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For many years, large-scale worksite raids constituted a major element of federal immigration enforcement. While the large-scale and well-publicized worksite raids have tapered, immigration enforcement has continued to increase, and the number of deportations and detentions is at an all-time high.
The ever-expanding arsenal of ICE enforcement policies, together with harsh state and local laws and policies, have harmful side effects that go far beyond the unauthorized population. Policies meant to target unauthorized immigrants also impact their family members, employers, and neighbors. A large number of the people affected are U.S.-citizen children. Latinos, Asians, and others who “sound” or “appear” to be foreign may be the victims of mistakes (such as the U.S. citizens who have been mistakenly deported), or may experience civil rights violations, discrimination, or profiling. In states and localities with anti-immigrant laws and policies, negative attitudes towards immigrants and nasty rhetoric might be enough to cause lawfully present people to leave.
When large numbers of people leave an area, either because they have been deported or because they simply couldn’t endure the hostility, there is a negative impact on the community. Immigrants and their families are workers, taxpayers, business owners, and consumers. When they disappear, so do tax revenues, businesses, and jobs. Furthermore, the goodwill between ethnic communities that took years to build can be quickly destroyed.
This paper examines the effects of the raid on the community’s financial, social, and human capital. It is important to recognize that the same effects are being felt in communities across the country, wherever large numbers of immigrants are being targeted and deported. The economic, social, and human impact of immigration enforcement rarely receives as much attention as the sheer numbers of people arrested and deported, but it is the broader implications of enforcement-only policies that have the strongest negative effects on the community.
For many years, large-scale worksite raids constituted a major element of federal immigration enforcement. While the large-scale and well-publicized worksite raids have tapered, immigration enforcement has continued to increase, and the number of deportations and detentions is at an all-time high. Nearly 400,000 immigrants were removed from the United States in Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 (U.S. OIS 2010). The budget of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased from $3.3 billion in FY 2003 to 5.7 billion in FY 2010 (U.S. DHS 2004, 2010).
Other enforcement measures have taken the place of raids. Partnerships with local police agencies such as Secure Communities, the 287(g) program, and the Criminal Alien Program identify thousands of immigrants for removal each year. Fugitive Operations Teams (FOTs), which are used to locate and remove criminal aliens, “fugitive aliens,” and other immigration violators, resulted in over 35,000 arrests in FY 2009 (U.S. ICE 2009). ICE also operates the largest detention and supervised-release program in the country. A total of 378,582 immigrants from 221 countries were in custody or supervised by ICE in FY 2008 (Schriro 2009).
Moreover, there has been an increase in the number of restrictive state immigration laws—such as SB1070 in Arizona and city immigration ordinances such as those passed in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Fremont, Nebraska—which aim to control unauthorized immigration. These laws require local police agencies to enforce federal immigration laws, and create additional penalties for activities such as failing to carry identity documents, renting apartments to unauthorized immigrants, hiring unauthorized workers, and soliciting and/or hiring day labor. These laws contribute to the policy of “attrition through enforcement” created and supported by restrictionist organizations, the idea behind which is to make life for unauthorized immigrants so miserable that they will choose to return to their home countries rather than remain in the U.S.
The ever-expanding arsenal of ICE enforcement policies and state and local laws have harmful side effects that go far beyond the unauthorized population. Because unauthorized immigrants live in “mixed-status” families and communities—meaning that U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants live in the same households and neighborhoods—policies meant to target unauthorized immigrants also impact their family members, employers, and neighbors. A large number of the people affected are U.S.-citizen children. Nationwide, there are approximately four million U.S.-citizen children with at least one unauthorized-immigrant parent, and policies that target their parents have grave effects on the children (Passel & Taylor 2010). Worksite raids, door-to-door raids, and other policies that lead to the detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants separate parents from children and husbands from wives.
Furthermore, while many of these enforcement measures are meant to target unauthorized immigrants, the fact is that thousands of legal permanent residents (LPRs or “green card” holders) and other lawful immigrants are deported each year, often for committing nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors. More than 100,000 children were affected by LPR parental deportation between 1997 and 2007, and more than 88,000 of those children were U.S. citizens (U.C. Berkeley 2010).
Immigration enforcement policies impact legal immigrants and U.S. citizens in other ways as well. Latinos, Asians, and others who “sound” or “appear” to be foreign may be the victims of mistakes (such as the U.S. citizens who have been mistakenly deported), or may experience civil rights violations, discrimination, or profiling. In states and localities with anti-immigrant laws and policies, negative attitudes towards immigrants and nasty rhetoric might be enough to cause lawfully present people to leave.
When large numbers of people leave an area, either because they have been deported or because they simply couldn’t endure the hostility, there is a negative impact on the community. Immigrants and their families are workers, taxpayers, business owners, and consumers. When they disappear, so do tax revenues, businesses, and jobs. Furthermore, the goodwill between ethnic communities that took years to build can be quickly destroyed.
While this paper tells the story of a large worksite raid and its aftermath, it is important to recognize that the same effects are being felt in communities across the country, wherever large numbers of immigrants are being targeted and deported. The economic, social, and human impact of immigration enforcement rarely receives as much attention as the sheer numbers of people arrested and deported, but it is the broader implications of enforcement-only policies that have the strongest negative effects on the community.
Early on Tuesday, December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered the Swift & Company pork processing facility in Marshalltown, Iowa. ICE agents blocked the exits and began checking identification, sorting workers into groups of presumed citizens, legal residents, and persons lacking legal documentation. They arrested 90 people, placed them in handcuffs, loaded them into three buses with opaque windows, and drove them to Camp Dodge, a National Guard facility in Johnston, Iowa. Families, lawyers, and clergy members struggled to get reliable information from ICE officials about detainees’ whereabouts. After 72 hours, the arrested workers were deported or transferred to out-of-state federal detention centers. Five other Swift plants around the nation were raided on the same day for a total of 1,282 workers arrested. It was the largest immigration raid on a single company in U.S. history (Hisey 2006).
Owners and upper management of Swift & Company knew for months a raid was likely to occur at its plants, and actively tried to prevent it (U.S. SEC 2006). ICE had subpoenaed the work documents of all Swift employees the previous March, retaining 665 belonging to Marshalltown employees. Swift claimed that an ICE action would violate the company’s participation in a pilot federal program to verify employment documents. Attempting to clear its files of potentially false documents, Swift began interviewing employees at several of its plants about their work documents in September and October of 2006. The result: 400 quit or were terminated company-wide. In November, Swift filed an injunction in federal court to prevent a raid. It was denied.
On the morning of Tuesday, December 12, the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the most sacred holy days for Mexicans, employees arrived before sunrise for the early shift. At about 7:30 a.m., six ICE buses pulled up to the Swift & Company plant and quickly secured all the exits. They entered with a warrant to arrest workers on charges of administrative immigration violation or identity theft. A flurry of phone calls emanated from the plant for family members to bring IDs to detainees and for family and friends to pick up children from school (See Brasher 2006; Perkins, Brasher, and Alex. 2006; various interviews).
ICE did not go to the schools, but many in town feared that it would. To dispel such rumors, the police chief asked for confirmation from ICE that agents would not go to the schools. He also asked for confirmation that ICE had a plan for preventing the stranding of children and dependent adults whose caregivers were arrested. ICE planned to ask detainees if they had any dependents and, if that detainee were the only caregiver, to release them. But employees were fearful that mentioning their children would lead to their arrest, too. So, many detained parents said nothing. In most cases where both parents were arrested, neither was released that day to care for the children.
Workers were initially separated by race and nationality. Those who appeared to be U.S. citizens were moved into the cafeteria for questioning; legal immigrants and persons suspected of being unauthorized were held separately. ICE agents did not always guess right who was a native-born citizen and who was not. We interviewed Michael Graves, a United Food and commercial Workers (UFCW) union member, a long-term employee at the plant, a former student at Iowa State University, and an African-American. He testified at a UFCW hearing in Des Moines:
[M]e and two other coworkers…[were] going our normal route to the cafeteria… ICE agents that [were] heavily armed met us at the door and asked us where we [were] going. We told him we were going to the cafeteria as we were instructed to go. He asked us, did we have any weapons on us and did I have any identification? I told him I had [my identification] in my locker. He told us to get against the wall and handcuffed us from behind.
So then he escorted us to the locker room… I gave him my combination, he opened my locker and he asked me, did I have any weapons in my locker? And I said no, I don’t have any weapons. So he searched my locker, he went through my clothes and my equipment and everything and found no weapons. He asked me, where’s my identification? I told him it was in my pants pocket. So he went in my pants pocket, pulled out my identification, and questioned me about [it.] He asked me where I was living and I told him I was living in Waterloo, Iowa. And he questioned me, why was I working in Marshalltown? I said, well, this is the place I wanted to work and I’ve been working here, at that time, for 20 years.
…[H]e questioned me about my status as a U.S. citizen and I said my mother and father were born and raised in Mississippi. He questioned me about that and asked me, did I know my route to Mississippi? And I said no, but I can find my way there because I had been there a lot of times with my parents. He looked at my I.D. again, told me to sit down with my hands behind my back, still handcuffed. (Michael Graves, quoted in UFCW, 2009, p. 16)
Graves was still handcuffed an hour later when he was taken to the cafeteria where other U.S. citizens were being held. He was not allowed to use the bathroom until sometime after he finally arrived at the cafeteria. He was released eight hours after being detained.
Manuel Vedínez, also a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed and taken with other detainees in the afternoon to Camp Dodge because ICE could not match the social security number he gave them:
[T]hey found my record…and said they had made a mistake. Then [the ICE agent] finally took off my handcuffs… They called a cab for me and I had to pay $90 for the cab ride back. I was not allowed to leave that place until 8 p.m. I was detained by the ICE agents for more than 12 hours… I had even been handcuffed for about 9 hours. I had done nothing wrong that would give…ICE agents any reason to believe I had done anything wrong, or that I deserved to be handcuffed. (Manuel Vedínez, quoted in UFCW 2009, p. 19).
In mid-afternoon of December 12, three buses filled with 90 detainees pulled out of Marshalltown for Camp Dodge for further processing. On Thursday, December 14, a small group of single mothers was released to return to Marshalltown to care for their children. Legal advocates and clergy had lobbied ICE to release single mothers. On Friday, December 15, all detainees were moved from Camp Dodge to federal prisons around the country, or they were deported. Those held in prison (principally one outside of Atlanta, GA) awaited trial. Family, clergy, and counsel of the detainees say ICE would not tell them where family member had been moved. Immigration lawyers who were involved claim ICE violated detainees’ rights to due process by limiting their access to legal counsel. ICE said people were moved so far away from home because that’s where there was space in federal facilities (Rood 2006).
To understand the trauma of the December 2006 ICE raid on Marshalltown (the second such raid in a decade) one must know why some Latino immigrants—both authorized and unauthorized—are attracted to previously non-Hispanic white (a U.S. Census term) communities in Iowa and the rural Midwest. That requires understanding basic changes in the meatpacking industry.
Meatpacking in the Midwest was restructured by placing the plants near feedlots, which grew enormously in the 1980s; boxing retail cuts of meat at the plant rather than at retail outlets; and deskilling labor from packinghouse to grocery store. The strong unions that had characterized the meat packing industry were broken, and mergers and buyouts concentrated the industry (Broadway 1995; Fink 1998).
Incomes of packing house workers in Iowa declined more than 40% between 1978 and 1992 (University of Virginia Library 2008; U.S. Census Bureau 2009). As wages plummeted, it became more and more difficult to recruit so-called corn-fed (white male) Iowa workers to meatpacking. In Marshalltown, as in other meatpacking communities, the downward spiral in real wages in that sector preceded the massive migration of Latinos to work in the plant.
In 1989, Swift and Company began to bus Latino men to Marshalltown from Waterloo to work at the plant (Griffith 2004). This brought the first handful of Mexican workers to Marshalltown. In 1990, there were 291 Hispanics living in Marshalltown, out of a total population of 25,178. By 2000, there were 3,265 Hispanics, making up 12.6% of the population (U.S. Census Bureau 2003). In 2008, we extrapolated the city’s Latino population to be over 5,000—nearly 20% of the total. The Swift plant, the largest employer in town, employs 2,400 workers and slaughters 19,000 pigs a day (H. Lewis and C. Prado, field notes from tour of JBS Swift plant, August 2008).
Marshalltown has experienced two major immigration raids on its meat packing plant in which local residents from Mexico and Central America were arrested and deported. How did the population respond to these federally induced disasters?
The immediate concern in the community the day of the December 12, 2006 raid was to identify children of detained parents to ensure and coordinate their care. Clearly, a list of detainees was needed. Many people disappeared from Marshalltown that day, but not all were detained. Some left town or simply went into hiding. A list of detainees would help responders identify which households to visit or call to check that children had not been stranded. The local chapter of the Red Cross, the mayor, and the police chief requested the list from ICE. ICE was unwilling to release a list, so the community assembled one on its own based on whatever local information could be gathered.
The school district helped identify all possible households with dependent children of detained parents. Each school was instructed to account for all of its students. Counselors, teachers, and others used a list of emergency contacts to contact each household and determine who was there and would be responsible for providing care for the students. In some cases, schools had to send children home with unauthorized caregivers, in which case they called third parties to verify the relationships.
Two other critical needs were to get information about detainees and coordinate financial assistance for families that had lost one or more wage earners. In particular, family members sought to find out where detainees had been taken, how to contact them, if they were well, and what legal recourse the families could take. To confirm that a relative was in custody and find how to get in touch with him/her, people were instructed to call ICE’s family hotline. But due to high volume of calls, people were put on hold for long periods and a second hotline was established on Thursday, December 14. Family members, clergy, and lawyers still reported difficulty getting in touch with detainees.
The Hispanic Ministries of the Catholic Church became the central place for people seeking information and solace, and it was the hub for coordinating responses among local service organizations. The first of three meetings was called at St. Mary’s Church on Wednesday, December 13, to coordinate response to the emergency. The Red Cross would coordinate information flow among key organizations and individuals helping or supporting affected families. The Red Cross was designated to receive all relevant information (ICE’s family hotline number, visitation hours, how attorneys could gain access to detainees, when community response meeting would be, etc.), verified it, and packaged it in daily emails to community leaders. Hispanic Ministries made sure the information got to the immigrant community.
On Friday, December 15, the church hosted a town hall meeting, coordinated by the Iowa Division of Latino Affairs. State and local officials, Latino community leaders, school representatives, and pro-bono lawyers were present. The lawyers explained the deportation process and met with families to assess their situation (Pierquet 2006).
The church received donations that flowed in unsolicited from individuals and organizations in Marshalltown, throughout Iowa, and beyond. More than $120,000 was received and distributed to families through the church. This included a contribution of a few hundred dollars per family from Swift and $20,000 from a local foundation. Other companies contributed gift cards for food and gasoline. The Low Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) was used to reduce the heating bills of households that lost a worker to the raid. The United Way received Swift’s donation to affected families, and funneled money to Hispanic Ministries to disburse, keeping track of each payment.
Individuals and organizations demonstrated a range of support. Volunteers compiled a list of community members willing to take in children of detained persons. A few days after the raid, a community action organization that administers programming to families visited homes to check on financial and other needs. Community and service organizations with regular contact with immigrants answered their questions, directed them to needed resources, and reassured them that ICE would not visit them. City library personnel assisted people in faxing paperwork and finding information on the Internet (such as legal services). A realty firm offered to help people stuck with a house if their name was on the mortgage, but it was being paid for by somebody who was deported. The firm would advertise the house at no charge and handle the sale of the house at cost.
Some local and state-wide media put a human face on the story of the raid (see Jacobs 2006 as an example). This may have increased pressure on ICE to release single mothers to care for their children. In February 2007, The Marshalltown Times-Republican sponsored a summit on immigration to help people understand immigration issues and policy and to make a unified call for reform.
Not all segments of the community pulled together to minimize the effects of ICE’s enforcement efforts on the community. The police chief, although playing a useful liaison role between ICE and the community on the day of the raid, continued to collaborate closely with ICE in an effort to root out unauthorized persons from the community. The Police Department requested that the City Council authorize a 287(g) agreement between the Police Department and ICE, which would allow the police to detain individuals arrested for other reasons for eventual transfer to ICE custody if they did not have proper immigration papers.
On April 17, 2007, some four months after the raid, Latinos en Acción organized a town meeting, attended by 175 people, to oppose the Marshalltown Police Department’s proposal to train local police to enforce immigration law under the umbrella of a 287(g) agreement (Galinsky 2007). Apparently, persons with and without appropriate documents protested. This is particularly remarkable, given the fact that the Swift raid (and a much smaller residential raid by ICE later the same week that netted one arrest for identity theft; see Black 2006) had struck fear in the hearts of many Latinos, authorized or not, and had caused Latinos to virtually disappear from public life in Marshalltown. In part because of the cost to the city of housing detainees in the city jail until ICE agents would pick them up, and perhaps because of the protest, the City Council did not act on the 287(g) request. Yet, on September 28, 2007, Marshalltown police led a police raid on workers at a Monsanto plant in nearby Grinnell. Sixteen people were arrested on immigration-related charges (Burke 2007a, 2007b).
In April 2008, the UFCW held a public hearing in Des Moines to investigate ICE misconduct, featuring testimony of people from Marshalltown and outside volunteers involved in the raid response.
Immediately after the raid, there was a sense of fear among the Latino population that constrained families from engaging in grocery shopping, dining out, or even visiting the downtown, which, at least temporarily, reduced the demand for goods and services in the city.
In 2006, Marshalltown possessed 55 Latino businesses in different sectors, including retail services (29%), auto repairs (18%), restaurants (16%), food products (11%), and construction and painting (5%), among others. Eleven food-related businesses reported sales of $3.1 million during that year, representing 21% of total sales of the food sector in Marshalltown (Cardenas 2006).
Businesses that offered goods and services to the Latino community indicated significant losses and a drop in sales in the period after the raid. Their customer base was undermined as people left, were deported, or returned to Mexico to join deported families members. Latino customers refrained from making purchases to save money in case of future economic hardship or should they have to leave Marshalltown.
Latino businesses in the food and beverage sector reported a sharp decrease in the number of customers per week after the raids as well. During the interviews, every business mentioned having lost at least 50% of their customers immediately after the raid. A year after the raid, several of the Latino business owners indicated that their sales had still not returned to previous levels. One clothing-store proprietor reported losing $70,000 in unpaid accounts as clients were deported or left town. The value of remittances, and hence proprietors’ commissions from wiring money internationally, dropped suddenly by 70% on average and overall sales decreased for these businesses by nearly two-thirds, according to estimates by the Latino businesspersons we interviewed who provided those services.
Losses by Latino businesspersons were not shared by Anglo proprietors. Latinos bore most of the economic brunt of the raids, except perhaps in the housing sector, where the decline was more widespread, but that sector appears to have recovered by the following year.
The general economic downturn in the first half of this decade affected Marshalltown, as measured by retail trade and population. The population of the city began to decline in 2001. The dip in population in 2006 of about 150 persons (State Data Center of Iowa 2009) may be due to persistent rumors of a raid at least as early as October of that year and the effects of the raid itself in December.
Food manufacturing was highly affected by the detentions. JBS Swift is the largest employer in Marshalltown. The plant increased wages for new hires to attract new employees to bring the operations of the plant back to normal. However, the increase in average earnings can be also viewed as an increase in the company’s expenditures and therefore, a decrease in its competitiveness.
The turnover rate at Swift and Company rose to 8.5% in the quarter preceding the raid due to anticipatory firings by the company, which was in negotiation with ICE in an attempt to avoid a raid. Some unauthorized workers may have left their job at the plant because of rumors of a raid.
The turnover rate shot up to over 18% during the fourth quarter of 2006, and, although trending downward, remained above eight percent in the seven quarters following the raid. This high rate following the raid suggests the continuing challenge for the company to find reliable and productive authorized immigrants or native workers. Because most workers have families, the employee turnover rate suggests an even larger “churning” of community residents. Schools and other community helping organizations and agencies are faced with an expanding numbers of newcomers. This complicates the work of the schools, the police, and other community institutions.
Generally, Marshalltown is viewed as a friendly community by Latino newcomers and long-term European-American residents alike. Over 90% of each group of interviewees disagreed with the statement, “It is hard to make good friends in Marshalltown.” When we asked them to respond to the statement, “Marshalltown is welcoming to newcomers,” 95% of Anglos and 84% of Latinos agreed. One thoughtful young Latino stated that before the raid, “Parks were always full. Always, public places, as they say—bars, were always full on weekends.” Others cited strong church attendance, the constitution of a 16-team soccer league (organized by Latinos en Acción), and the establishment of a Hispanic Festival before the raid.
A plurality of people, both Latino and Anglo, felt that trust between Latinos and Anglos decreased following the raid. However, only two-fifths of Anglos said so, compared to two-thirds of Latinos. None of the Latinos felt that inter-group trust had increased, while 16% of the Anglos interviewed did.
The following statement comes from one of the Anglo women professionals that led one of the organizations central in responding to the raid. She felt that the raid had increased trust between Latinos and Anglos:
…what I saw was sort of the disaster phenomenon, this outpouring of compassion. People in this area really care about other people and they really respond when they know that people are hurting and it has been caused by some event…so there was a strong wave of compassion and community, and “these are our people too,” and the whole method—ICE probably couldn’t have engineered any better to create negative feelings towards ICE and empathy towards those rounded up. I think just like the patriotism and the sense of unity we saw after September 11th, a huge outpouring of support and compassion that we saw after Hurricane Katrina, it was that same kind of thing… (Director of a social service agency.)
A few Latino and Anglo leaders said that the raid had done such damage that relations would take many years to get back to where they were before. An Anglo media person put it this way:
The sad part is that when you look around, [Latinos] are buying homes, they are buying cars, they are buying groceries; they are integrated 100% that way, but the animosity in the community is stronger than it has ever been before. The day those raids came through, it kicked it up a notch back to earlier levels. People crawled out of the woodwork like you wouldn’t believe. We ran a special section a year after the raids, and the number of comments—we actually had to disable comments on our website because of the problems we had with people complaining: “All you people do is write about the sad, sad story. Have you forgotten what the word ‘illegal’ means?” Well, actually, if you look, the people we wrote about weren’t illegal. We wrote about the impact it had on those who are here legally. So, that has been tough.
I think we took 20 years of stepping forward and in one hour on that morning [December 12, 2006], we went back 20 years right away. I think it took that little of time to take a massive step backwards.
The impact of this backward step on immigrants, whether documented or not, was palpable. It is most notable in the case of this worker, who was arrested at the Swift plant and later released. A year and a half later, she was still anxious:
…for me everything changed as a result of the raid, because now I live in fear. I don’t feel secure in my own house… and even when I just see a policeman, he arouses fear in me (Latina packing plant worker).
Other Latinas reported discrimination that they believed resulted from the raid:
I think that some people took a great dislike to us, based on an incident that occurred to me several months ago. I go to the House of Compassion [a soup kitchen and emergency relief agency] occasionally, and in this instance I took my children. We set out walking and when the children and I arrived, (according to my son) the person in charge asked if we wanted coffee and crackers and if we did, invited us to sit down. Since we were pretty hot, I said to my son, “Lets grab some water.” There were some gabachos [slang for North Americans or Anglos] who were playing dominos, and I felt uncomfortable because they turned around and stared at me and my children and then said something. I asked my son what they were saying and he told me they asked, “What are we doing here? And, wasn’t it true that we just came to ask for what really belonged to them?” I said, “Why are they bothering us if they came for the same reason?” So I felt very badly because never before in my life had I had gabachos be so ugly to me, so I said to my children, “No, we had better go,” and I grabbed them and we left. My daughters left their glasses on the table, and they [the domino players] said to the children that they should not leave the glasses there, and that we should wash them carefully because they could infect someone. My son took the glasses back and said, “Ay, mommy! They are saying we must wash the glasses so that we won’t infect anyone.” I had never had something happen like what occurred that day.
The ICE raid brought at least a temporary halt, and perhaps a sharp reversal, to the established social capital between Latinos and Anglos in Marshalltown. It gave license to those who held views opposing the presence of immigrants to express anti-immigrant statements, and at least in some instances, to actively insult or discriminate against any and all Latino residents. On the other hand, the raid generated bonding social capital among Latinos and bridging social capital with a small, but important, number of Anglo social service providers and community leaders who pitched in to attempt to ameliorate the effects of this “unnatural” disaster.
While the raid caused great suffering, community disruption, and even enmity, a keen observer of the situation, taking the long view, has an optimistic assessment that bridges are being built in Marshalltown between Latinos and long-term residents:
I would say that generally it [trust] has probably increased because people have more neighbors who are Hispanics. They have worked with them and their kids are friends with them. They see them on the street; they go to church with them. They work next to them, so I think in that way they have become more than just these people who are foreigners here who don’t speak the language. They have become real people to a lot of them. And I think a lot of them have heard people’s stories too after the raid. They heard stories about, “This is why we came and this is why we are here and this is our situation.” So, like I say, it kind of put a human form to this immigration thing (Female Anglo religious leader).
In 2000, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack named Marshalltown one of three model communities because of its success in integrating immigrants into the community (Woodrick 2006: 291). The police chief, the mayor, and several others visited Mexico to learn more about the new members of the Marshalltown community. Although rarely has there been mixing of Latinos and Anglos in intimate settings like each other’s houses, other events, such as citywide festivals, parks, and school sporting events, have drawn a brown and white tapestry of family participation. Best of all, kids have been learning each other’s language at a premier dual-language elementary school, blazing a bicultural path for future leaders. In spite of murmurs of anti-immigrant sentiment, the official face of Marshalltown has been consciously painted as a welcoming place, and hearts were slowly following suit.
The 2006 raid in many ways set this scene in disarray, and gave voice to suppressed resentment among a minority of Anglos unwilling to accept new immigration and multiculturalism, increasing distrust between Anglos and Latinos.
The ICE raid contributed to a localized economic recession for perhaps six months to a year after the raid. Yet the situation threw people and groups together that otherwise might not have collaborated. Anglo- and Latino-led community organizations and individuals figured out how to rescue children, families, and the community in the immediate aftermath of the raid. The collective effort in the immediate aftermath of the raid was reminiscent of response to a natural disaster. Recently, in a year-long effort, service agencies and organizations, local authorities, and other immigrant-serving organizations that responded during the raid developed a raid-preparedness plan should another raid occur. However, it was necessary to adjust the plan as raids have shifted from the workplace to people’s residences.
Still, as in an earlier wave of INS raids in the late 1990s, the fundamental issues have not been addressed in Marshalltown, the state of Iowa, or in the nation as a whole. One writer observed the following after raids in 1996, but much of what he said can be applied following the raid ten years later:
…INS raids across the state revealed how deeply dependent packing plants are on Latino immigrants. Most criticism in the state and local press, however, targeted the immigrants and not the plants.… Very few openly acknowledged that meatpacking could not survive without immigrants, even though immigrants in general took the political heat when so many were discovered to be in the country illegally. Most critics sought deportation for the illegal immigrants. Very few believed settlement of immigrants was the answer (Grey 2000: 96).
The massive headline-grabbing workplace raids of the past have ended for now, but ICE continues to identify, detain, and deport large numbers of immigrants in smaller actions and through new programs such as Secure Communities. Members of the 112th Congress appear ready to press the Administration to increase worksite enforcement, looking, perhaps, for a return to what is ultimately a counter-productive and harmful strategy. The pressure from Congress will likely be exacerbated by pressure within many state legislatures, where efforts to adopt Arizona-style anti-immigrant legislation are multiplying. These events make our findings in Marshalltown all the more relevant, as the goal of deportation often comes without an understanding of the real consequences for individuals and for communities. The experiences of the people of Marshalltown teaches an important lesson: immigration enforcement actions have lasting consequences that can harm the financial, human, and social capital of communities.
Marshalltown teaches other lessons, as well. The Marshalltown raid also forced a conversation about immigration and community that might not otherwise have occurred. New relationships and new alliances have developed, particularly among social-service agencies and organizations that represent Latinos. There is a greater awareness of what can and should be done collaboratively at a local level to protect families and the community as a whole from the damage wrought by immigration-enforcement actions. In other words, the raid forced a greater recognition of the complex relationships between undocumented immigrants and their communities, but it was a conversation that came at great cost to all involved.
Published On: Tue, Jan 25, 2011 | Download File [1]
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[1] http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/Marshalltown_Raid_012511.pdf