A Year Without a Mexican: The Debilitating Loss of Economic Lifeblood

By Marcelo Ballve, Mother Jones. Posted April 2, 2009.

As we talked, it grew louder and rowdier inside the bar. Later, while waiting for the commode, I saw a fistfight nearly break out among three men, one of whom had been peddling baggies of marijuana. Postville's police chief, Michael Halse, has complained publicly about higher crime since the raid -- including a double stabbing last July involving three former Agri employees. Halse hired three new part-time officers -- every weekend, squad cars linger outside Club 51, awaiting the inevitable brawl.

This rough-and-tumble crowd frightens the townspeople. Even some of Agri's former workers are cowed. María Laura Gómez, a Guatemalan detained in the raid, tells me she'll leave Postville if she can swing a deal to escape deportation by cooperating with federal investigators looking into Agri. "It's gotten ugly," she says. "I don't like living here anymore."

On November 4, true to Herrera's prediction, Agriprocessors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The week before that, top Agri officials, including Sholom Rubashkin -- the founder's son and one-time chief operating officer -- were charged with federal immigration violations and fraud. And now the meatpacker is on the block; an Israeli suitor balked on its $40 million bid in February, leaving Agri with a mountain of unpaid debts, so the court scheduled an auction for March 23. Postville residents fear that the plant will be bought and pillaged for usable assets, leaving the town, once again, without a lifeline. (Likewise, locals of Laurel, Mississippi, fret over rumors that Howard Industries, their town's top employer, may outsource manufacturing to China or Mexico -- a potential development that many view as an economic death sentence.)

Critics of ICE's hardball tactics, while grateful that the raid exposed serious labor abuses at Agriprocessors, accuse the immigration authorities of badly mismanaging the aftermath. To be sure, ICE has neutralized Swift and Agri and Howard Industries as illegal-immigrant magnets, but so, too, has it neutered the economies that came to depend on them. And even fans of this tough-guy strategy tend to agree that without systemic reform, there will be no end to our illegal-immigration issues.

In the meantime, dozens of ex-workers still walk around Postville in ankle bracelets, unable to earn a living, making the town something of an open-air prison. Some of them are witnesses in state and federal cases against Agri. Why, residents ask themselves over and over, should local institutions bear all the financial and social costs? "It's outrageous," said Sol Varisco, who works with refugees and immigrants for Catholic Charities at the Des Moines diocese. "Is this how we enforce the law? Leave the churches and nonprofits to pick up the pieces?"

See more stories tagged with: immigration, deportation, ice, raids, postville

This story was produced under the George Washington Williams Fellowship, sponsored by the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a project of Tides Center.

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