From a Canadian report on how immigration is good for small rural communities:
There is no cookie cutter model for success, but the report’s case studies illustrate strategies small communities can capitalize on:
Winkler, where a quarter of the 9,106 residents are immigrants, used its Mennonite roots to attract Mennonite families from Europe and South and Central America. The strong community support triggered a "chain migration" that made it one of the fastest-growing rural communities.
Brooks, with 17.6 per cent of its 12,495 residents being newcomers, was helped by its key employer, Lakeside Packers, a meat processing and packing plant. The company needed 2,000 employees and worked with Calgary Catholic Immigration Society to bring in recruits from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. [Immigration reviving some small towns - thestar.com,By Nicholas Keung, October 6, 2009 ]
Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s not the racial differences between the white Mennonites and the Sudanese, et cetera, although that’s a big, important difference. (Which, under Canadian law, you’re not supposed to object to. ) Or that it’s not the religious difference between the Christian Anabaptist Mennonites, who do not practice female genital mutilation and polygamy, and the Muslim Africans who do. (Which, under Canadian law, etc. )
It’s not even the cultural difference between the excessively pacifist Mennonites, unpopular in First World War America because they didn’t want to fight the Kaiser, and the refugees from war-torn Africa. (If you see a Mennonite with a machete and a crowbar in the main street of your town, you can be pretty confident that he’s on the way to fix a buggy.)
No, the mentionable difference between one situation and the other is that the first is a normal, problematical, process of immigrants telling their friends and relatives to come join them, and the second is a multinational corporation importing 2,000 indentured laborers from poor, third world countries where they’ve never heard of labor unions. You would think that that sort of thing would be something a Canadian reporter could figure out. Lakeside Packers is actually based in America—it’s a subsidiary of Tyson Foods, and has done the same thing in America.
