Can aging N.D. resist change amid immigration debate?

COOPERSTOWN, N.D. -- Every other Wednesday at lunchtime, the Coachman Inn attracts what, in this sparsely populated part of the world, amounts to a crowd. They come for the kumla— the Scandinavian potato dumplings their grandmothers and great-grandmothers used to make.

It's a lively scene that reveals a sobering demographic truth. The hands passing the pitchers of melted butter are weathered; the heads bobbing in animated conversation are mostly silver-haired. The kumla tradition is in danger of extinction. So is Cooperstown and many of North Dakota's once-bustling rural crossroads.

"We simply don't have enough workers," says Orville Tranby, a community leader who in 1999 helped Griggs County, where Cooperstown is the seat, and neighboring Steele County win a 10-year federal grant to create jobs and stem population loss.

When developers proposed locating a dairy in the area, however, the community shot it down. A proposed hog plant is facing similar opposition. Tranby says it's because some residents fear such facilities might attract a wave of Hispanic immigrants who could change the local culture.

"I've had them face to face tell me that," he says.

The tension here reflects why the nation's debate over immigration is likely to be such a potent issue in next year's presidential campaign. More than 1,400 miles from the nation's southwestern border and far from the cities where the debate has been most prominent, the conflicts many communities face in dealing with an aging workforce are exposed in North Dakota like the flat prairie landscape after the fall harvest.

Nationally, the U.S. Commerce Department projects that the number of people in prime working years, ages 25 to 54, will increase 0.3% a year through 2015. In the third quarter of this year, the economy grew by 3.9%.

"We're facing a dramatic labor shortage," Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said in a speech in March. "Without immigrants, we don't have enough workers. Period."

The demographic crisis in North Dakota is more severe. The population increased in only six of North Dakota's 53 counties from 1990 to 2000.

Farm families have become smaller and farms have become bigger. Richard Rathge, a demographer at North Dakota State University says the average size of a North Dakota farm is 1,300 acres, up from 500 acres during the 1940s.

That's left businesses in rural communities with fewer customers to serve. That, in turn, leaves the farmers who remain with fewer places to worship, shop or send their kids to school.

Rathge considers depopulation a threat to the state's agricultural economy. "We've seen North Dakota really hollow out," he says.

On one hand, state officials are working hard to attract people to North Dakota. The Griggs-Steele empowerment zone wired the area for high-speed Internet, improved parks and renovated apartments.

But as the conflict over the plans for a dairy here shows, residents are struggling with what Democratic state Rep. Lee Kaldor calls "cultural concerns."

Welcoming newcomers is part of the state's settler heritage, but "the average North Dakotan is German or Norwegian, Lutheran and white," Kaldor says. "If we have an influx of people with a different heritage, how will we react?"