In Mississippi, Immigration Raid Tests Community's Cross-Racial Bonds

Editor's Note: Nearly 600 people were detained in an immigration sweep in Laurel, Mississippi in August. New America Media's Marcelo Ballvé traveled to Laurel to find out how a small town has dealt with demographic change, and discovered proximity can give rise to both tensions and some surprising relationships.

LAUREL, Miss. -- Melvin Mack remembers the ugly days of Jim Crow when he witnessed the Ku Klux Klan march right past the downtown building where he now works as Laurel's first black mayor.

"At one time there was a lot of racism in and around the city of Laurel, a lot of shooting in black people's houses, a lot of cross burning, a lot of brutality," he says.

Mack, elected in 2005, is a symbol of Laurel's efforts to put this contentious history behind it. Of course, segregation's scars haven't healed completely. Poverty remains entrenched in the African-American community, pockets of prejudice persist. But Laurel has progressed enough so that when thousands of Latin American immigrants began arriving in the late 1990s, there was hardly any fuss at all.

"It didn't really raise any eyebrows," says Paul Barrett, publisher of The Review, a weekly newspaper in Laurel. "They were hard-working, they stayed to themselves."

The newcomers, mostly undocumented Mexicans and Panamanians, rented homes and trailers and renewed vacant storefronts and buildings with their restaurants, shops and churches. They found work in pine plantations, in wood and poultry-processing, and at Howard Industries, a homegrown billion-dollar electronics manufacturer that is the town's largest employer.

By all accounts, Laurel and surrounding Jones County had begun to piece together a civic coexistence, binding together black, white and immigrant.

Then, on Aug. 25, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rushed into a sprawling Howard Industries transformer plant just outside town, arresting 595 undocumented workers and exposing the extent to which local businesses had begun to tap immigrant labor. Some tensions that had built under the surface for a long while received a public airing -- especially worries about whether illegal immigrants were taking jobs from poor locals.

Not surprisingly, immigration restrictionists, lately on the rise in Mississippi, extolled the raid.

State Sen. Chris McDaniel, a Jones County Republican, had co-authored a strict law that passed earlier this year. Among other disincentives to illegal immigration, it made it a felony for an undocumented worker to take a job in Mississippi. Shortly after the raid, McDaniel appeared on local NBC affiliate WDAM-TV news. "There's no question in my mind that Americans will do those jobs," said McDaniel, who is white. "I think it's a good thing what the federal government did."

McDaniel cited high unemployment in Jones County as a reason for welcoming the raid, although Jones has the fourth lowest unemployment rate among Mississippi's 82 counties-- 6.5 percent, according to state government statistics from July.

The Howard Industries transformer plant

where the undocumented workers were detained.

The same news spot also showed scores of people, mostly African Americans, but whites, too, lined up at Howard Industries hiring offices. An anchor said that now, instead of illegal immigrants, "honest to goodness Americans" were seeking jobs. In on-air interviews, some applicants complained bitterly they'd formerly been shut out of Howard jobs because of an unstated preference for illegal immigrants who work for less wages.

But many in Laurel disputed that contention.

"The 'illegals are taking jobs away from American workers' chant doesn't ring true for me," wrote Barrett, the newspaper publisher, in an editorial. It may be true in a theoretical sense, but practically speaking, many of those doing the chanting aren't filling out the job applications."