Demographic Changes in Southern MN and the Challenges and Opportunities

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 16, 2009

I just saw this article from The Twin Cities Daily Planet about immigrant demonstrations last weekend throughout some of our region’s rural cities and towns. The article does not cover all of the activities, more articles were written in the Post Bulletin and the Owatonna People’s Press. The issue of new immigrants, especially Latino/a in our region is bound to keep growing in its social intensity as well as its importance for the region’s economic vitality. Minnesota 2020 for example, has published some important facts about the role of new immigrants on the schools and the region’s economy, specifically in Worthington, where the Latino population became key in re-energizing the schools and downtown to name two areas positively impacted.

Here at the Rural Enterprise Center, we are concentrated in tapping on the opportunities that this new population represent, specifically the areas of intensive sustainable agriculture that engage existing resources and improve their productive capacity through the incorporation of traditional knowledge that many new immigrant families bring with them. Our current free range poultry and vegetable production system is one clear example of how we can all turn to the positive side of almost any challenging situation, no negative approach has ever produced a positive result, and no reaction to a situation is ever better than a proactive approach.

With this in mind, we will continue to work on our economic development systems, and as we do this, many other approaches will continue to evolve like the ones documented in the reports above. All of this is good, the conversations need to happen and policies and systems that don’t work need to be fixed, sooner or later.