Whitewater Immigrants: Entry into a Small Wisconsin Community

Whitewater’s 15,000 residents have seen between 800 and 1,000 South American immigrants land in the area since 2022, according to letters from Whitewater Police Chief Daniel Meyer and Senator Tammy Balwin. The migrants, in their numbers, are finding an increasingly limited selection of places to stay and accessible resources upon arrival. Many are finding homes with sponsor families or in housing vacated by UW-Whitewater students. But, the struggles are much more global than what the media tells.        

“When [COVID-19] happened, a lot of the off-campus housing that’s typically taken up by students was vacated,” said Chief Meyer. 

The vacancies allowed immigrants to apply for rentals in the area. Some immigrants qualified for housing in homes or apartments intended for UW-Whitewater students. Often these leases are short term and require fewer rental criteria than other residences. Roughly one eighth of the tenants in student housing overseen by the Whitewater Rental Association are immigrants, according to Stacy Johnson of the WRA. Many others reside at an apartment complex called Fox Meadows, which is just West of UW-Whitewater. These spaces, however, are filling up as more immigrants arrive.  

“We’re having another surge [of immigrants] right now,” said Johnson.  

In Johnson’s case, the application process has become increasingly difficult because of the language barrier and the immigrants’ inability to produce proper identification or paperwork. Most housing applications require a driver’s license or some form of government ID, which is impossible to obtain given Wisconsin’s 2006 law which prohibits undocumented people from driving legally, according to ProPublica. 

The first signs of the surge of immigrants included several service calls to the WPD regarding housing violations or domestic emergencies. In January of 2022, the WPD responded to a call involving a family with a two-year-old child who was found living in a ten-by-ten shed in negative temperatures. The only heat source in the shed was a small space heater wired from a trailer home on the lot. 

If immigrants are unable to legally reside in a home or apartment, many turn to friends or family in the area who are also renting. Often, two or more families are staying in single-family homes, violating occupancy laws, and drawing the attention of police and rental companies. When law enforcement or landlords are called to the residence, there is often an added challenge in communicating because of the language barrier. In 2022, service calls to Fox Meadows increased five times what they were in 2021, according to Chief Meyer.  

“We would have 14, 15, 16 people in an apartment intended for four,” said Chief Meyer. “The problem with that is a lot of the times it was non-familial living conditions… We’ve had multiple 13-year-old girls who were impregnated by 20-something-year-old men.”   

In addition to the immigrants’ struggles to find appropriate housing, the occupancy calls and housing related interactions with immigrants and non-English speakers have made the jobs of Whitewater police more intensive, according to Chief Meyer. A service call that would normally take two hours is taking upwards of four to six with the time it takes to translate everything via Propio, a paid translation hotline service used by the WPD.

One of the officers from the WPD, although fluent in Spanish, struggles to understand the language differences between him and the Nicaraguans in the area. The costs associated with these kinds of resources are just one of the many grievances in the letter sent by Chief Meyer to U.S. representatives. 

The letter includes a detailed recount of scenarios which represent a need for more police power. From housing calls to traffic stops, proactive policing has taken a huge step back as officers are forced to spend time policing a seven percent increase in their population.  

The letter denounces vilifying any new Whitewater residents but mentions the need for more police power to properly serve the Whitewater community. 

“This is not just a law enforcement issue,” said Chief Meyer. “We’re an element of it, but it’s much bigger than us.”

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This project was created through a journalism class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies Department. This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.