By Natalia Alamdari
In light, cursive script, she strings newly learned verbs into sentences.
She sounds out each foreign syllable, practicing with the volunteer teacher.
“Yo escucho, tu escuchas,” Janet Evans recites. I listen. You listen.
“It would take me 100 years to say anything to anyone,” the retired North Platte doctor jokes.
Evans is one of 53 people signed up for this Spanish class organized by the nonprofit HOPE-Esperanza. The goal for this group of English-speaking 911 dispatchers, doctors, city and county employees, ranchers, police officers and business owners: communicate better as North Platte prepares for the opening of a massive new meatpacking plant.
“If you want to go to Spain or Mexico, this isn’t the class for you,” said TinaMaria Fernandez, founder of the nonprofit. “There’s a need in our community. How do we help communicate with each other to provide safety and welcoming?”
In the spring, the rancher-owned meatpacking plant Sustainable Beef will open in this west-central Nebraska city of 22,523. The plant is expected to add 2,500 people to town, as employees and their families move to fill the predicted 800 jobs, making it the city’s third-largest employer.
City leaders say it’s a boon for North Platte, a rare growth opportunity after decades of stagnation.
But in the years since the plant was announced in 2021, City Council meetings have also been peppered with complaints about the project – worry over the smell. Traffic on South Newberry Road. Harm to nearby wetlands.
And assumptions about the plant’s future employees, complaints about its yet-to-arrive people. Residents have pointed to Grand Island and Lexington, and the meatpacking plants that helped to demographically transform those towns, as cautionary tales.
They fear North Platte will change. They fear its future.
“These jobs that we’re getting are not for North Platte people,” resident Chuck McCarty said at a City Council meeting in August 2021.
“They are for the people that are coming across the border,” he said. “Obviously illegal.”
In 1980, North Platte stood at 24,509 residents. It had grown by 5,000 people during the 1970s, and proudly hailed itself as the largest Nebraska city outside the Omaha, Lincoln and Grand Island metros.
That same year, the trucking company Consolidated Freightways relocated employees to Las Vegas and Lincoln.
“I remember driving down one of the busier streets in North Platte. I’m not exaggerating – about every third house was for sale,” said Mayor Brandon Kelliher, a North Platte native. “I don’t know how many people moved out, but it was noticeable, even for a kid.”
The trucking company’s departure kicked off three decades of population inching up or down, never breaking past 25,000 people.
With Union Pacific as its largest employer, North Platte’s size stayed yoked to the success and struggles of the railroad, Kelliher said.
“People just say, ‘well, I can’t find a good job here, so I’m going to go somewhere else,’” Kelliher said. “And they leave. It’s that simple.”
Then, from 2010 to 2020, the city shrank by 1,343 people – a blaring alarm bell to leaders like City Council President Jim Nisley.
Sustainable Beef is expected to grow the population by roughly 10%, they say. It will fill empty seats in the school. It’s already helped bring hundreds of new apartments to the community.
It’s also bringing fear and anger, with much of it revolving around the meatpacking employees themselves, said the Rev. Steve Meysing, rector at North Platte’s Episcopal Church of Our Savior.
North Platte is the county seat of Lincoln County, which just voted 77% for Donald Trump after he promised an immigration crackdown and mass deportations. In public and private conversations, North Platte residents shared their fears: The new employees’ language. Their religion. Their immigration status. Their alleged criminality.
“It didn’t take long before all the dark concerns of long-term residents were being named,” Meysing said.
Letters to the editor poured into the North Platte Telegraph.
“The only ones profiting from this will be the investors and the illegals,” resident Dee Fugate wrote to the paper. She appeared at a planning commission meeting and termed the project “a nightmare.”
“Are they in cahoots with Joe Biden? Or just looking to turn this wonderful small town into Lexington II?” wrote Lora Bevington.
“Most of these people that work at these plants are immigrants,” resident Jim Jackson said in December 2021. “Quite a few of them are illegal immigrants. What’s it going to do to the crime rate in North Platte?”
Before a packed room in March 2021, resident Josh Empfield spoke one question into the microphone: “Where are we going to put the prison?”
Laughter rippled through the crowd.
In Nebraska, industries like meatpacking and manufacturing do rely on immigrants, so much so that more than 60 Nebraska organizations – including the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Nebraska Cattlemen and the Nebraska Dairy Association – joined to publicly call for more generous federal immigration policies.
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