30 minutes from Springfield, another Ohio city welcomed immigrants — and got a boost

Beth Casella's family has been making things out of metal in Dayton, Ohio, for more than half a century.

FC Industries — the company started by her grandfather, Frank — has grown into an $85 million local manufacturing business, churning out everything from high-tech centrifuges to La-Z-Boy recliner frames.

"We're growing," Casella says. "We keep breaking records, month after month."

Finding workers to sustain that growth has not been easy, especially since the pandemic, in a city where the unemployment rate is just 5%. Casella has relied in part on immigrants, who now make up about 10% of FC Industries' 300-plus-person workforce.

"We've always prided ourselves on being very diverse," Casella says. "Three of my grandparents were immigrants."

The company has partnered with a local refugee resettlement agency to help recruit workers. Bilingual employees are paid extra to act as translators, and the company is setting up an English class. It's not altruism, Casella says. Just good business.

"We want good workers," she says. "We want people who can grow here and grow us to the next level. And we're open to looking wherever that could be."

It's not just Casella's company. Nationwide, immigrants are a vital force in powering the American job machine and keeping the U.S. economy humming. Over the last 12 months, nearly 1.5 million foreign-born workers have joined the labor force — legally or illegally. In the same period the population of U.S.-born workers has shrunk.

The broader data shows that immigrants are not displacing native workers, but rather filling a hole that's been created by retiring baby boomers. Were it not for immigration, job growth likely would have stalled. And that's doubly true in places like Dayton — an aging industrial city with a population that's half the size it was in 1960 .

Dayton rolls out the welcome mat for immigrants

While nearby Springfield, Ohio, has become a lightning rod in the national debate over immigration, Dayton has been working for more than a decade to lure more immigrants, to help fill jobs and revitalize old neighborhoods. Dayton dubs itself an " immigrant friendly city " and launched a program in 2011 to make services more accessible to newcomers and integrate them into the local community.

"Our goal is to make Dayton a welcoming place for everybody," says City Commissioner Matt Joseph, who helped spearhead the "Welcome Dayton" initiative.

Joseph, who has business cards printed in Spanish, Mandarin and Croatian, says there was some pushback, but not much.

"Most of the people who complained about it came from out of town," he recalls. "Sometimes out of state. Like, they would drive hours to come to our meeting to complain about it. But native Daytonians didn't, which I was really proud of."

In a survey last year , 57% of Dayton residents said they'd be happy to have an immigrant family next door. That's down from 70% three years ago. City officials suspect hostile rhetoric from national politicians is partly to blame for the decline.

One immigrant's journey from Payless Shoes to trucking company owner

Some of the new arrivals have started their own businesses, like Moh Fardeen Ahmadi, who moved to Dayton from Afghanistan, where he'd worked as a translator for the U.S. military.

When he arrived a decade ago, Ahmadi spent a year working at Payless Shoes, then got a job as a truck driver. Eventually, he started his own trucking company with Afghan, Arab, Latino and U.S.-born employees.

"I started with one truck," Ahmadi says. "I have nine trucks now. I have a total of 10 drivers. And I have three dispatchers. And I have a guy working in my office too."

Since the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan three years ago, more than 100 other Afghans have settled in Dayton. Ahmadi calls it a second chance to rebuild their lives.

Now available in a Dayton store: Cassava flour and smoked fish from Tanzania

Anita Nzigiye grew up in Rwanda and followed her sister to Dayton. After working for a time as a home health aide, she opened a market with her family, selling east African groceries to the growing community of African transplants.

"It's basically food from home," Nzigiye says of popular items such as smoked fish from Tanzania and specialty flours made from cassava and yams.

Nzigiye used to rarely see African immigrants in Dayton but says more are arriving every week, building a customer base for her store and a built-in welcoming committee for new arrivals.

"The housing is affordable," Nzigiye says. "Even if their English may not be their first language, they can still find a job."

Dayton's lure: Low cost of living and abundant jobs

Those are the same qualities that drew waves of European immigrants and Black workers from the South to Dayton in the last century.

"My parents owned Evans Bakery right across the street," says Dayton native Jennifer Evans. "I grew up there. Went to the local Catholic school here in the neighborhood."

Today, Evans and her husband, Matt Tepper, are active in the Old North Dayton Neighborhood Association. The arrival of new immigrants has given a welcome boost to the aging community.

"Families were buying these abandoned houses and fixing them up immediately, occupying them," Tepper says. "So Old North Dayton doesn't have the — quote — abandonment problem that a lot of urban areas had."

Friday worshippers share a parking lot with happy hour revelers

A group of ethnic Turks from Russia and Ukraine converted an old funeral home into a mosque. It shares a parking lot with the Polish social club next door. Luckily, the growing crowd at Friday prayers typically clears out just as happy hour at the social club is getting underway.

That friendly co-existence between new and old residents is a stark contrast with the ominous picture of immigrants that former President Donald Trump and his running-mate JD Vance like to paint.

To be sure, many Americans from across the political spectrum would like to see changes in national immigration policy. Evans says she would too. But however people make their way to Dayton, she tries to make them feel welcome, and thinks most of her neighbors feel the same way.

"I'd be lying if I said there was never anybody that said, 'I don't want all these new people in my neighborhood,'" Evans says. "I'm sure there are still some people here that would prefer it to be the way it was 60 years ago. But it just isn't. For the most part, we're all working together to make us all stronger."

The city's Welcome Dayton office has three full-time staffers who spend part of their time mediating between immigrants and longtime residents to prevent small conflicts from spiraling into something bigger. Recent cases involved people parking their car on the grass instead of the driveway and drying their clothes on the bushes. A quiet conversation in the right language can make a big difference.

"When those small things become a huge monumental mountain, Welcome Dayton has been instrumental in putting them back to mole-sized hills," Tepper says.

In this elementary school, 40% of students speak a native language other than English

The foreign-born population in Dayton, like Ohio as a whole, is still relatively small — about 5%, compared to a national average of nearly 14%. But Dayton's immigrant community has grown large enough to be noticeable in some areas.

At Kiser Elementary School, for example, 40% of students now speak a native language other than English. Instructions on the walls are printed in Spanish, Turkish and the central African language of Kinyarwanda.

City Commissioner Joseph acknowledges there are costs associated with providing services to the new arrivals, and he wishes his city had more control over things like work permits.

On the whole, though, Joseph says Dayton has prospered by reaching out to immigrants rather than turning them away.

"This is the best the city has done in 50 years — since before I was born," Joseph says. And welcoming immigrants, welcoming everyone, has played a role in that."