Why I So Love Kansans and Kansas
The Atlantic has a wonderful article about the changing nature of southwest Kansas as immigrants from Mexico and central America have flowed into the area. The interview results might pleasantly surprise you:
...I can barely express how strongly I wish that anyone writing or opining about American “nativism” or “resentment” could come to a place like this, and see real Americans of many backgrounds responding to real demographic change. We are better, still truer to ourselves, than some of our politics now suggests.
The Atlantic is hardly a conservative publication. The New York Times is also liberal and it, too, has recognized how well Latin Americans have integrated into Wichita's life.
Wichita, and Kansas, is the "real America" in the very best sense of the term. Friendly, kind, diverse, open-minded. If you want to raise your family in a GREAT place (I am not a native Kansan) with a low cost of living, please consider us. You won't be sorry.
Every single person we’ve met here — Anglo and Latino, African and Burmese and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, male and female, well-educated and barely literate, working three jobs and retired and still in school—of all these people, we’ve asked the same questions. Namely: how has Kansas handled this shift in demography? And how does it sound, in this politically and culturally conservative part of the country, to hear the national discussion about “building a wall,” about making America “a real country again,” of the presumptive Republican nominee saying even today that Americans are “angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over, nobody even knows who they are.”
And every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it. (The unemployment rate in this area, by the way, is under 3 percent, and every business we’ve talked with has “help wanted” notices out.)
This is in small-town western Kansas. And it is what we have heard in every discussion. I could give 50 examples, and eventually will, but here is one for now. A white man who grew up in this area, and works in construction, told us a few days ago: I wasn’t sure about the change in town. It’s different. But these people want to work. They want a better life for their children. We need them. Without them, we would shrivel up...
...I can barely express how strongly I wish that anyone writing or opining about American “nativism” or “resentment” could come to a place like this, and see real Americans of many backgrounds responding to real demographic change. We are better, still truer to ourselves, than some of our politics now suggests.
The Atlantic is hardly a conservative publication. The New York Times is also liberal and it, too, has recognized how well Latin Americans have integrated into Wichita's life.
Wichita, and Kansas, is the "real America" in the very best sense of the term. Friendly, kind, diverse, open-minded. If you want to raise your family in a GREAT place (I am not a native Kansan) with a low cost of living, please consider us. You won't be sorry.
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