Road to Understanding

Survey by social work students reveals local attitudes, knowledge about immigration

Emotions ran high when 100 people packed a February meeting of the Sioux County Board of Supervisors last year.

“It was tense,” local reporter Doug Calsbeek ’79 remembers. “The chairman did his best to get people to lighten up. There were also a couple of Homeland Security people there, keeping an eye on the crowd.”

According to spokesman Kurt Wierda, a Sioux County dairy farmer, he and others had come to express concern that their immigrant employees, friends and neighbors were being targeted by the sheriff’s office for traffic stops. At times, those stops ended in arrests for possessing false documents and eventually resulted in deportations.

Since 2003, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—has been part of the Department of Homeland Security. The presence of federal employees at a county meeting was one indication of how our nation’s immigration problems are affecting local communities.

Sioux County is one of 15 Iowa counties in which Hispanics make up more than 5 percent of the population, double the 2.5 percent residing in the area just eight years ago. With the influx of immigrants have come conflicts such as the one that occurred at the board of supervisors meeting.

In searching for solutions, local officials came to Northwestern College, where senior social work students played a role in providing answers. At the request of a focus group formed by the board to study the immigration issue, Professor Val Stokes enlisted students in her social work theory and practice course to research community attitudes and knowledge about Hispanic immigrants.

The students spent the entire fall semester working on their senior project. In addition to administering a telephone survey and then analyzing the data, they conducted a needs assessment for the county and met with key stakeholders in the community. They then shared their findings with the focus group and later with 70 people attending a public forum at City Hall in December.

Given the need for immigration reform, Stokes believes the work done by her social work majors was great preparation for their careers.

“Those who immigrate to the U.S. are a vulnerable population,” she says. “Because social workers serve in agencies and organizations that meet the needs of vulnerable populations, it’s likely our graduates will be working with immigrants.”

Serving individual clients, however, is just one way these Northwestern alumni can make a difference in the world. As Stokes explains, “We also train social workers to think systemically, and that means they will be prepared to be involved in policy-level matters.”