Link to: Muslim-only section in the city cemetery for religious reasons.

Garden City’s racial diversity is a look at America’s future

By DAVID KLEPPER ★ The Star’s Topeka correspondent

"For a growing number of immigrants, home is far west Kansas in a city of 28,000, a world away from Mogadishu, Mexico City and Myanmar.

It's where women in burqas stroll down a Norman Rockwell Main Street festooned with early Fourth of July banners. And where a Buddhist temple sits alongside grocery stores selling Mexican soft drinks and 50-pound bags of jasmine rice."

The plant

The plant was once the largest beef processing plant in the world, butchering up to 5,700 cattle a day. Tyson employs 3,100 workers, more than the next six largest employers in Finney County combined. The plant buys $1 billion worth of cattle each year, many from nearby ranches.

Wages start at $12.30 an hour, and it’s tough, bloody work.

>snip< By 2050, the Census Bureau predicts, the United States will have a new minority: whites. Already, non-Hispanic whites are the minority in California, Texas, New Mexico and Hawaii, and about one in 10 U.S. counties
>snip< The county is the latest in Kansas where whites are the new minority.
According to projections, the 2010 U.S. Census will show that whites will be the minority in as many as four Kansas counties: Finney, Seward, Grant, and Ford. All are southwestern Kansas counties that supply labor to meat packing plants.
>snip< Missouri has no county like that — but that’s likely to change in the next decade. Already, minorities make up more than 40 percent of those under 20 years of age in Jackson ounty, a sign that minority populations are gaining demographic ground and not just in rural areas.

>snip< Like their predecessors, the new immigrants bring their own cultures and controversies. Last month, Somali residents ruffled some feathers in Garden City after they requested a Muslim-only section in the city cemetery for religious reasons.
“This is our home now,” said Abdulkadir Mohamed, a Somali Muslim and translator at the Tyson plant who moved here in 2006. “But we need a place for us in the cemetery.”
“We’ve been too politically correct for too long,” said Leonard Hitz, a former Marine, retired banker and self-described cowboy poet. “If you want to come to this country and be an American, you’re welcome. But learn the language and assimilate.”
>snip< Debbie Jordan is a longtime resident, business owner and a leader in the local “tea party” movement.

“The people I talk to here are in the complete support of the Arizona law,” Jordan said. “The government needs to secure our borders.”

>snip< The immigration tsunami hit Garden City’s schools hardest.

Imagine the challenge of teaching 3,000 schoolchildren who speak a language other than English. The district, which has 7,400 pupils, had to hire more English language teachers. Even the cafeteria menu was changed to offer familiar foods.
But thanks to the community’s number of low-income immigrant households, the school district receives more money than other districts. Indeed, Garden City schools get $60 million in state and federal funding, compared with the $40 million received by the similarly sized De Soto district.

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