First, yeah Europeans committed all kinds of attrocities against native tribes in the past. We hear about that all the time and we'll have to keep hearing about it forever. But they also built over time the freeest, wealthiest, most innovative, and most productive society the world has ever known. Even looking at the cases of the tribes who were taken over: Do you seriously think that the members of those tribes today would have been better off if the colonial era never happened? You have a choice of being a US citizen of native american decent or a member of one of the uncontacted tribes of the amazon or New Guinea and you'd choose the latter?
Second, the exact reason white people are becoming a minority in this country is because of that more intelligent world you speak of. White people on average are far more likely to not have their first kids until they are educated, have started a career, and are nearly in their thirties and they're having far fewer of them than most of the minority races in this country. The hispanics and blacks are becoming a larger share of the population precisely because they have kids sooner (something you can do more easily when you don't go to college/grad school) and have more of them. So really there's two issues here. The death of small town (mainly white) america, the topic of the article and whose demise may or may not have merit. I mean I can agree with arguments on both sides of that one. Then there's the death of the european race, probably the most intelligent and open minded of any on the planet and whose demise certainly won't improve intelligence or openmindedness.
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How did the people of Ellis respond to your solutions for curbing the brain drain?
Carr: No bunch of people you write about are going to be thoroughly delighted; there's going to be a fair amount of rancor, and that's healthy. You need to use that as a steppingstone to reexamine what you're doing and say: Could we do something better? Could we make those linkages between secondary and postsecondary education better, so that high school is not just geared for people going on to a four-year college degree? Could we retrain people to be able to be competitive in industries that are a growth industry in Iowa, like biotech and nursing and wind energy? Could we begin to think differently about the stranglehold that big industry has on the heartland?
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Kefalas: In Ellis, people very clearly saw what is in their future, and I think this is something that the mayor, chamber of commerce members, and parents are all very clear about. The mayor on several occasions told me, "I'm worried we won't make it." There is a sense of fear and anxiety. But the battleground is ultimately going to be, how do we fix it? Reimagining education undoes a time-honored tradition of "Well, we send our best kids away—that's kind of what we do." What we're saying is, let's take a deep breath and think about this whole process of how you educate your young people.
Your book seems something of a rebuttal to those who have embraced the ideas of urban theorist Richard Florida, who argues that places thrive and prosper when filled with young, creative types and that communities should aim to lure or retain those sorts of people.
Kefalas: Florida is right; it's just that he's looking at one side of the coin, and we're looking at the other side of it. He's influenced folks all over the country to bring the creative class in and really develop a community. Unfortunately, the challenges for Iowa or western Pennsylvania or Michigan to make their creative class grow and bring their people in is maybe not the best solution for them.
Carr: Florida's argument is flawed because if you adopt that approach pretty much anywhere, you buy into the Field of Dreams notion that "if you build it, they will come." Michigan bought hook, line, and sinker into the Florida argument and created a "Cool Cities" program where they said, "Look, we have 70,000 college graduates every year; only 7 percent stay in the state; we need to fix that, so what we need is a whole bunch of cool cities because the cool cities will attract people." Well, guess what? The graduates still leave because there are cooler cities.
One of the solutions you propose to help revitalize rural communities is to bring in immigrant populations. Might that cause resentment and exacerbate the exodus of people from those towns?
Kefalas: It's interesting—when we look at ways to solve the depopulation problem, we keep coming back to the immigration solution because it's the one thing we know that works. But it's a very volatile solution. In Sioux City, Storm Lake, Ottumwa, all over the rural South and Midwest, the arrival of immigrants, from Somalia, from Latin America, from Mexico, is rapidly transforming these communities and keeping their schools open, keeping companies going, keeping Main Street alive, keeping churches alive. Folks understand—and certainly governors all over the region understand—the power of these folks to transform aging and demographically vulnerable communities.
Carr: It's not that this is a magic solution. One of the things we're very careful to write about in the book is that that also has to be linked to fundamental changes to how workers are treated in agribusiness. One of the issues with Hispanic workers in the Midwest, and part of the animosity that some people feel toward them, is that, yes, when they showed up, wages went down. But they didn't cause that. Agribusiness basically uses undocumented workers to depress wages. And the working conditions are nothing short of atrocious. The only response from the federal government has been the multimillion-dollar raid on Postville, Iowa [in May 2008]. The thinking has to be very bold on this in terms of changing the labor practices and changing our immigration practices away from interdiction and more toward pathways to citizenship for longtime undocumented workers.
Another way to bring people back is to, of course, create jobs. But as you point out in your book, there is the boredom factor—small rural towns have little diversity or diversions. How do small towns attract young people back without those qualities?
Kefalas: There are people who are going to leave, and I don't think there's anything that's going to stop them from leaving. But there are people maybe with young families or who tried urban living and wanted to opt out and try something else, who could be lured to the region—maybe not every 22-year-old, but maybe a 32-year-old who would think, "This is great. I can raise my kids, I can buy a gigantic house. And as long as I have the digital infrastructure, I can telecommute. I can have a very good quality of life." I think the lifestyle rural communities have to offer is really more compatible for young families. There are also ways to lure back professionals through more aggressive tuition breaks for medical students [in exchange for a commitment to return to the community after graduation], which I think is going to become more appealing as students take on more and more debt. And finally, the other thing we want to talk about is pushing the development of our community-college students, creating that infrastructure to match up economic demands for the regional economy with the young people who are most likely to stay.
Carr: You don't have to build amenities just to lure people. You should be building amenities for everybody—having digital infrastructure and having abundant opportunities for leisure should be something for the commonweal. But the mistake is often to place all of your emphasis on that. In some places there is a critical shortage of professional workers, especially health workers. Part of what can be done is for the kids who are growing up who seem to be on track for that is to identify them early and say, "Look, if you're going to go into medicine or dentistry or law, we're going to give you your tuition if you commit to practicing here for 10 years when you graduate." For the price of graduate school, you're getting a great deal.
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