When I read your post, I assumed you live in CA, TX or another border state “hot zone.” You live in Nebraska? I did not see that coming.
The immigration stuff is hot all over, I think. There are lots of small towns getting introduced to gang activity and a lot of drug dealing. Right now in my kids’ school I’d say at least half of the kids are Hispanic. They just changed the reading curriculum here to one that’s intended for inner-city kids because they have to teach everything from the ground up.
The Latinos around here pay for things with cash and a lot of them take the dangerous meat-factory jobs which pay well. My neighbor said that the parents are afraid of being sent back to Mexico so they want to earn as much money as they can while they’re here. They don’t want to take time away from earning money to actually supervise their kids; they just figure the kids will be fine here in America and raise themselves. So the kids search out the gangs.
And there is a lot of pregnancy. The school was considering putting up a daycare between the middle and high schools because there are so many girls with babies. I think there were 3 girls in my older daughter’s grade who had either had babies or abortions by the time they were in 7th grade.
The school started serving meals to any school-age child who wanted them, no questions asked, last summer. In a small-town environment where the feds are willing to pump money in, how do the local people object to the schools becoming a de facto welfare office? Because of the large “minority” population we get all kinds of grants. The pre-school run by our church has struggled since the government has offered free pre-school in the interest of dealing with such a high-ESL (English as a second language) population. It’s hard to compete with tuition that’s free because the taxpayers pay it all.
Anyway, the border states may be the triage area, but illegal immigration affects EVERY area. It’s turning a lot of small-town America upside-down, where people who used to know their neighbors and share a common worldview don’t even speak the same language and definitely don’t necessarily share the same Constitutional worldview. I’m just as likely to see a Mexican or Guatemalan flag flown here as I am to see the US flag.