The law is the law, but the law is shit

The Globe and Mail has a 4 page report about a large recent immigration raid in the US that essentially decimated a small Iowa town. A (legal) resident the paper interviewed said "The law is the law, but..." Here's an excerpt:


In the largest immigration raid in U.S. history, 389 people were arrested in a matter of minutes, herded onto buses and interned at the National Cattle Congress Fairgrounds, 120 kilometres away in Waterloo.

They were kept there in a makeshift camp, behind a chain-link fence, watched by armed immigration officers for three days until they could be processed and sent to jails across the state. Nearly 300 have pleaded guilty to reduced charges of document fraud and will serve short prison sentences before being deported, while others are awaiting immediate deportation or have been placed on temporary release for compassionate reasons.

The Iowa slaughterhouse raid is part of a growing trend in the United States, home to anywhere from 12 to 18 million illegal immigrants, that has seen workplace immigration arrests grow tenfold in the past five years. Deemed illegal "aliens," this group has long been the focus of a fierce political debate, most recently in last year's failed attempt to reach a congressional consensus on immigration reform. That effort highlights the enduring tensions in this debate between hawks who want to clamp down on illegal migrants and pour billions into beefing up border security, and those - like the people of Postville, it turns out - who acknowledge that the migrants have earned a place in American society.

Rosa, a 40-year-old mother of two from Mexico, was working on the kill floor the morning of the raid. She had been at the plant for 15 months, and has lived in the United States for 13 years, working a number of factory jobs in Midwestern towns.

When she heard the cries of "la migra," a warning about immigration officials, ringing through the plant and saw her friends drop their tools and run, she slipped into a freezer and hid among the dead chickens. She sat there alone in the cold for several minutes, thinking to herself that everything was over. She would be caught. She would have to go back to Mexico with nothing. The better life she had planned for her children was not to be.

For years she had worried that this day might come, but somehow allowed herself to think it would not. Not here, not in the lush, green farm country of northern Iowa, more than a thousand miles from the Mexican border and a long way from the dense immigrant communities of California, Texas and South Florida. When she finally felt the hand of an ICE agent on her shoulder, Rosa's heart sank. The game was up.

As the illegal workers at the slaughterhouse watched their hoped-for futures dim, the people of Postville fumed. The bust puts the town's major employer in peril, casting a shadow of uncertainty over Postville's future.

At an emergency town meeting this week, Mayor Bob Penrod summed up the mood of an angry and confused town.

"I've asked myself 100 times, 'Why us?' " he said. "We're just a small town in Northeast Iowa."