With rural antagonism against immigration from Mexico prevalent in North Dakota, it is time to recount the days when the sugar beet industry relied on Mexican labor to exist as an alternate crop for farmers.

The idea of raising sugar beets preceded the mechanization that eventually occurred. As the sugar beet farms grew through the ’30s and ’40s, domestic labor could not keep up with the demand and it took thousands of Mexican immigrants to come to North Dakota to do the job. 

Whole families – including the children – worked long hours in the heat to bring in enough money to survive. Many of the living quarters consisted of one room shacks with outhouses and no water supply until the federal government required decent living conditions. 

The immigrants were not the only beneficiaries. North Dakota main street businesses sold them clothes, groceries, pickups and everything else required by a household. 

But we forget what these immigrants did for the North Dakota economy when it was staggering through the 1930s. Now that sugar beet growing has been totally mechanized and “RoundUp Ready” is dealing with the weeds, the attitude about Mexican immigrants has turned sour.

Many in North Dakota support building a wall at the border to keep them from getting what we have got. We are silent when the governor of Texas strings razor wire through the Rio Grande to cut up any Mexicans trying to swim to the United States. 

According to a poll by the Washington Post, rural residents are nearly three times as likely (42%) as people in the cities (16%) to say that immigrants are a burden on the country.

CATO, a conservative think tank, says that is not true.

Writing for CATO, researcher Alex Nowrasteh discovered the following: immigrants do not take American jobs or lower wages; immigrants make large net contributions to Medicare and Social Security.

Immigrants assimilate into American society just as our grandparents did; immigrants create less crime than resident Americans (verified by other sources); only one radicalized terrorist entered the United States for every 29,000,000 visa or status approvals, and our immigration restrictions are tougher than a number of other countries. 

The truth is that we assume that we are more moral, more entitled and more loved by God than immigrants. Being white feeds this negativism. Since North Dakota is very rural, we harbor these attitudes and it is time to curb this self-righteousness. 

Space does not permit us to recount how our nation bullied Mexico into an unjust war after which we commandeered almost half of the country. The 525,000 square miles became Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of a couple other states. 

And the policymakers of the day claimed that God ordained the theft as “Manifest Destiny.”

Many Christians today still believe in “Manifest Destiny” even though the United States was created by secular national and local ratifying conventions. They created a secular government to solve secular problems without mentioning God. 

The consequences of our treatment of Mexico are still with us today and as a nation we have a responsibility to do penance for our sins. The least we could do is give qualified Mexican immigrants in controlled numbers preference in our immigration laws. 

Right now our penance has been to build walls and cut desperate people with razor wire in the Rio Grande. Maybe the time has come to repeal “one nation under God” and “in God we trust” because neither one is true.

Lloyd Omdahl is a former lieutenant governor of North Dakota and former political science professor at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.