Residents feel that national outlets have misrepresented their tax-related concerns as racism.
Tucked away among the corn and soybean fields of southwest Minnesota, the city of Worthington looks in many ways like the epitome of small-town America.
Settled next to Lake Okabena, Worthington’s neighborhood streets are lined with maples, elms and cedar trees, and the brick downtown buildings are filled with local businesses.
There are plenty of jobs – in manufacturing, in bio-science, in health care – for the city’s 13,000 residents. A JBS meatpacking plant is the city’s largest employer.
But in 2019, during the last surge at the Southwest border, this small Minnesota city unwittingly found itself at the center of the national debate over illegal immigration and its impact on the communities where those immigrants settle. At issue was yet another school bond referendum, the sixth since 2013 (the previous five all failed), this time to build a new $37 million intermediary school to help ease the district’s overcrowding issues.
National news coverage of Worthington in 2019 tied the referendum to the large number of unaccompanied minors from Central America who had recently been settled in the community, and it essentially linked opposition to the referendum to anti-immigrant bias.
Worthington leaders on both sides of the school-funding issue told National Review that the news coverage of their city blew the divide over immigration out of proportion. But two years later, as even more unaccompanied minors arrive at the U.S. border – more than 34,000 arrived from January through March – there will likely be more communities like Worthington all across the country that will be forced to contend with the sudden and unexpected arrival of large numbers of third-world immigrants in their cities and in their schools.
“I think all across the country, rural America is changing and it’s becoming more diverse, and looks different than it did 40 years ago,” said John Landgaard, Worthington’s superintendent of schools. “We just happened to have it at a quicker pace than most rural communities.”
Worthington first received national attention in September of 2019, when the Washington Post published a story that painted the city as not only sharply divided over school finances – does the city need a new school, and if so, how should it be paid for? – but also over immigration.
It turns out, because of the availability of jobs, little Worthington has become a go-to destination for newly arrived immigrants from Central America. Between 2013 and 2019, more than 400 unaccompanied minors were placed in Nobles County, the second most per capita in the country at the time, according to the Post.
“Their arrival,” according to the Post, “has helped swell Worthington’s student population by almost one-third, forcing administrators to convert storage space into classrooms and teachers sprint between periods, book carts in tow.”
Following the Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in November 2019, that in Worthington, “A bitter fight over school funding has become a flash point in a larger debate about immigration and its impact on this southwestern Minnesota prairie town.”
In a Star Tribune op-ed, former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann wrote that “the arrival of illegal immigrants has ripped at the social fabric that held Worthington together for generations.”
But school and community leaders told National Review they felt the news reports painted an unfair portrait of the city and its residents. Yes, they said, the city’s demographics have changed considerably over the last few decades. And yes, the schools are overcrowded. But most of the opponents of the school bond referendum really were focused on finances and who shoulders most of the tax burden, not on the race or ethnicity of the students, they said.
“Unfortunately, those stories were, in my view, blown out of proportion. That’s just my take,” Landgaard said. “In our community, I’m sure there are those people who take issue with immigration and immigrants, but it really came down to the cost and the tax burden that people took issue with on some of the requests.”
Congressman Jim Hagedorn, who represents southern Minnesota and lives in nearby Blue Earth, said he doesn’t think the news reports accurately depicted the dynamics in Worthington. He thinks some residents were painted with a broad brush, and portrayed as “bad folks because they didn’t want to support the referendum.” He said Worthington is not a racist place.
“I visit Worthington fairly regularly. I don’t see any of that,” he said. “All I see is a community that celebrates a lot of different backgrounds.”
Landgaard said it’s true that Worthington has become more diverse, but it hasn’t happened overnight, and it’s not just because of the recent arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America. Rather, he said, the city’s manufacturing and meatpacking plants have been attracting immigrants since the early 1990s. At first, they were immigrants from Laos and various African countries. Now there are more immigrants coming from Latin America, he said.
Twenty years ago, Worthington schools were about 30 percent “diverse,” Landgaard said. Now it’s closer to 70 percent. There are 34 languages spoken in the district, he said.
Landgaard pointed at the way Minnesota funds schools as the real reason for the divisions over the bond referendums. The state’s practice of using property taxes to pay for schools has historically put a disproportionate burden on farmers and other large land owners.
Worthington isn’t the only rural Minnesota community that struggled to pass school bond referendums. According to a 2019 report by Minnesota Public Radio, the Minnesota Rural Education Association estimated that farmers often pay two-thirds or more of the increase when taxes are raised to pay for new schools. A new tax credit that puts a larger share of the burden for building new schools on the state is helping to ease the burden on farmers.
“Minnesota’s system really was out of alignment, and particularly on ag land,” Landgaard said. “That was the big problem.”
Landgaard acknowledged that there were some community members opposed to the referendum who initially started down the road of tying school overcrowding to immigration.
“There was some that were part of that that had that feeling. Did everybody? No, I do not think so, and I don’t want to believe that if that were really the case,” he said.
Ultimately, though, “it really is about money and the tax burden on tax payers, not immigration or immigrants,” Landgaard said of the most recent referendum, which voters approved.
Like much of rural America, southwest Minnesota is a generally conservative place. In Nobles County, where Worthington is the county seat, 64.4 percent of voters cast their ballots for then–president Donald Trump in 2020. Hagedorn, who considers himself to be an immigration hawk, said he believes a lot of the voters in Worthington share both his appreciation for legal immigration and his disapproval of illegal immigration.
Hagedorn said he taken heat from the media and from the left for supporting Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.
“They say we’re bad people for that,” Hagedorn said. “I think that they were looking at it exactly the same way with the folks (in Worthington) that said, ‘Gee, why do I have to pay the extra money? That’s not fair to us.’ They want to see the government do a better job of protecting the country and not putting them in that position.”
Landgaard said the way Worthington and its residents were portrayed was unfortunate.
“I don’t think in my view people got a clear picture of how well we support our kids,” he said. “And the community support we have is very good. I don’t have any complaints about how much our community is invested in the school system.”