View of immigrants more negative in rural US

A father of five in the Ohio countryside near Lake Erie says immigrants lower wages. But in New Orleans, a lifelong urbanite credits immigrants with rebuilding her hurricane-scarred neighborhood.

A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of nearly 1,700 Americans — including more than 1,000 in rural areas — reveals that attitudes toward immigrants form one of the widest gulfs between U.S. cities and rural communities.

Rural residents are more likely than people in cities or suburbs to think that immigrants are not adapting to the American way of life. The poll also finds that these views soften in rural areas with significant foreign-born populations.

“I think it’s just people not getting out there and knowing their neighbors,” said Adam Lueck, who lives in a rural part of Minnesota and thinks immigrants strengthen America.

President Donald Trump won the November election with broad support from rural America, and his aggressive stance against illegal immigration resonated strongly there. In the Post-Kaiser poll, rural residents are almost three times as likely as city dwellers to consider immigrants a burden to the United States: 42 percent vs. 16 percent.

Rural residents are also more likely to say that recent immigrants’ values differ from theirs: 50 percent, compared with 39 percent of urban residents.

Trump voters in rural areas are the most critical: Seventy-four percent say that recent immigrants are not doing enough to assimilate to life in America; 49 percent of rural Americans overall think that.

One reason for rural Americans’ concern about immigrants could be their lack of exposure to them. Foreign-born residents make up 2.3 percent of the population in rural counties; they make up 15 percent of urban counties, according to Census Bureau data for 2011 to 2015.

The Post-Kaiser poll finds that in rural areas where immigrants are less than 2 percent of the population, fewer than 4 in 10 residents say that immigrants strengthen the country. But that figure is nearly 6 in 10 in rural areas where at least 5 percent of residents were born outside the United States.

That is certainly the case for Kathleen Kanost, a 64-year-old disabled woman in New Orleans who grew up in Washington, D.C., and moved to Louisiana in 1978. A former waitress, she said she frequently worked alongside immigrants from the Middle East and Latin America.

“They’re hardworking people, the ones I’ve known all my life,” she said. “They seem to stick together and help each other out.”

David Woods, a 36-yearold father of five, has a different view. Reared on his family farm near Lake Erie in Ohio, he hoped to continue to work on farms after his family sold theirs. But soon he felt pushed out. Nobody at the dairy farm where he had a job spoke English, he said. And the immigrant workers were more willing to work for low pay.

He said he’s frustrated that immigrants who are in this country illegally do not, in his view, pay their fair share of taxes.

“A lot of people, when I start on my rants about it, they say I’m racist. I’m not racist,” Woods said. “I feel like if you’re going to live in the United States like the rest of the U.S., you’re going to have to pay taxes like the rest of us.”

Federal data shows that millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year.