Posted on Sun, Jan. 19, 2003
Pioneer Press

JIM RAGSDALE: Austin's changing face reflects one similar to decades past
JIM RAGSDALE
Pioneer Press Columnist

The Rotary Club of Austin met last week for lunch, fellowship and a fresh perspective on their changing city.

It was not what I expected to hear.

After loading our plates with chicken and mashed potatoes, reciting the time-honored Rotary principles of fairness and goodwill, singing "When the Saints Go Marching In'' and greeting members of the red-hot Austin Packers' girls basketball team, member Roger Erickson spoke briefly.

"Of course, all of us are sons and daughters of immigrants," he said as he introduced the speaker, Dan Donnelly, a lawyer whose specialty is immigration law. His place of work: Austin, Minn.

His clients are from Sudan and Somalia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, people for whom the green card is the grail and an immigrant amnesty is devoutly to be wished.

Donnelly explained how post-Sept. 11 laws require his Arab clients to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, setting up a showdown with the federal government that other nationalities can avoid. He talked about clients showing up at an INS office at 4:30 a.m. in hopes of seeing a federal official that day. He explained the lengthy waits legal immigrants face to get permission for relatives to join them.

None of this is news along University Avenue in St. Paul or Lake Street in Minneapolis. But Austin's changing demographics are more recent. Mower County's population declined precipitously from 1960 through 1990. Then Austin showed a 6.3 percent spurt in the '90s, which officials attribute to foreign immigration.

The city of Spam and labor activism along the Cedar is still dominated by the company begun by George A. Hormel, himself the son of German immigrants. Workers from Africa, Mexico and Bosnia come here to work in packinghouses, much as Germans, Italians and Poles flooded Chicago packinghouses in the late 19th century.

The Rochester Post-Bulletin recently carried a story about members of Ethiopia's Anuak tribe working in Austin plants and trying to focus world attention on violence against their tribe back home.

Austin Mayor Bonnie Rietz welcomes the new arrivals and has helped put together services to help them adjust: around-the-clock child care, low-income housing and a Welcome Center.

Liliana Silvestry-Neilon, executive director of the Welcome Center, helps with immigration forms and job searches and filling out money orders.

Listening to the Rotary Club immigration presentation reminded me of my own packinghouse background. None of it involved Hormel or Austin. But the story might be the same.

Through the benevolence of alumni, the boys in my Los Angeles high school could get summer jobs at a central Los Angeles slaughterhouse. It was a job with good pay and unforgettably vivid conditions. Every day was a maelstrom of steam and frost, a riot of squealing pigs, hot-pink flesh and frozen carcasses. The production line stretched from the train car to the freezer. Everyone had a station. The hogs, suspended on rollers by a wooden post through the tendons of their hind legs, floated by your spot, thousands per day.

We were the summer help. Most of the regulars were Spanish-speaking men. This was the mid-1960s, and I believe that immigration status in southern California was a very gray area. It was understood that these were jobs that many people in L.A. didn't want.

"Easy money, kid!'' the regulars would shout from their butchering posts as I swept up the floor or pushed a row of carcasses into the freezer.

The story told by attorney Dan Donnelly and my own experience are tiny parts of a bigger American story. Chicago in the 19th century, L.A. in the 1960s and Austin in the 21st century — places where trainloads of hogs, local boys needing cash and immigrants willing to do our hardest jobs converge.

In L.A., we students would come and go, off to college at our parents' expense. Vacations, girlfriends, graduations intervened. Years passed.

And when we came back, the same men would be at their same posts on the line. "Easy money, kid!'' they would shout as the hogs drifted by.