Thanks eplay. Problem is: They get a diploma and go away. The US should staple a Green Card at their diploma if they would agree to settle in a place where population is dwindling.
When I lived in Sweden, I heard about the people complaining about theiur villages where only the old people stayed. All young people were leaving and the older people get left behind.
At every taxi cab in Stockholm -you know those square boixes Volvo makes- there is a bumper sticker: "We Need 1.000 drivers.
I always talked with the cabies -can't drink and drive like other places I lived and they are damn serious those Swedes, they throw you in jail for that, albeit you need to wait for a place in the 'Calabush' and can choose the day to go there serve your time for this kind of "offense", tell you we would need to cover Curitiba, the city where I have my place down south Brasil and put a wall around the city and call it a prison if you would do that kind of thing there.
But I'm diverting, what I was talking about? Oh, yes the cabbies. I ask where they come from: Algeria, Kazahkstan places like this. Perhaps in Calif. might be like that too.
Nobody is willing to do this job. You end up importing people to do that work. People end up comong to replenish the urban areas while the fringes get depopulated.
We are seeing just the begining of tyhis trend:
nytimes.com
Amid Dying Towns of Rural Plains, One Makes a Stand
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 1, 2003
SUPERIOR, Neb. — When death comes to a small town, the school is usually the last thing to go. A place can lose its bank, its tavern, its grocery store, its shoe shop. But when the school closes, you might as well put a fork in it.
So it was in Hardy, one of many last-gasp towns in Nuckolls County, Neb., along the Kansas state line. A rock memorial, overgrown by grass and weeds, rests like a tombstone under sagging football goal posts. The stone marks where the Hardy school used to be, where the wind carried voices of children — the joyous static of tomorrow.
This year, Nuckolls County, population 4,843, lost another two schools, to budget cuts and declining enrollment, perhaps dooming another pair of towns to Hardy's fate in a region that has seen nearly two-thirds of its population disappear since 1920.
But here in Superior, whose slogan is "An oasis of the Great Plains, in the middle of everywhere," and which claims to be the exact same distance from Los Angeles and New York, they have made a last stand.
From the Dakotas to the Texas Panhandle, the rural Great Plains has been losing people for 70 years, a slow demographic collapse. Without even the level of farmers and merchants that used to give these areas their pulse, many counties are also losing their very reason to exist, falling behind the rest of the nation in nearly every category as they desperately try to reinvent themselves.
And now a broad swath of the nation's midsection seems to have lost something else, as well: its optimism. Polls show a quiet crisis in confidence, the one thing that had seemed a part of rural American DNA. More than ever, people feel powerless to control their lives and pessimistic about the future, according to the annual University of Nebraska poll of rural attitudes.
"Will this be the last generation to inhabit the rural Great Plains?" asked Jon Bailey of the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Walthill, Neb. Few people in Nebraska, which has 7 of the nation's 12 poorest counties, scoff at the question.
Some of the same signs of despair and breakdown that wore out aging American industrial cities in the 1960's have come to the rural plains. Among teenagers, there is now a higher level of illicit drug use in rural areas than in cities or suburbs, recent surveys indicate. The middle class is dwindling, leaving pockets of hard poverty amid large agribusinesses supported by taxpayers.
I mena that's sad. Imagine how it will look by 2020. |
