Homepage Feature

Refugees and recession in the Dakotas

By The World ⋅ August 20, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
Play
Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
DSC_0011aIt’s always difficult to be an immigrant or refugee coming to a new country. It can be even tougher during times of recession. But what’s it like to be in the refugee placement business these days? In some states, businesses here lean heavily on refugee workers. The World’s Jason Margolis reports from North Dakota.

Economic strategy in North Dakota
August 17, 2009

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
North Dakota has fared relatively well in the economic downturn. But as The World’s Jason Margolis reports, some farmers and agriculture businesses there are trying to position themselves to be even less vulnerable to the swings of the world economy next time trouble arises.

On the Road to a Climate Deal: Bismarck, North Dakota
August 11, 2009

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
The World’s Jason Margolis tells us why Bismarck, North Dakota has such a major role in determining US legislation on climate change.

Discussion

3 comments for “Refugees and recession in the Dakotas”

  • David

    Great piece. But could you please stop referring to “the Dakotas?” There is a South and North Dakota and they are different places. It’s fine to talk about both at the same time. But when you are talking about a specific place, like Sioux Falls or Fargo it is best to say, “how do the refugees like it in South Dakota” etc.

  • Ruth Berge

    I was listening to this show in the car with my daughter. I assume it was this show, based on the schedule. The show was about Somalis and Kurds who had moved to the Dakotas. The narrator made a comment that bothered me a lot. I can’t quote it exactly but he said something about Somalis and Kurds moving into an all white area.

    What bothers me about that is the off hand way which the narrator, and so many others, lump all white people together. The show made it clear that Somalis and Kurds are people with a distinct culture. Why not show the same respect for the people who were living in the Dakotas? I realize that people from North and South Dakota are probably the epitome of bland midwestern casserole eating white Americans (at least from what I hear on Prairie Home Companion). But I don’t really believe that. They have as much culture as the Somalis. This narrator is common, not outstanding or different. To him , it is clear, white Americans are just a big amorphous mass of nothing. I’d like to think that I am more than my skin color. There is as much diversity among “whites” as among “blacks” or between “whites” and “blacks”. I found the comment to be insensitive and dismissive to the established cultures in South Dakota

  • Laura Beth

    In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote, “The Jungle,” about the plight of immigrants who came to the US for “a better life.” They too, were abducted into the massive industry of “meat packing.”
    Americans want to spare themselves the sights, sounds, reality of their “food” choices that turn living, breathing, sentient beings, made of the SAME DNA as we, into pieces of flesh for consumption.
    The piece did not focus on how slaughterhouse workers feel about what they do, living the nightmare of the dis-assembly line where animals often regain consciousness while being dismembers with chain saws and knives. No interviews about the injuries sustained while working with screaming, thrashing, terrified animals who are born in terror, live in terror, and die in terror, so people can continue to eat their parts.
    The disease economic empire is juxtaposed with the agribusiness economic empire.
    Perhaps a broadened exploration of world violence, cruelty, abuses of power from whence it all began…..the adoption of herding, domestication of animals, a neat misnomer for slavery, would enable the age of spiritual evolution to finally usher in.
    Perhaps interview Dr. Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, would expand the myopic coverage of topics like war, preventable disease, environmental suicide from animal agribusiness, paving the “change” people seek that begins at the end of the fork.
    The Dakota’s may provide jobs, and have low unemployment, but I am willing to wager that the disease rates are sky high, bullying is rampant in schools, special needs rates in children are increasing, and there are huge rates of domestic violence and drug and alchohol abuse.
    FEELING human beings could never work slaughtering animals and have a normal life, just as people who deny their food choices cause abject and incalculable sufferin carry subconscious guilt that manifests in the many problems our society is plagued with.
    Mr. Margolis should do a follow up piece that lets slaughterhouse workers tell us the truth about what goes on in these animal concentration camps. Did he visit the kill floors?
    Thomas Edison said,” Non-violence leads to the highest ethic, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we STOP harming ALL other living beings, we are still savages.” Apparently, given the news today, he was correct.

    http://www.all-creatures.org