Minnesota Farm Town Reshaped by Migrants Wrestles With Real Changes Beyond the Political Vitriol

Two Guatemalans wearing traditional embroidered skirts bought coconut boba teas on an October afternoon at the bustling downtown Asian market. In decades past, the building served as this rural town’s hardware store where farmers shopped for hammers, nuts and bolts.

Over the past generation, immigrants from Southeast Asia, East Africa and now predominantly Central America have transformed this once overwhelmingly white community on the vast prairie. Students of color constitute more than 80% of those enrolled in K-12, Spanish is most children’s first language, and soccer is far more popular than football.

“ Literally everything has changed,” said Chad Cummings, a city councilor and co-owner of the local radio stations — including a new 24/7 Spanish-language one.

Immigration is a core issue for voters this election, and some of the 2024 campaign’s most charged political vitriol has swirled around its effects on towns small and big across the country.

Like most lifelong residents in this politically red area, Cummings is proud of Worthington’s cosmopolitan flair, thriving economy and booming population. Thanks to migrants, most of whom come to work in the pork processing plant next to giant corn silos on its outskirts, the town has bucked the trend of rural communities nationwide that never recovered from the 1980s farm crisis.

But such rapid change has come with significant challenges and costs, as schools, churches and law enforcement have sought to respond to new needs despite language and cultural barriers. Old-timers and newcomers in Worthington are grappling with perhaps the most basic question — how to turn very separate groups into one functioning community.

“There are many ‘us’ in Worthington,” Cummings said. “How do we become a true blended community? Is it happening? It is, in some aspects. Is it fully happening? No. Will it ever? I don’t know.”

“Assimilation is going to take education,” he added. “The minority population, who is the majority; the Anglo population. … Until we can get that blend to come together, how does it work? How is it going to work?”

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Near her family farm, Julie Robinson attends the same Baptist church founded by Scandinavian immigrants in the 1870s where her grandmother worshipped in Swedish.

Two decades ago, the Indian Lake congregation was getting so small that they prayed for the miracle of five new families, she said. What they got was some 60 refugee families from Myanmar and Thailand, who today pack the Sunday afternoon service in their Karen language that follows the English one, one third its size.

Southeast Asians were the first foreign migrants to diversify Worthington, and the town has grown about 10% each of the past three censuses, to about 14,000 residents, said city administrator Steve Robinson. In Nobles County, of which Worthington is the seat, Latinos nearly tripled from 2000 to 2020, to more than 7,200 of 22,300 residents.

Government offices have hired bilingual employees since the bulk of customer service is in Spanish, Robinson said. The city has beefed up its recreation infrastructure, but struggles to address an acute housing shortage, with the few rental units going for big-city prices.

The economic and cultural changes are etched into the landscape, from the stores and churches to the baseball diamonds turned soccer pitches, where the fierce prairie wind mixes fallen leaves and corn husks.

Latinos and other immigrants have long gone from border states like Texas and California to revitalize Midwest towns like Worthington. They’re attracted not only by jobs but the feeling they’re safer and more familiar with the leave-doors-unlocked, no-traffic-lights pace of life, said Omar Valerio-Jiménez, a University of Texas at San Antonio history professor.

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Longtime residents’ longing for the glazed donuts from shuttered Lang’s Bakery matches only the Latino newcomers’ enthusiasm for the fresh bread that’s now baked in myriad varieties from walnut to jalapeño.

Over a post-liturgy lunch of pancake-like injera bread, Ethiopian Orthodox Church chairperson Abebe Abetew said their new worship space is where he and fellow East Africans “feel in our own home.”

“Everything we see and smell is like home,” he added. At a nearby table, women in white veils called netela said they’re glad their children make friends from other ethnic groups in school — but still prefer to socialize with other Ethiopian and Eritrean mothers.

Cristina Cabrera, who fled poverty in Central America three years ago, has similar preferences.

“Here I feel as if I were in my town in Guatemala, they’re my countrymen,” she said of downtown El Mexicano grocery’s clients. “We have all gone through the same.”

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But today, many migrants aren’t sure they’ll stay in Worthington. Some are undocumented and their status is precarious.

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More worrisome is the concern that traffickers are taking advantage of undocumented migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, Appel said.

Last year, the U.S. Labor Department found that a sanitation service company had employed 22 minors at the Worthington meatpacking plant in hazardous conditions. In 2006, when the plant was owned by a different conglomerate, federal immigration authorities made more than 200 arrests in a raid.

Over the past 10 years, nearly 800 unaccompanied migrant children were released to sponsors in Nobles County, according to federal data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

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For all of Worthington’s growing pains, school is one place where almost everyone sees hope.

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Of the roughly 3,300 in-person students, 500 are English learners. In 2024, 82% of them are students of color, compared to 29% in 1999, said Pat Morphew, the district’s accountant.

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