Employees work at a Rivian electric vehicle factory in Normal, Ill., in 2021. A historic recovery in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 was concentrated in small urban areas such as McLean County, where Normal is located, and where car and candy factories have added jobs. (Courtesy of Rivian)

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, McLean County, Illinois, was known mostly as the home of State Farm Insurance in Bloomington and Illinois State University in Normal.

Now, the area illustrates a trend that’s bringing more factories to small cities with lower costs of living: It has thousands of new jobs manufacturing Rivian electric vehicles and a new candy factory that will produce Kinder Bueno and other Ferrero candies.

“Food and electric cars. This is not something we were known for before 2019,” said Patrick Hoban, president of Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council in McLean County.

“We’re primarily an insurance and university town that’s just now seeing a rise in manufacturing. Rivian has ramped up from 300 to 8,000 employees, and I don’t think anyone realized how fast that was going to happen,” Hoban said.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to rebuild American manufacturing, and he won handily in most areas hollowed out by the movement of factory jobs overseas. But the rebound Trump promises has already been underway in many places: McLean County is part of an unusually strong jump in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 — the first time manufacturing employment has recovered fully from a recession since the 1970s, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

There were about 12.9 million manufacturing jobs in 2023, slightly more than in 2019. However, the number of manufacturing jobs has declined precipitously since the all-time peak in 1979, when there were 19.4 million of them and they were a much larger share of overall employment.

Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University professor and labor history expert, said manufacturing has been on an upswing since 2010 as the nation started recovering from the Great Recession. The pandemic interrupted the trajectory, but the United States recently saw a hopeful increase in pay for the new jobs, he said, as the Biden administration aimed to increase both wages and jobs through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The Biden administration tried to use policy to ensure that more of these would be union jobs or at least offer union-level wages,” McCartin said. “This approach is almost certainly dead due to the results of the election.”

Employers may have a hard time filling lower-paying manufacturing jobs such as meat processing if the new Trump administration deports the immigrants who fill them, said William Jones, a University of Minnesota history professor and former president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.

“These will be hard hit if Trump follows up on his deportation plan,” Jones said. “The political rhetoric is that a bunch of native-born workers will move into these jobs, that they’re getting squeezed out, but that’s actually not the case. Some of these industries are extremely dependent on immigrant labor.”

Where growth happened

Small urban areas such as McLean County got most of the increase in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Innovation Group report. Rural areas lost those jobs, and large cities saw no change.

It was mostly Sun Belt and Western states that saw the increases during those years, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The largest percentage changes in manufacturing jobs were in Nevada (up 14%), Utah (up 11%), and Arizona and Florida (each up 9%). The largest raw numbers of new manufacturing jobs were in Texas (up 48,200), Florida (up 35,100) and Georgia (up 22,900).

Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi also have seen more automotive jobs as manufacturers have taken advantage of lower costs and state “right-to-work” laws that weaken unions. Vehicle manufacturing jumped by 7,800 in Alabama and 6,600 in Mississippi, the largest increases outside California.

Meanwhile, traditional Rust Belt states have seen continued declines, with manufacturing jobs down about 2% in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and also in Illinois — despite McLean County’s success.

Manufacturing is playing a critical role in Nevada as it tries to diversify its tourist-oriented economy so it can better weather downturns such as the one during the pandemic, said Steve Scheetz, research manager for the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development.

Automotive and other battery manufacturing and recycling, driven by electric carmaker Tesla and battery recycling firm Redwood Materials, account for much of the increase in Nevada manufacturing, Scheetz said.

As in Illinois, the job growth tended to be in smaller areas outside big cities, such as Storey County, just east of Reno, with a population of about 4,200.

“Fifteen years ago, this small county in rural Nevada was relatively unknown,” Scheetz said, adding that jobs and economic output has risen tenfold and the number of total jobs — including manufacturing — has grown from less than 4,000 to almost 16,000 in those 15 years. The county also is home to plants making building materials, industrial minerals and molded rubber, among other products.

The Biden administration focused on bringing more blue-collar jobs to small cities like Normal and Bloomington, said Jones, the University of Minnesota professor.

“Much of the growth is due to [President Joe] Biden’s manufacturing investments. There was a conscious strategy to focus on small towns to get the political benefit in places that tended to vote Republican,” said Jones.

If there was a play for political benefit, it got mixed results: Vice President Kamala Harris carried McLean County, Illinois, on Nov. 5, but she lost Storey County, Nevada, by the largest margin for a Democrat in 40 years.

Blue-collar wages

The decline of unions and the availability of cheaper labor overseas have dampened U.S. factory job wages in recent decades. Even so, manufacturing jobs remain an attractive path for blue-collar workers.

Manufacturing pay still ranks fairly high among the blue-collar fields at an average $34.42 per hour as of October — less than wages in energy ($39.98) or construction ($38.72), but considerably more than hospitality ($22.23) or retail ($24.76). That also was the case in 2019, and it has led many state and cities to seek more factory positions to balance out the lower-paying service jobs that have blossomed as manufacturing has waned.

But in the past year, state Republican leaders have pushed back on a burgeoning Southern labor movement that aims to bring higher wages and better benefits to blue-collar workers.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a new law in May that would claw back state incentives from companies that voluntarily recognize labor unions. GOP leaders in Georgia and Tennessee also passed laws pushing against a reinvigorated labor movement, viewing unions as a threat to the states’ manufacturing economies.

Much of the increase in Alabama manufacturing jobs has been in the northern part of the state, near Tennessee and Georgia. Since the pandemic began, Mazda Toyota Manufacturing came on line with the goal of hiring 4,000 vehicle production workers and another 2,000 in nearby parts factories as other manufacturers also boosted hiring. Private investment in Alabama automotive manufacturing totaled $7 billion over the same time frame, Stefania Jones, a spokesperson for state Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair, said in a statement to Stateline.

Supply-chain problems during the pandemic illustrated the advantages of American-made goods, said McCartin, the Georgetown University professor. However, without union support, today’s factory workers are unlikely to achieve the middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by earlier generations, he said.

“The growth of manufacturing itself is unlikely to become a panacea for what ails working-class America,” McCartin said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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Faith leaders with the Dane Sanctuary Coalition spoke out against anti-immigrant rhetoric at the Midvale Community Lutheran Church Thursday | Wisconsin Examiner photo

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance traveled to western Wisconsin this week to double down on his spurious attacks on immigrants, promising to “kick these illegal aliens out.” 

It was the second time in two weeks that Republicans have campaigned in the rural, western part of the state on their “mass deportation” platform. 

The region where Vance and U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden made their recent stands against immigrants is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Immigrants make up a large majority of the workforce on area dairy farms and they do most of the heavy lifting for other key businesses in the area including Ashley Furniture — the world’s largest furniture manufacturer — and the Pilgrim’s poultry processing plant. 

Western Wisconsin has experienced a big recent demographic shift with an influx of Latin American immigrants. And those newcomers have revitalized small towns across the region that were in decline because young people are moving away, leaving an aging white population. Mexican restaurants, grocery stores and other small businesses have given new life to fading Main streets and young families have filled schools that were on the brink of closure from low enrollment.

It’s hard to keep up with all the falsehoods politicians are spreading about immigrants in this campaign season. Among the doozies Vance dropped during his visit to Eau Claire was his baseless assertion that immigrants caused two area hospitals to close recently and that mass deportation will “make the business of rural health care much more affordable.”

The closure of those rural hospitals was agonizing for the communities that struggled to hold on to them. An aging patient population, low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, trouble finding and keeping staff, and a larger harsh landscape for nonprofit hospitals were among the factors that caused the hospitals to close. But neither the legislators who worked on the issues nor hospital management pointed to immigrants as the problem. There’s good reason for that.

Across the country, immigrants use the U.S. medical system far less than people born in the U.S. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that: “Recent immigrants were responsible for only about 1% of public medical expenditures even though they constituted 5% of the population,” and “immigrants’ medical costs averaged about 14% to 20% less than those who were US born.”

As Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, has seen that phenomenon up close. She explained during a panel I participated in this week that given a choice between seeking medical care and staying on the job, “immigrant workers will choose to keep working every time, unless it’s a dire emergency.”

Meanwhile, national research shows that immigrants — including those without legal status — pay more into government health care programs through tax withholdings than they use in benefits. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes, about a third of which went to Medicare and Social Security —  programs they will never be able to use —Wisconsin Watch reports. Without them, U.S. safety net programs would take a big hit.

Other misleading campaign talking points mix up immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal authorization, like most Wisconsin dairy workers, with refugees and asylum seekers like the atrociously slandered Haitian refugees Vance and Trump have been falsely accusing of eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — who are here under U.S. protection and therefore not, contrary to campaign rhetoric, eligible to be deported. 

Antonio De Loera-Brust, a United Farm Workers spokesman, told Wisconsin Watch that the point of anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a real policy plan. After all, deporting millions of workers would be logistically impossible, in addition to depriving U.S. agriculture of a huge portion of its labor force. Employers who support Trump despite his threats, De Loera-Brust theorized, aren’t worried about losing their workers — they see the rhetoric as a way to frighten farmworkers so they don’t demand their rights. “I don’t think you need to psychoanalyze it that much further beyond, ‘This is in their economic interest,’” he told Wisconsin Watch.

He has a point. There is nothing coherent or logical about the barrage of hateful rhetoric about immigrants. Fear itself seems to be the point. And a system in which a disempowered workforce lives in fear is a system that is bound to be rife with exploitation.

Still, some farmers do object to the nasty characterization of immigrants. They point out that there is no legal visa for year-round farm work, even though the U.S. has depended on these workers to do jobs Americans don’t want to do for decades now. They want a visa program that recognizes that work and gives the people who’ve been here a long time a path to citizenship. 

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about all the political flame-throwing over communities supposedly afflicted by immigrants is that many of the people who live in those communities don’t agree that they are afflicted at all.

I found this out when I interviewed local leaders in Whitewater, Wisconsin, which was the focus of a lot of misleading political spin about a supposed sudden “flood” of Nicaraguan asylum seekers causing a crime wave. It turned out that story was false.

Eau Claire, like Whitewater, has been welcoming asylum seekers from other countries for years, and, as in Whitewater, residents there say the experience has enriched their community.

Matt Kendziera, executive director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, lived in Eau Claire for 29 years before moving to Madison last year. He said he never heard divisive talk about the arrival of people from other countries in the community until Vance visited this week to talk about the scourge of immigration. “Eau Claire has been a wonderful and welcoming community to the refugees who are there,” he  told me. Many former refugees have become community leaders, he added, running for city council and becoming active in the local schools. 

I spoke to Kendziera Thursday during a news conference at the Midvale Lutheran Community Church in Madison, where faith leaders who are part of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition were speaking out against “the growing number of vicious, racist lies, hatred, bomb threats, persecution and death threats against asylum seekers,” according to a coalition press release.

“This church has had the privilege of accompanying asylum seekers,” said Midvale Lutheran’s co-pastor, Rev. Katie Baardseth. Families from Cameroon, Ukraine and Colombia fleeing persecution and violence had found “peace and success in Madison,” she said. The experience of welcoming those families had benefited the congregation, she added.

Rabbi Jon Prosnit of Temple Beth El talked about Jews’ historical experience: “We’ve been targeted, we’ve been scapegoated. … We are always on guard lest our own hearts harden,” he said, adding that welcoming and protecting outsiders is “the most repeated injunction in the entire Torah.” 

Ibrahim Saeed, president of the Islamic Center of Madison, described the history of the Muslim people as a history of persecution and exile but also of being welcomed by strangers. God made humanity, he said, “so you can get to know each other, not to despise each other.”

Without a doubt, there’s a demographic shift going on in Wisconsin, especially in rural areas. But community leaders, employers and regular citizens in Wisconsin communities like Whitewater, Eau Claire and Arcadia have embraced the change and the energy and economic and cultural benefits that come with it.

It’s inspiring to talk to people who have opened their hearts, welcoming newcomers and feeling their own lives and communities enriched by the experience.

Contrary to all the toxic rhetoric, immigration is a net plus for our country, and especially for the white, rural areas the Trump/Vance campaign is targeting in Wisconsin. Beneath the noise of the political campaign, a lot of people in those communities can tell you about it. 

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Migrants wait throughout the night on May 10, 2023, in a dust storm at Gate 42, on land between the Rio Grande and the border wall, hoping they will be processed by immigration authorities before the expiration of Title 42. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)

It seems absurd to take the time to refute the preposterous claims about immigrants made by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in Wisconsin, including U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Sen. Ron Johnson. But the campaign of slander targeting vulnerable workers who milk our cows, pick our crops, build our roads and prop up our economy is genuinely dangerous.

Trump hit a new low when he claimed during Tuesday’s presidential debate that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Kamala Harris’ bemused reaction, laughing and shaking her head, reflected the feelings of a whole lot of viewers who were appalled to hear the former president spreading a racist internet fable from the debate stage. 

This was not a one-off. Outrageous lies about immigrants are the centerpiece of Republican campaigns this year.

On Monday, as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden held a press conference to turn a single criminal case against a Venezuelan immigrant into fodder for his reelection campaign in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District. 

“American citizens’ human rights are being violated. They’re being kidnapped, raped and murdered by criminal, illegal aliens, and it’s just got to stop,” Van Orden declared.

In reality, an extensive study led by Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky shows that immigrants are significantly less likely to be locked up for serious crimes than people born in the U.S. “From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Abramitzky said.

As dairy farmer John Rosenow, who lives in Van Orden’s district, told Redman, anti-immigrant rhetoric does nothing to help farmers like him, who employ some of the immigrants performing 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of those workers are not here legally and could be deported at any time, because Congress has failed to enact a visa program for year-round farm work. 

“If there’s one thing you can do to help us [it’s to] tone down the rhetoric,” Rosenow said he told Van Orden’s staff. “They’re doing all the work, and why do we select one person that does something wrong that’s an immigrant and make it like all immigrants are like that person?” Rosenow added. “We don’t do that for Americans. We’ve got plenty of bad white people around here that do bad things, and we don’t extrapolate that to everyone else.”

But stirring up white voters with race-baiting stories about immigrants is a vote-getter, Republicans figure. 

On Wednesday, Wisconsin’s Sen. Johnson joined Senate GOP colleagues in a press conference demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act “to protect integrity in U.S. elections and ensure only U.S. citizens can vote.” Republicans are threatening to shut down the U.S. government over the non-issue of alleged voting by undocumented immigrants — something that is already a felony. 

Instances of unauthorized immigrants voting are “so rare as to be statistically nonexistent,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told the Christian Science Monitor — hardly a “crisis” that merits the extreme measures Johnson and his colleagues are calling for.

For the most part, Democrats have responded to Republican alarmism about immigration by sticking to policy and brushing off the fearmongering and grotesque caricatures of immigrants. Taking the high road might be a smart political strategy, particularly for Harris, who is herself the child of immigrants and the first woman of color with a serious shot at the White House. Like Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, Harris has responded to race-baiting attacks by rising above them and encouraging Americans to do likewise, to “turn the page” on ugly, divisive politics, to embrace a big-hearted sense of ourselves as having “more in common than what divides us.” Calling out racism directly is a loser for candidates of color, political consultants advise.

At the same time, Democrats including Harris and Wisconsin’s incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin point out — correctly — that Republicans in Congress abandoned a bipartisan border security deal they’d helped negotiate because Trump told them to let it die so he could use immigration as a campaign cudgel.

It’s true that the incident shows the GOP’s lack of seriousness about tackling the U.S. immigration system they are constantly complaining about. But the border security bill also drew a lot of criticism from immigrant rights groups, particularly for the way it turns the U.S. asylum application process into a game of roulette, allowing a future administration to deny asylum protections, and changing the rules on a day to day basis when border crossings exceed a certain threshold.. Harris has pledged to sign it anyway if she’s elected.

That’s too bad, because the bill does nothing to address the issue she was charged with looking into as vice president: the root causes of mass migration. Nor will it stop people from sneaking across the border to fill jobs while employers are desperate for their labor — including on Wisconsin dairy farms. 

These workers are already vulnerable to exploitation. They come here with no legal protections and work long hours for low pay doing back-breaking jobs Americans won’t take. They pay taxes through wage withholdings into social safety net programs they can never access. 

To a lot of citizens they are invisible. Anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric casts them in an ugly glare, focusing resentment on people who are already living in tenuous circumstances. They are not only doing our dirty work, they are boosting the wages of U.S. workers and making our economy stronger.

The injustice of Republicans’ anti-immigrant libel, set beside immigrant contributions to the U.S. economy, is overwhelming. 

Political point-scoring aside, it would be nice to see Democrats stand up more forcefully on this topic, instead of tacitly agreeing with Republicans’ false claims that immigrants are harming our country. Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Baldwin this year in the U.S. Senate race, claims without evidence that immigrants are causing the lack of affordable housing and driving up the cost of health care. Baldwin has said she supports the bipartisan border security bill and wants to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. 

What we don’t hear enough about is that the big reason migrants pour across our southern border is because employers like the farmers here in Wisconsin demand it. Without those immigrants — if, for example, Trump launched his promised “mass deportation,” sending federal agents door to door to arrest undocumented workers — our dairy industry would go belly-up overnight.  

“Immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell writes in a recent column. “That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.”

Van Orden, in his recent press conference, acknowledged the contributions of immigrants to the dairy industry in his district, along with the construction and hospitality industries, and said that’s why he supports the H-2A visa program, which gives temporary visas to migrants to do seasonal farm work in the U.S.

But the H-2A program “means nothing to dairy farmers,” Rosenow told the Examiner, since it doesn’t apply to workers who labor year-round on dairy farms, as well as in all of the other industries Van Orden mentioned.

Instead of scapegoating, we owe hard-working immigrants a debt of gratitude. And we need to listen to employers like Rosenow, who are asking politicians to show some common decency and come up with policy solutions that acknowledge what they’ve known for decades: Our country benefits tremendously from immigrants. 

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