You haven’t been paying attention if you think the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which took effect 40 years ago this month, has served its purpose. If you weren’t paying attention, you might have missed the threat to immigrants implied in the dirty calling card left on some Des Moines doorsteps four months ago by the white separatist group the National Alliance. You might not have taken notice of the rally that took place here last week at the National Governors Association meeting, when a throng of activists raised immigration reform issues ranging from access to driver’s licenses to family reunification to access to education. Or you might just think that the next wave of the civil rights movement isn’t a business issue.

You’d be wrong about that. Civil rights issues are inextricably woven into employment issues, especially in Iowa, where a forecast severe worker shortage in the next few decades will provide opportunities for new Iowans, many of them immigrants of diverse ethnicities. Iowa needs immigrants; unfortunately, there are too many indications Iowans don’t want them. It’s an unsettling paradox that has Iowans recognizing the need to welcome immigrants as a stabilizing force in the economy, but its state leaders uncompromising on issues such as access to driver’s licenses and unfriendly English-only laws.

In a state that prides itself on its residents’ collective intellect and genuine hospitality, it’s mind-boggling that such measures can gain steam. Alicia Claypool, who chairs the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, thinks she may know why and is nagged by a statistic she extracted from U.S. Census Bureau data that shows three-fourths of Iowans live in the county in which they were born. “That means that even if they did go away to college, they came back, or they never went very far away,” she said. “People in Iowa don’t have a lot of exposure to diversity.”

It’s easy for folks to downplay or even ignore civil rights issues when they rarely come face-to-face with immigrants and people of color. That isolation can allow hate and prejudice to fester and grow before it boils over nastily, as it did when the National Alliance warned Des Moines residents in March that “non-whites are turning America into a Third World slum.” And it can cause some people to believe that the civil rights movement is yesterday’s cause and has no relevance whatsoever in the 21st century.

Civil rights activism, both on the state and national levels, is as important today as it was in the 19th-century struggles for freedom and the 20th-century fight for equality. Today, religious intolerance has reached frightening levels. Immigrants are welcomed to certain jobs, but are denied some of the freedoms Americans cherish. Women haven’t yet gained equality in the workplace, same-sex couples are discriminated against and a hasty response to terrorist threats gave Americans homeland security legislation that can be used to limit free speech, encourage racial profiling and even give the government the right to see who’s checking out what book from the public library.

The late Sen. Hubert Humphrey once said, “The struggle for equal opportunity in America is the struggle for America’s soul.” That’s true in Iowa, too, where we’re still searching for our soul. Fortunately, the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1965 provides a roadmap to it.