Welcome to Rubber City

What do tires, methamphetamine and Bhutanese refugees have in common? They all are integral parts of the community I now live in – the City of Akron, Ohio.

When you drive around the city a little, you notice pretty quickly that this place used to be way bigger than it is now. Coming from Athens, I took I-77 northbound. Usually, you notice bigger cities in the U.S. early on by the endless suburbs that are lined up along the highways. Nothing of that in Akron. Just woods and fields which haven’t been mowed in a long time, high blades of grass withered and brown from the heat of the early summer. The city really starts when you leave the highway and drive through the spoiled neighborhoods. The big spaces between the ever-present two- or three-story wooden houses point to the fact that Akron had to cope with a massive population decline in the last 50 years. Around 1960, the city was a sprawling place with a population of roughly 300,000. The big rubber boom of the early 1900s brought a ton of workers who were driven to the city by the rapidly expanding tire-manufacturing businesses. The world’s biggest tire companies – Goodyear, Goodrich, and Firestone – all had their headquarters and production facilities here. But as other Rustbelt cities like Detroit or Cleveland, car manufacturing and related businesses in Akron entered a steep decline after peaking in the 1960s. The new American middle class found itself deprived of its livelihood, manufacturing. From the 60s on the population declined rapidly and reached an all-time low in 2015, when only an estimated 197,000 people still lived in the city. Today, only Goodyear still produces tires in Akron. As opposed to the majority of Ohio’s counties, however, that development did not translate into broad support for Donald Trump in the last Presidential Election. Summit County, in which Akron is located, voted clearly for Hillary Clinton, as one of eight Ohioan counties out of a total of 88. But still, distrust in politics also prevails here. An old lady behind the counter of a tiny convenient store on the outskirts of Akron laughed bitterly when I said that I study American politics, before telling me that “it’s all crooked, and that’s really the only thing that you need to know about it.”

Economic decline and increasing poverty do not only drive people out of communities, they also attract, cheap drugs for example. By the mid-2000s Akron was dubbed the “Meth Capital of Ohio,” and in 2009 the Akron Beacon Journal reported that Summit county was “trailing only two other counties in the country” in terms of the number of discovered meth labs. While the DEA, local law enforcement agencies and other organizations don’t have a clear explanation for the drug’s popularity in the Midwest, it nevertheless has been linked to poverty and a lack of economic opportunities. Easy to make with legally obtainable ingredients it enjoys popularity among Mexican drug cartels and local producers alike. And although local, state and federal agencies are stepping up their countermeasures, there is not a decline of the drug’s popularity in sight.

But besides the negative aspects of postindustrialism and methamphetamine, there are also success stories. And they seem to follow a constant in American history: immigration is a blessing for both the community and the economy. The vibrant immigrant community of Akron plays a major role in reshaping the local economy and turning around the negative demographic trend. Especially Bhutanese of Nepali origin, forced out of Bhutan during the 1990s as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign initiated by the country’s monarch, have been successfully resettled in Akron’s northern neighborhoods. In North Hill, small businesses have been popping up at a fast pace, tapping into the immigrant community’s demand for Himalayan cuisine and groceries. As a result, many immigrants from Bhutan and Nepal living in other parts of the U.S. have moved to Akron and now contribute to the booming community. Also due to immigration, Akron’s population decline has hit an all-time low in 2015, and is likely to be reversed in the near future. This example once again highlights the (economic) benefits of immigration that America has always enjoyed without exception, and it makes the recent calls for more isolationism of conservatives, who always want a strong and vibrant economy, look all the more absurd.