During a busy lunch hour at Postville’s Junior Senior High School, Brendan Knudtson, the superintendent and principal, walked through the school’s crowded halls, chatting with students. The rural school district of about 800 students has grown since Knudtson arrived more than a decade ago.
“We put seventh and eighth grade into this building, I don’t know, eight years ago, because of our growth population. We couldn’t fit them in the other building,” he said.
Its schools are at capacity due to the high number of immigrants who have come to Postville, initially drawn by jobs at local meatpacking plants, he said. About 60% of the district’s kids belong to minority groups, and about a third are English language learners.
Immigrants have been vital to keeping the district — and town — thriving, Knudtson said.
“They're all here living in houses. They're paying taxes. What would Postville look like if this wasn't the case?” he said. “It would be like many small, rural towns. There wouldn't be much left.”
Iowa’s birth rate has been falling, along with the national average, since the 1950s when it peaked. Iowa currently has a rate of 1.7 births per woman. Experts say a rate of 2.1 is needed to sustain its population over time.
At the same time, more young people are leaving the state. In recent years, immigration has played a big part in sustaining the state’s population, particularly in its rural communities.
The long-term drop in the birth rate is due to increased opportunities for women and more people focusing on careers, according to David Peters, a sociologist at Iowa State University. But the sharp drop in the last decade has been mostly due to economic strain.
“High housing costs, high mortgage interest rates, all mean that young ... couples looking to start a family, the cost of housing is prohibitive,” he said. “Child care has also gotten very expensive.”
Because of this, immigration has been key to sustaining the state’s population.
“Immigrants tend to have larger families for cultural and social reasons, and that has really helped stabilize rural birth rates,” he said.
Foreign migration to Iowa has spiked in the past four years. Experts say that's due to increased mobility following the end of COVID-19 policies that restricted movement, as well as more permissive immigration policies under the Biden administration.
“The U.S. had a really strong economic recovery [from the pandemic]," said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. “We had ongoing challenges, but saw really strong employment growth and job demand, and other countries didn't recover quite as quickly.”
This increase in immigrants has been beneficial for Iowa. The state needs them to fill manufacturing and meatpacking jobs that native Iowans just aren’t taking, according to Ben Murrey, the director of policy and research at Common Sense Institute Iowa.
“If foreign immigration into Iowa halted for the next four years ... the state would lose 11,000 labor force participants and $300 million in state domestic product,” he said.
Though many immigrants initially come to Iowa for work, many choose to stay here for the long run, Peters said.
“What keeps them here is the relatively good quality of life, particularly the school system, and the housing that they can find in rural Iowa that they don't really find in other states,” he said.
Postville has given Ricardo Garcia, who is originally from Mexico, opportunities he said he couldn’t find elsewhere, like owning a house and opening a business.
“I tried to buy a house someplace else. Nobody gave me the opportunity. Postville gave me the opportunity to buy a house. They gave me the opportunity to buy this building,” he said during a quiet afternoon at his restaurant, El Pariente.
Before moving to Postville nearly two decades ago, Garcia moved around the country, working at different meatpacking plants. He came to Postville to fill openings at the Agri Star meatpacking plant following a 2008 federal immigration raid that resulted in the deportation of hundreds of workers.
Garcia has lived in urban areas — he doesn’t like them. And he also likes living in a diverse community where he can learn about other cultures.
“Small towns, you know everybody, and small town's people care about the other people. You know, we just take care of each other,” he said.
