US Immigration Reform and Its Global Impact

Lessons from the Postville Raid

E. Camayd-Freixas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137106780
• Print ISBN:
  9780230105850
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law

An insider's account of the Postville case, this book gauges the raid's human, social, and economic impact, based on interaction with the main participants and interviews with local citizens and arrestees in the US and Guatemala.  

1

HOMETOWN TO THE WORLD

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POSTVILLE

Maybe Postville is out front of where the rest of America is eventually headed.

—Stephen Bloom

Driving south from Minnesota on Route 52, just past the Amish settlement at Harmony, the traveler finds a friendly billboard marking the state line, “The People of Iowa Welcome You: Fields of Opportunity.” It means, “Iowa needs workers.” This is the first of many welcoming signs, whose messages, much in keeping with the character of the region, are nevertheless profoundly at odds with an immigration raid. An eventual left onto Route 9 at Decorah will bring you to Frankville Road, right turn only. Over yonder sits tiny Frankville (pop. 343). To the right, the cemetery is larger than the town. For 150 years, folks have been born, raised, and buried at “The Nicest Little Spot in Northern Iowa.” Postville too was like that once, a homogeneous town of German and Norwegian Lutherans, followed by Irish Catholics, Dutch Methodists, and Presbyterians. Four miles ahead, a right on 51 toward Route 18 brings you to Postville, “Hometown to the World,” established 1849. A century and a half later, this town of two square miles had been home to people of 50 nationalities, speaking 35 languages.¹

Postville’s foundational years are aptly told by Stanley Schroeder, unofficial historian and founder of the Postville Historical Society at his own home on East Williams Street, where he “amassed 50,000 typewritten pages on Postville’s history.”² Schroeder printed historical compendia titled Postville Pageant 1849–1974, which provide content for the history tab of the City of Postville website. He had a weekly radio program at the Postville station, called Prominent People of the Pale Past. In a colorful and direct style, halfway between Garrison Keillor and the Farmer’s Almanac, Stan Schroeder told the tales of old Postville, from its settlement by Joel and Zeruiah Post in 1840, and its founding after Iowa became the twenty-ninth state in 1846 and the buffalo-hunting Winnebago Indians “relinquished” the “neutral grounds” to the white settlers by treaty in 1847,³ to the first school, the first election, the first businesses, the railroad, churches, clinic, the first newspaper, and the coming of lighting and running water—leading to the town’s first public bathroom at the Parker Barber Shop, billed as “a place where men may take their Saturday night bath.” After the arrival of the Western Railroad in 1864, the town’s population swelled from only 50 settlers to 832 in 1880. The surge was not without some growing pains.

Prior to the 1890s the streets of Postville were dark and lonely after the evening sunset. An occasional light or the moon would help steer the weary person as he felt his way along the village streets towards home. A frequent number of burglaries occurred during that period. Things finally got so bad that it was necessary to hire a night watchman. Through the efforts of a few leading citizens, $104.50 was raised and 28 oil lamps were purchased. The city installed gaslights in 1903. “The lights give Postville quite a metropolitan aspect. A few, of course, are disappointed that they are unable to read a newspaper by them two blocks away.” In 1909, the first electric lights were turned on at Thomas’ Drug Store and the Nicolay & Durne Hardware. “They work like a charm, free from flicker, and as white as an old maid plastered up with talcum powder.”⁴

The original German settlement of “Cabbage Hill” became more residential as businesses moved closer to the railroad tracks. The weekly Postville Review, in print since 1873, was Greek to the growing number of first- and second-generation Germans who could not read or write English. So in 1891, the Iowa Volksblatt began publication exclusively in German and expanded distribution as far as Milwaukee. In 1918, the new owner changed it to Postville Herald and began to publish in English. Similar changes that swept through Iowa were patriotically motivated by anti-German sentiments after World War I. Yet Schroeder reports that still in the 1930s German was more commonly heard than English in the streets of Postville. St Paul’s Lutheran Church continued its services in German until the mid-1950s.

Since the times of Benjamin Franklin, German immigrants were the objects of discrimination. Franklin’s commonplace attitude, consigned to a private letter sold at auction in 1919 and quoted in the New York Times, came to reinforce postwar anti-German sentiments. “Those who come hither,” he protested a century earlier,

are generally of the most ignorant, stupid sort of their Own Nation . . . Few of their children in the country learn English . . . Bonds and other legal writings in their own language are allowed good in Our Courts, that there’s continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in Ye Assembly, to tell one half of Our Legislature what the other half says.

Franklin worried that French colonists were promoting German immigrant settlements in Illinois leading to potential alliances that might undermine the eastern colonies. “Yet I am not for refusing entirely to admit them,” he conceded. “All that seems to me necessary is to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English . . . for they have their Virtues; their Industry . . . They are excellent Husbandmen and contribute greatly to the Improvement of a country.”⁵ Like every other immigrant group that came after, the Germans found in remote Postville an Arcadian refuge where they could work hard, live in peace, and enjoy freedom from discrimination and persecution. Today 36 percent of Iowa’s population is of German ancestry, the state’s largest ethnic group.

Like Norwegians, Irish, Dutch, and others whom the railroad brought, the Germans in time became Americans, Iowans, and yet preserved much of their heritage, while sharing in their neighbors’. Ethnic differences became blurred through intermarriage and business partnerships, frowned upon at first but gradually accepted as inevitable. Even the divide between Lutherans and Catholics became nuanced by new conversions. The myth of the American “melting pot” took shape—as a Caucasian myth, to be sure—while in reality Postville became more like an alphabet soup of old European surnames.

The railroad became a catalyst for the American way of life. An iconic moment in that subtle transformation came in 1916 as a long caravan of exotic species along the iron tracks: five Iowa sons, the Ringling brothers, brought “The Greatest Show on Earth” to Postville. Today a mural on Lawler Street commemorates the momentous arrival of that great equalizer of cultures, the circus. By then, Native Americans were rare enough to be exhibited as oddities, alongside actors posing as cowboys—a social type extinct since the invention of barbed wire in 1873.

But the railroad not only brought peoples and things. Outward bound, it also linked Postville to port cities on the Mississippi River, in line with the mighty Corn Belt, among the world’s most bountiful agricultural regions. Iowa became known as the “Food Capital of the World.” With the advent of hybrid corn, a crucial advance in modern agriculture, yields quickly doubled in the 1930s, helping to propel the region and the nation out of the Great Depression. Through the railroad, Postville also contributed its share of native sons to every major American war. Many went out to see the world in times of peace as well, but none as avidly as John R. Mott (1865–1955), who became secretary general of the YMCA World Alliance, founder of the World Student Christian Federation, and 1946 Nobel Peace laureate for his lifelong work in promoting intercultural understanding. Schroeder calls him “a true Citizen of the World.”

Such a long and proud legacy of tolerance, inclusion, and diversity characterizes Iowa in general. The first decision of the Iowa Supreme Court, In Re the Matter of Ralph (1839), was one of the country’s earliest rejections of slavery. Departing from prevailing federal law, the Court ruled that a slave named Ralph had become free the moment he set foot on Iowa soil. In 1869, after the Civil War, the state began encouraging immigration by printing an official booklet, Iowa: The Home of Immigrants, with editions in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.

After the period of agricultural expansion (1865–1940), Iowa farm towns, though not immune to national trends and upheavals, developed rather slowly and peacefully, in tune with the geometry of the surrounding cornfields and the open Midwestern sky. They raised pigs, cattle, and poultry, strictly in that order, and added soybeans as another major crop. Postville’s population stabilized at around 1,400 and then stagnated. For decades now, as in other rural towns across the nation, young people have gravitated to big cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, or Chicago in search of opportunities, but leaving a severe labor shortage behind. Others simply moved to larger communities within the state, the closest being Decorah, 25 miles away, but also Waterloo at an hour’s drive, Cedar Rapids at two hours, or Des Moines, the state capital, four hours away. The problem of rural flight, a by-product of globalization affecting countries the world over for decades, became particularly acute during the Midwest Farm Crisis of the 1980s.⁶ After years of near-zero growth, Iowa’s population decreased for the first time in history, by an alarming 5 percent throughout that decade. Rural towns were most severely impacted. Land and property values plummeted by 60 percent; farms, banks, and businesses folded. The heaviest casualties were family farms, which henceforth became an endangered species.⁷

The period of manufacturing expansion (1940–85) had never quite reached Postville aside from agribusiness. The town had a feed mill, suppliers of farming machinery and equipment, seed and chemicals, and two meatpacking plants: Iowa Turkey, established in 1972, and the Hygrade beef plant, which shut down in 1980 after many years in business, an early victim of the farm crisis. Postville was a declining town of 1,500 souls in 1987, when the Rubashkins, Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn, bought the abandoned Hygrade slaughterhouse and turned it into the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the country, and eventually the world. They named it Agriprocessors, “A Great Place to Work!”

“Agri”—as locals called it—was Postville’s second railroad of prosperity. It patronized local contractors and suppliers, reinvigorated the housing market, and quickly tripled the town’s economic output and capital base.⁸ It brought Postville back from the brink of oblivion and into the age of Iowa’s mixed economy (1985 on), when the expansion of modern manufacturing and diversified services reduced the state’s dependence on agriculture. The renewed base of prosperity ushered by Agri made the town attractive enough for the Norplex-Micarta merger to revamp operations in 2002 into a high-tech thermoplastic laminates manufacturing plant employing 200–500 local Iowan skilled workers. And when Iowa Turkey burned down in December 2003, Agri absorbed many of its displaced employees. Yet from the start of Agriprocessors, the bulk of the muscle, the human fuel that drove that railroad of prosperity and lifted Postville out of the dregs of the farm crisis, was constituted by undocumented migrant labor: Eastern European at first; then Mexican; and, finally, Guatemalan.

To oversee the kosher operation, the Rubashkins brought rabbis from New York, Russia, and Israel. They soon sent for their families, forming a Lubavitch Hasidic community 250 strong. The labor-intensive plant attracted waves of immigrant workers of many nationalities, most of them undocumented. From New York the Rubashkins recruited Eastern Europeans, helping them to secure a piece of the American Dream: Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhstanis, Kyrgyzstanis, and Bosnians. They were followed by some Philippines, Bangladeshis, and Nigerians. Before the mid-1990s, few Hispanics worked at the plant, but persistent labor shortages led the Rubashkins to recruit along the Texas border. Soon, Mexicans from rural villages and indigenous communities made up the majority of the plant’s new labor force. Some settled in and bought modest homes or started small businesses, while others moved on to greener pastures. After 2006, displaced Guatemalan peasants, including many ethnic Mayans, became the plant’s largest minority until the day of the raid.

Stephen Bloom’s Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (2000) chronicles Agri’s early years and the town’s veritable explosion of ethnic diversity from labor migration. A liberal Jew living in San Francisco, Bloom moved in with his young family to become a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. He was intrigued by Postville’s new Orthodox Jewish community, and wondered how he might fit in with all the new faces of rural America. He set up camp in town in 1995–96, partly with the idea of getting back in touch with his Jewish roots. He soon found out, though, that he was more readily trusted and accepted by the old-time Protestants and Catholics than by the Hasidic newcomers, intent on preserving their ultraorthodox ways from contamination. These factors served to balance Bloom’s perspective as an impartial outsider, resulting in a nuanced account of the collision, negotiation, and adjustment that led this community to forge a difficult and fragile equilibrium over the years. Bloom’s conclusion, “Maybe Postville is out front of where the rest of America is eventually headed” (359), may sound like an ominous foreboding today if we think of it in terms of the raid, but when he wrote it in the late 1990s he meant it as a site of ethnic negotiation, a possible roadmap for the future of our global village.

I met Bloom in January 2009, when we were invited to speak at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, a venerable venue that had hosted the likes of Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama, and Rigoberta Menchú. We had no idea what the other was going to say. A self-described “storyteller,” Bloom’s narrative style complemented my more analytical bent as an essayist. I spoke first, laying the background for the 2008 raid. Then Bloom reflected on it and read some illustrative passages he had selected from his book, written ten years earlier. We both marveled at how little some of Agri’s and the town’s labor and social dynamics had actually changed in the decade leading to the raid. Sure there were new faces, cultures, and issues, but deep down it was all business-as-usual. “Almost three quarters of the three hundred or so workers at Agriprocessors were foreigners,” he wrote in the 1990s.

As much as 60 percent was illegally employed. Neither Jew nor local, these gentile immigrants were a third element to Postville society, a rerun of the classical American story: Newly arrived in the land of plenty, working in the lowliest of jobs, between shots of anesthetic to deaden the pain of their labors, they scrimped and saved, sending money to their wives and children back home. (134–135)

No one cared in those days that they were undocumented. That transient “third element” of Eastern Europeans living in trailers on the outskirts of town was practically invisible to a mainstream Postville society defined instead by the sharp and more permanent contrast between locals and Jews. Old-time Iowans found a number of petty issues with the Hasidim: They loved to bargain for a lower price, failed to keep manicured lawns (a Midwestern pet peeve), drove and parked without regard for traffic laws, and generally did things their own way, refusing to follow established rules—a culturally bound, old-world way of doing business that would prove fatal, years later, for Sholom Rubashkin. But the real crux of the matter was the Hasidic obligation to lead reserved, segregated communal lives, typically as enclaves in large, impersonal urban settings such as New York, Los Angeles, or Detroit. “They don’t want to have anything to do with us,” the locals complained. “We’re invisible to them. They look right through us like we don’t exist” (47). Bloom explains why this was so threatening: “The hard Iowa farm life required a connectedness, a mutual support system among neighbors. Through the brutal Iowa winters, scorching summers, pesticide-thick springs, around-the-clock autumn harvests, a communal bond was crucial if the community was to survive. Maintaining this support system was the undergirding of rural life” (56). In contrast, the Jews came looking for a promised land where they could live undisturbed. As the strict rules of kashrut governing Hasidic life were better understood, locals became more accepting, and the Hassidim more outgoing. Economic interdependence ultimately prevailed, to the point that when the plant grew to a thou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction Think Globally, Act Locally
• 1 Hometown to the World: A Brief History of Postville
• 2 ICE over the Heartland: The May Raid and Its Costs
• 3 Theatrum Juridicum: Inside the Judicial Process
• 4 The Script and the Scandal: National Legal Reactions
• 5 The Orphans of Globalization: A Portrait of the Migrant Workers
• 6 The Kosher Jungle: Chronicle of Agriprocessors (1987–2009)
• 7 Endgame—The Prelude and the Aftermath: Raids, Race, and Labor before and after Postville
• 8 The Day Democracy Died: The Decline of the US Constitution
• Conclusion Enlightened Immigration Reform: Toward a Free-Trade Labor Policy
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index