Wage slaves sustain South Dakota's economy

Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Trump state economies are in the toilet according to Creighton University's Ernie Goss but it's not about laziness, it's about Maria shrugged, if you will. 

In 2022 an interested party phoned the son of an old friend who took over his dad's successful painting business based in Spearditch and asked him whether Spanish speakers still do much of the work in the trades. He said many drive back and forth from Gillette, Wyoming after the collapse of the coal industry and Lawrence County's property crimes and violence among rival workers peaked in 2018 but now Rapid City sees the bulk of the construction site thefts, drunken brawls and housing overcrowding. He told me that in Hill City Spanish speakers became the only applicants for employment at the sawmill so after Donald Trump was forced from office Jim Neiman shuttered it. 

South Dakota is home to about 39,900 recent immigrants or about 4.3% of the state's population and more than 280 refugees resettled in South Dakota during the fiscal year 2024 compared to 206 in all of 2023. So, the extreme white wing in South Dakota is losing it not because nearly half of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and some 3,500 students receive special education support but because new residents in South Dakota are migrants from Muslim countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia. 

Nebraska and Iowa are also seeing surges in immigration but Brookings and Moody Counties in South Dakota are homes to more people from Guatemala and other Central American nations.

Working-age adults between 18 and 64 have represented the largest share of people moving into South Dakota from other states every year from 2021 through 2024, according to an analysis of Census Bureau migration estimates. During that period, an average of about 21,000 working-age adults moved into South Dakota each year, compared with about 5,000 children and 2,000 retirees. [SD News Watch]

Religionism is what these climate refugees and migrant workers have in common with their Midwest counterparts. And "pro-life" is simply code for white people breeding because African-Americans terminate pregnancies at about the same per capita rate as white people do but don’t take their jobs. Latinas, however, have fewer abortions per capita and the extreme white wing of the Republican Party knows it's hemorrhaging jobs to Latinos.

South Dakota is the hardest-working state, in part because 6.5% of workers have multiple jobs, the 11th-highest percentage in the country. Although this may not be an ideal situation, indicating that people’s main jobs are not paying them enough, it’s still a testament to how hard South Dakota residents are willing to work. In addition, South Dakota has the fifth-lowest share of “idle youth” – people ages 18 to 24 who are not in school, are not working and have no school experience beyond a high school diploma. [WalletHub]