My colleague Smmo Ozawa and I spent the past year recording oral histories about immigration in the rural United States. One of my favorite interviews happened at the police station in Fort Morgan, a small, Eastern Colorado town where I spent the first decade of my childhood.

Sheriff Dave Martin, who ran as a Republican, talked about a childhood spent working on his grandfather’s Morgan County ranch, struggling to keep up with the Mexican family who migrated there every year to help harvest sugar beets. As a young adult, Martin worked on the killing floor at the town’s local slaughterhouse alongside a mostly immigrant workforce, who were mainly Polish and Vietnamese at the time.

Martin said that same slaughterhouse has changed ownership but is still operated by a largely immigrant workforce, most of them Latino and African. “[White Americans] are in management over there,” Martin explained, “but they’re not down on the floor with the knives. They’re not cutting meat.”

Sheriff Martins’s comments brought to light an enduring fact about immigration in much of rural America, where the foreign-born population has helped drive essential industries for generations. As law enforcement officers meant to protect all members of their community, Sheriff Martin and Chief Sharp have tried to build trust with the immigrants who keep these industries alive.

But building trust in a hostile political climate is challenging. For example, I came into this project with my own stereotypes about small-town cops, drawn from TV shows and movies that tend to portray local law enforcement as either lone-gun heroes fighting local corruption, or agents of corruption themselves.

Smmo and I conducted conversations like the one we had with Sheriff Martin and Chief Sharp as part of a fellowship about welcoming and inclusion that was co-sponsored by the Rural Assembly and Welcoming America–a nonprofit network of immigrant-centered organizations, municipalities, and community groups dedicated to building a nation of neighbors.

We spoke with people who represent their family’s first generation in the country, as well as the descendants of those who immigrated generations ago. And we assembled these perspectives in a five episode podcast miniseries called Routes to Roots, which is now also available in Spanish.

Translating the podcast into Spanish arose out of one of six takeaways that came up across a number of the interviews we conducted.

1. We Can’t Come Together Without a Comprehensive Translation Policy

Episode 4 of the series focuses on the different kinds of language barriers that keep recent immigrants from feeling welcome in their new communities.

Khadro Abdi, a first generation youth leader in Fort Morgan, Colorado, speaks about how her Somali parents can’t access their local government because its resources and discussion aren’t available in their native tongue.

Diego Plata, the first Latino immigrant to be elected mayor of Gunnison, Colorado, explained his community’s commitment to translate materials into Spanish. To address language needs beyond Spanish, the city gets “the most bang for [its] buck” by dedicating resources to a third-party vendor that can help with translation on an as-needed basis, according to Plata.

Community leaders across Colorado spoke about their obligation to communicate clearly across demographic barriers.

2. Local Law Enforcement and Immigration Enforcement Operate in Separate Spheres

In our conversation at the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office, Chief Sharp spoke on the issue of immigration enforcement in his jurisdiction.

“This is a political topic, clearly,” he said. “But it’s not political on our side. So regardless of what my personal belief is should happen, we’re going to follow the law.”

Chief Sharp repeated this sentiment throughout our conversation, explaining how his work is aligned with local and state statutes, not those of a federal agency like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has its own, separate responsibilities.

Sheriff Martin echoed Chief Sharp’s comments, explaining how neither the city nor the Sheriff’s Department can hold people on immigration charges after they’ve been charged for a different crime. If the police brought an individual in custody for a violation of a state statute, they could not continue to be held in custody for federal immigration matters if they had already been released on bail. Immigration has its own, separate federal facilities for detaining people who violate immigration law. In Colorado, state officers are not allowed to directly police immigration law.

3. Inconsistencies in Immigration Law Creates Challenges

Immigration law has shifted frequently and unpredictably over the course of our nation’s history, at the whims of a given congress and/or presidential administration.

In Episode 1 of Routes to Roots, Mitch Homma, who helps steward the historic site of a former Japanese-American incarceration camp in rural Southwestern Colorado, explains how Asian Americans have experienced the volatility of our country’s shifting immigration policies. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 catered to a surge of national anti-Chinese sentiment by barring immigration from China for decades. In 1942, Executive Order 9066 called for the incarceration of Japanese Americans because of a perceived threat to national security.

The feeling of being a political football has been at the center of the immigrant experience for people of other nationalities as well. “There were almost no rules until 1924,” said Ray Suarez, author of the oral history anthology We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century.

In 1924, the country introduced a quota system that would limit immigration by nationality for decades. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 overhauled the quota system, lifting the gates for residents of Asian, African, and Latin American countries that previously saw minimal immigration to the United States.

Legislators of both major parties celebrated the Immigration and Nationality Act in the years following its signage. But since its passage, immigration has developed into one of our most divisive national issues.

Many advocates we spoke to in rural communities work with Temporary Protective Status (TPS) holders, who are granted legal residence in the United States for a variety of reasons–from larger national crises like civil wars and natural disasters, to more personal dangers like domestic violence–whose viability shifts from one administration to the next. For example, the Trump administration has eliminated the TPS option for most countries facing environmental disaster and civil war conditions, and has significantly limited the potential for seeking TPS as a victim of domestic violence.

Other conditional and shifting status like DACA–the Obama-era legal status granted to people brought into the country illegally as minors–are subject to the same political push-and-pull. Under one president, immigrants are granted a legal status, only to risk having that status limited or outright revoked when leadership changes.

4. We Need One Another

On Episode 1 of the podcast, speaking to the work of integrating immigrants in rural communities, Derek Gross lifts up a sentiment frequently repeated by North Dakota senator Tim Mathern: “They need us, and we need them.” Derek is the executive director of Communities Acting Together for Change and Hope (CATCH), a nonprofit that resettles refugees in small towns across North Dakota.

As part of his work, Gross gives presentations to receiving communities, explaining the mutual benefits of refugee resettlement. He explains the dire need of refugees fleeing war and famine abroad, but he also points out patterns of local population decline. In recent years, many rural North Dakota counties have suffered population loss upwards of 30%. And although the state boasts one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates, it still has more than 30,000 open jobs, an estimate Gross thinks is conservative.

“Because, you know, you go to my small town,” Gross said, “and the school needs custodians and paras, and the Cenex needs cashiers, and the little coffee shop needs workers. There’s more need out there than they know.”

Also included in the first episode of the podcast is an interview with the Daily Yonder’s Data Editor Sarah Melotte. Melotte analyzes migration data that explores how immigration is helping rural communities bounce back from a years-long trend of population decline. According to 2020 Census data, recent arrivals reversed a decade-long trend of natural decrease, which is when the number of deaths in a place outnumbers the number of births.

“This is good news that rural America is not on this steady population decline trend anymore, overall, and that people want to move there,” Sarah reflects. “It keeps vibrancy in these communities alive, and it means that people have jobs there, and that they’re hopefully raising families and having children and keeping traditions alive.”

5. We Decide Who We Want to Be

Recognizing immigrants as vital, rural economic contributors was a point made by almost all of the people we interviewed. But many of our interviewees took this recognition several steps further, encouraging listeners to value recent immigrants not only for their economic contributions, but for our shared humanity.

The very existence and persistence of rural lifestyles in the United States is the result of waves of immigration dating back to the country’s founding. Through their own human care and ingenuity, immigrants have helped rural communities survive and thrive across the decades.

One of the most heartening stories in the podcast comes from Sevier County, in the far Southwestern corner of Arkansas. In Episode 3, Veronica Ozura shares her family’s story as some of the first Mexican Americans drawn to Sevier County by booming dairy and timber industries.

In those early years, Ozura’s reception was far from warm.

“My mom would talk about how people would see your skin color, and immediately it was like the cops were coming to pick you up, to take you and get deported,” Ozura said.

This early anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in steep economic and population declines in the region as many Latinos fled out of fear.

Decades later, Ozura has witnessed a major transformation in Sevier’s County seat, DeQueen, where white and Latino leaders have come together to develop policies and strategies to fully integrate their communities and help the entire county thrive. This transformation is on display at the town’s annual Fiesta Fest–a celebration of diverse local cultures initially conceived as a benefit for immigrant youth in need of financial support to attend college. In recent years, the event has grown from a small gathering to a citywide celebration on main street.

6. We Can Learn the Easy Way, or We Can Learn the Hard Way

“If we want to kick [all the immigrants] out, let’s be honest with ourselves. It’ll make our food more expensive. It would be an earthquake in rural America to send the immigrants home,” said Ray Suarez on Episode 2 of Routes to Roots.

Sevier County, Arkansas, experienced the kind of earthquake Ray is talking about as a result of the aggressive immigration enforcement that depleted its dairy industry during the 1980s. Forced to live in fear, many new immigrants left, and the region’s economy and culture suffered greatly. The county had to learn the hard way about how critical these newcomers were to the survival of their way of life.

Under the second Trump administration, federal agencies are carrying out an approach to immigration enforcement that routinely violates state constitutions, a tactic that has become increasingly unpopular among the general public.

While the federal government may remain intent on its current approach, we can use a different tactic at the local level. We can resist a federal overreach that doesn’t align with local values, laws, and business interests.

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