Latino’s?
In RURAL Iowa ?
Republican Country?
REALLY?
What about ALL that worry about MINORITIES taking over America???
Organizers said they plan to advertise Greene County to Latinos on social media, radio, television and billboards, and employers will arrange for vans to bring in workers as soon as this summer. Civic leaders are planning educational activities to integrate the community, with classes about soccer, language, and arts and culture, and they also are exploring ways to fix the area’s acute housing shortage.
The goal is to advertise to residents within a 60-mile radius, such as the city of Perry, where nearly 1 in 3 of the city’s 7,500 residents are Latinos and many work in meatpacking plants and construction. Organizers say Greene County is offering cleaner, safer jobs. The county is home to factories that make farming machinery, gymnastics equipment and the backboards for the National Basketball Association.
Employers, the city of Jefferson and Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa) have endorsed the plan. The county Board of Supervisors voted 3-to-2 in favor; one member expressed concern about the project’s cost, another said private businesses should create more housing to attract workers.
“We’ve got to do something different,” said Gary Vance, chief operations officer at Bauer Built Manufacturing, which makes agricultural machinery. He said at the town hall meeting in the village of Paton that he has as many as 60 job openings paying $19 to $24 an hour, “like now.”
While the town-hall meetings aimed to sell the idea to Greene County residents, they also served as a way to gauge their reactions. In 2020 voters here overwhelmingly supported Trump , who had called Mexicans “rapists” and criminals, and backed King in the primaries, which he ended up losing after his own Republican Party shunned him for racist remarks. People of Mexican descent are the largest Latino group in Iowa.
At the meetings, Argüello said he could not have imagined this happening in west-central Iowa years ago when he was one of few Latinos here, but he believed that things had changed. He emphasized that White and Latino Iowans both prioritize family, faith, work and education….