Immigration: Who gives, who takes?

I’ve always found that the dominant anti-immigrant narrative in this country — despite paens to the great mythical “melting pot” I read in my grade-school social studies textbooks — is that immigrants take. They come here to take our jobs. They take up social services. They take formerly pristine street corners and make them look dirty by standing around looking for work. They take the money they earn back home rather than keep it in the local community. These are the things I hear repeated on crap cable shows like Glenn Beck’s, or when I sit down to dinner with my conservative relatives.

It’s also a theme that popped up a lot when I was doing some reporting several years ago in a small town — Milan, Missouri — where more than 50% of the 1,000 or so residents were Latino immigrants, due to the opening of a pork processing plant. The fascinating thing about Milan (pronounced MY-lan, not Mi-LAN like the city in Italy) was that, prior to the pork plant opening and the influx of immigrants, the town was basically dead. A small chicken processor was there, providing jobs for a few hundred residents, but the town was clearly in decline. And while it was by no means a seamless transition from a town of 500 mostly white folks to a town of 1,000 that was half white long-time residents and half Latino immigrants, it was undeniable that Milan was more alive and more vibrant because of its new residents — despite what some of the white folks said about the immigrants “taking” resources from their community.

This narrative wasn’t in the forefront of my mind as I watched the news unfold about the immigration raids in Postville, Iowa last May. But an article in my hometown paper, as well as this recent article from Mother Jones, on Postville nearly one year later, make really clear how screwed up the “immigrants take from our communities” narrative really is.

Indeed, the 389 arrests eliminated more than one-third of the meatpacker’s workforce and nearly one-fifth of the town’s population. It also prompted an exodus of hundreds more Hispanic residents who were either afraid of being targeted or simply opted to escape the town’s inevitable tailspin. Postville’s businesses began to suffer almost immediately. Even the Wal-Mart in Decorah, a half-hour away, called Postville mayor Robert Penrod with concerns about the economic impact. Penrod, who stepped down as mayor this month, can recall an eerie calm settling over the town, as though it were part of some Twilight Zone episode. “Before, it was all hustle bustle, and you’d see people walking up and down the streets and driving and listening to music,” he told me. “Then all of a sudden, boom! I mean nobody was walking the streets.”

I followed the stories of the separated families and the deplorable detention practices in the wake of the raid. Immigrants themselves were the most violently affected by the ICE raid, without question, and it’s important to keep them — as human beings, as
people who contribute not just to our economy but to our communities —
at the center of the conversation. But it’s also
helpful to think of this holistically, as an issue in which everyone
who lives in America, immigrant or not, has a serious stake. Honestly, it never occurred to me that something horrible was happening to everyone in Postville and the surrounding area.

We might acknowledge in big, sweeping terms that our economy runs on immigrant labor. But because people with anti-immigrant views are so good at focusing the conversation on “those outsiders who are taking our jobs,” we don’t often see stories like this one told. The story of small towns in places like Iowa and Missouri suffering in the absence of immigrants. The story of immigrants not taking, but giving life to their adopted communities.