Young people often leave Iowa after they graduate from high school or college, and our population in the state keeps getting older. What can we do to attract people to live in Iowa?
Once upon a time, our state had perhaps the greatest immigration campaign in the history of the world. It was a word-of-mouth campaign that took place around 1850 in the beer halls of Bavaria and Munich, and it went like this:
"Have you heard about Iowa? It's in America! They don't care where you're from. They don't care what language you speak. You get to keep 96% of what you earn; 4% taxes! And you can live your life however you want!!"
And when people heard about this they said "That sounds so great!! I want to live there!", and they did come here in droves because of the freedom that our state offered them. And when they came here, they put the motto of our state on our flag "Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain" to remind us, the future citizens of the state of Iowa, that liberty is the reason they came to live here.
I think that's an awfully good immigration campaign. It's a campaign I would sorely love to see revived.