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Yes, there are immigrants in Iowa
POSTVILLE U. S. A.:
Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America
By Mark A. Grey, Michele Devlin and Aaron Goldsmith
200 pp. Gemma $14.95
Reviewed by Mike Marcoe
You may have awakened one morning in May 2008, and heard a story on the radio or TV about a massive immigration raid in the state of Iowa. You may also have caught yourself thinking, “There are immigrants in Iowa?”
The Midwest is already slowly losing its quaint, patchwork Nordicity, and assuming more of the melting pot quality that the east and west coasts have had for some time now. As immigrants move in from Third World countries to take low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want anymore, the Midwest is challenged to watch as multiculturalism carves away its very identity and forces it into America’s big melting pot at last. The question is: as a new and blank slate, can Iowa become multicultural?
Meet Postville, a charming little town in Iowa’s northeast that, until recently, was just another small dot on the big white map of America’s corn belt. Postville, the book, begins when an Orthodox Jewish family re-opens a local meatpacking plant as Agriprocessors—whose original incarnation had closed because of competition from larger plants elsewhere—and fashions it into the largest kosher packing plant in the nation, brings in hundreds of Orthodox Jews, and then welcomes hundreds more Hispanic immigrants to work in the plant for very low wages.
This quick and unparalleled diversity drew the attention of observers from around the world, and while the world watched and hoped, Postville worked extra hard to prove that diversity could indeed work in the kind of place that the PC crowd least expected it to. Indeed, if it could work in Iowa, as speculation allowed, then surely it could work anywhere, and hopefully more smoothly. And it did work, despite some resistance by the locals, who were not always comfortable with the Orthodox Jewish self-exclusion from the community. But with effort and communication, both sides began to open up.
Postville’s diversity included not only Mexicans and Orthodox Jews—some of the Jews coming from Israel—but Eastern Europeans, Somalians, and East Asians. The town went the extra mile to show that it could accommodate so many groups in so little time. The book centers largely on the Orthodox Jewish citizens, to the detriment of what should have been more balanced coverage of other groups, contrasting some of their relatively strange lifestyles with those of the white Lutherans, but noting that in the end, the groups came together at last. Diversity, it seemed, could work.
Unfortunately Postville was unsuccessful, but it wasn’t the diversity that eventually destroyed the experiment, nor was it any failure of diversity. It wasn’t the right wing’s “I told you so,” nor was it overzealousness by the PC left. Rather, it was the government.
U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the plant on May 12, 2008, arresting 20 percent of the town’s population and eviscerating what was then the city’s largest employer. A breakdown in the city’s tax base, and a breakdown in city services quickly followed.
The authors expose the unusual methods used in the raid—charging the workers in groups, building a concentration camp-like structure beforehand to house them in, and severely curtailing their access to legal counsel—to call attention to inconsistent enforcement of immigration policy. Allegations of illegal and unethical practices are sprinkled throughout Postville as well, but dampened due to the status of the case at the time of the book’s publication. An important takeaway point of the analysis seems to be that the United States simply doesn’t know how to deal competently with immigrants. The thrust of the book is thus a post-hoc analysis of what everyone did wrong in Postville and everywhere else in the U. S. A.
At the end, the authors offer a chapter of lessons in diversity training tailored to a cross-section of America—policymakers, employers, small towns, average folk, social infrastructures, the PC left, and you and me. No one emerges unpunished, not least of all you and me, whose thirst for all things cheap has driven low-wage immigrants into our backyards. These are lessons that had to be learned the hard way, because that’s how a nation in denial tends to learn them.
The three authors live and work in Postville’s neck of the woods, and they write some eye-opening truths that we will have to heed if we are going to keep our melting pot from boiling over. Diversity in Postville, meanwhile, is struggling to continue where it left off, leaving a ray of hope.
Mike Marcoe is a writer and editor from Middleton, Wisconsin. He specializes in writing personal finance articles and editing scholarly books. He has published over 100 articles, a book on anxiety disorders, and a book of short stories. He has also worked as a chef and a business manager. In his day job, he is the director of content development for the Educated Investor. When not working, he plays a variety of ethnic flutes, cooks vegetarian cuisine, and writes fiction. His Website is http://www.mikemarcoe.com.
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