One afternoon in 1993, as Carolyn Treadway looked out through her house window, she caught the sight of a woman in a traditional Islamic garment practicing parallel parking between mobile cones beside Faribault’s Central Park.
The nonprofit news outlet MinnPost provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
Days later, Treadway learned about an expedition of Somali-American leaders from the Twin Cities who had come to Faribault to explore job opportunities for newly arrived refugees, people with limited English language skills and employment experience.
Soon after, the leaders found out about the town’s meat processing plant, operated by Jennie-O, and news about job opportunities in the area spread. Hundreds of Somali refugees eventually flocked to Faribault for jobs the company had been struggling to fill after it had eliminated union positions and lowered employee wages.
The change opened up doors for new refugees, many of whom have made Faribault their home over the last three decades: working, raising their families and establishing small businesses in the city.
The influx of Somali immigrants has allowed the city of 24,000 — located 50 miles south of the Twin Cities, in Rice County — to avoid the fate of so many other towns in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest, places that have seen their populations stagnate or decline.
Yet the demographic change initiated by that shift didn’t come without consequence, and it is only now, some residents say — after years of grappling with cultural and racial issues, and overwhelmed schools and social service programs — that those tensions are starting to fade away, as more and more native-born residents come to terms with the fact that Somali refugees are putting down permanent roots in Faribault.
When Treadway first moved from Kansas to Faribault more than four decades ago, Faribault was an almost entirely homogeneous white community, not much different from many towns across Minnesota.
That started to change in the 1980s, when a small wave of Cambodian refugees first made their way to Faribault to work at the Jennie-O processing plant. In the following two decades, a steady stream of Latino immigrants and Somali refugees arrived in Faribault seeking jobs at the plant.
The arrival of Somalis, in particular, significantly altered the city’s demographics. In 2000, whites made up 90 percent of Faribault’s population. Today, people of color make up more than 26 percent of the population, with African Americans alone accounting for 9 percent of the city’s residents.
The change was even more dramatic in area schools. Today, students of color account for 53 percent of the student population at Faribault Public Schools, as detailed in a 2018 report by the Minnesota Department of Education.
The pace of the Somali refugee arrivals in Faribault was gradual in the 1990s and early 2000s. But it grew exponentially during the Great Recession, when jobs became hard to come by in the Twin Cities metro area. The growth was also fueled by people from other parts of the country moving to Faribault to join family or friends.