The year after I left, the taconite mine that literally built the town in the 50s unexpectedly and immediately shut down. Some of my classmates who had stuck around to live the lives their fathers had were shell-shocked when only a few months after signing 30-year mortgages they found out that their well-paying job had just been pulled out from underneath them. Many people speculated that the town would not make it. Taxes had been essentially paid by the mining company, and so there would be no money to fix roads and pay for teachers and cops (my parents still pay less than $200 PER YEAR for property taxes). As a result of the closure, many people left the town. Surprisingly, though, many people stayed. Many of the residents were retirees and could survive because of the low cost of living.
Something even more surprising has happened in the last few years: the price of precious metals has increased so much that now other mining companies are talking about coming back to the Iron Range. One company has spent the last 3 years fixing up the facilities abandoned by the original mine. There are multi-million dollar building projects going on and hundreds of new jobs are forecasted. In fact, everyone is talking about this being the biggest economic boom for northeastern Minnesota in a generation. Seems like all good things for my childhood community.
The question I want to pose here, is, what are the social (and criminological) implications of such a rapid change? The area went from boom to bust and now back to an apparent boom in the matter of only a few years. Sounds like classic anomie to me. There is a very good article in the Duluth News-Tribune this morning written by an economist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth about some of these issues. Tony Barrett writes:
Face it, we’re in for several years of upheaval. Positive upheaval, for the most part, but upheaval nonetheless. Change does not come easily for anyone and the communities on the Range will be no different.Are we prepared for such changes and should we expect an increase in crime as a result? How will the life-long Rangers get along with those who come from elsewhere? What can we do NOW to prepare for the changes? There is very little analysis of rural crime issues in the literature, though it seems to me that this is a case study of how rapid social change can affect rural areas.
2 comments:
I think it depends a lot on the available work force ready and able to do the work required in such facilities. Iowa saw a decline in farming in the 1980s, especially the lose of family farms in favor of larger corporate farms. In the 1990s several national meat packers began open facilities in small towns that no longer had a surplus of laborers willing to do that type of work. What happens instead? You see an inflow of migrant workers (some legal, many not).
The social outcomes and dynamics of that transition are amazing. A small town of a few thousand people, all Lutheran or Catholic, all with roots back to the same part of Europe, suddenly has an international grocery store and a foreign language radio station. Occasionally the feds like to feds their muscle on the matter (as they did yesterday in one small community; look for details on the Postville raid at http://www.desmoinesregister.com)
and make a raid.
This is when the tension start to emerge, but perhaps not in the way you would expect. You have the groups that oppose illegal immigration. You have the usual rebuttal of "if Americans would do the work, immigrants wouldn't come here". You have debate about the latter point, saying the corporations abuse the rights/interests of immigrants by knowingly underpaying them and knowingly violating the law. You have locals who now realize their neighbors and a sizable portion of the community tax base are not threatened. Etc.
You also see the emergence of unexpected dynamics. Last year there was a raid on a plant in a "larger" town where my sister and her family live. The feds didn't handle the matter all that well. Both parents were arrested and no one realized there were children coming home from school to an empty home. School enrollment plummeted the next day as those not arrested hunkered down with their family, etc.
I'm not taking a stand on the illegal immigration issue at this point. I think it is too complicated to just say it is good or bad. My point is, will this be the future of the range? Will mining companies find they have to turn to illegal immigrants to fully staff these facilities after more than a decade of being out of the area? Will they have to turn to legal immigrants, who don't bring in ICE, but bring in other social disruption (not because of specific criminal/deviant acts, just simply because it introduces variance into historically homogeneous communities)? And WHY THE HELL have they not raised taxes in your parent's home town? Is it tradition or driven by the economic capacity of the population? I pay almost that much in a month and I my house is small and modest (ask Velma, Pap, or Patch, who have all seen the place).
This is really interesting, Patch. Thanks for posting this.
A similar thing happened -- on a much, much larger scale, of course -- in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities that also were defined by one industry. (For an excellent analysis of Detroit's rise and fall, read Thomas Sugrue's "The Origins of the Urban Crisis".) Of course, there is a different set of issues with boom-and-bust (-and-boom?) in rural areas, but it would indeed be interesting to examine whether rural areas that undergo massive social change experience similar types of crime patterns as large urban centers do.
I also am reminded of "Crime and the American Dream" -- what happens when the primary means of achieving the American Dream in a particular city or region suddenly disappears? Is the loss of a tent-pole industry felt more sharply in isolated, rural areas because there are fewer easily accessible alternatives for employment? Or does the higher relative level of community cohesion in rural areas help cushion the economic blow in ways that are not possible in big cities?
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