the federal government mandated decent living conditions.
The immigrants were not the only beneficiaries. Stores on North Dakota’s main streets sold them clothing, groceries, pickup trucks, and everything else a household needs.
But we forget what these immigrants did for North Dakota’s economy when it was in trouble in the 1930’s. Sugar beet cultivation is now completely mechanized “Ready to launch” When it comes to fighting the weeds, attitudes toward Mexican immigrants have turned sour.
Many in North Dakota support building a wall on the border to prevent them from having what we have. We are silent as the Texas governor runs barbed wire across the Rio Grande to cut up any Mexicans trying to swim to the United States.
According to a Washington Post survey, immigrants are almost three times as likely (42%) as urban dwellers (16%) to be a burden on the country.
CATO, a conservative think tank, says that’s not true.
Researcher Alex Nowrasteh, writing for CATO, found the following: immigrants don’t take American jobs or lower wages; Immigrants make large net contributions to Medicare and Social Security.
Immigrants integrate into American society just like our grandparents did. Immigrants cause less crime than resident Americans (confirmed by other sources); Just one radicalized terrorist has 29,000,000 visa or status approvals and our immigration restrictions are stricter than some other countries.
The truth is that we assume we are more moral, more entitlement, and more loved by God than immigrants. Being white feeds this negativism. Because North Dakota is very rural, we harbor these attitudes and it is time to end this self-righteousness.
Space does not allow us to tell how our nation forced Mexico into an unjust war, after which we confiscated almost half of the country. The 525,000 square miles became Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of a few other states.
And the policy makers of the time claimed that God had ordained the theft that way “Manifest Destiny.”
Many Christians still believe in it today “Manifest Destiny” although the United States was established by secular national and local conventions of ratification. They created a secular government to solve secular problems without mentioning God.
The consequences of our dealings with Mexico are still being felt today, and as a nation we have a responsibility to atone for our sins. The least we could do would be to prioritize qualified Mexican immigrants in controlled numbers in our immigration laws.
Right now our penance is building walls in the Rio Grande and cutting up desperate people with barbed wire. Perhaps the time has come for a repeal “One Nation Under God” And “we trust in god” because none of them are true.
Lloyd Omdahl is a former North Dakota Lieutenant Governor and former Political Science Professor at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.
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