When Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were vilified in a campaign of politicized fabrications about eating pets, Faranak Miraftab's mind went to a place she knew well. A professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she had spent a decade writing a book about Beardstown, Illinois—a once struggling Midwestern community that has seen its population rebound since the 1990s, lifted by an immigrant population from around the world.
"I thought of Beardstown and how it exemplifies the opposite of the falsehood that is being spread about Ohio," she said. "Towns around Beardstown are boarded up and are ghost towns. Beardstown shines thanks to its immigrants."
