Remembering a raid

One year ago, some 900 immigration agents descended on a small Iowa community and rounded up nearly 400 illegal immigrants at Agriprocessors Inc., a kosher meatpacking plant.

The Postville raid, one of the largest of its kind in U.S. history, illustrated the country’s intent to enforce immigration laws. But it’s now looked at as how bad the country’s immigration problems have gotten.

Advocates of stricter immigration laws say the government should never have let companies and communities become so dependent on undocumented labor. Critics have used the raid as a rallying cry against unfair treatment of illegal immigrants and a reason for reforming the country’s immigration system.

Dozens of news outlets, big and small, covered the one-year anniversary Tuesday. Here is some of what they reported.

A year later, Iowa raid still marks a flashpoint
The Kansas City Star
While the raid answered the prayers of millions of Americans on the anti-immigration side of the debate, it fed the passions of millions of others who are lobbying for leniency toward undocumented workers.

Indeed, Obama administration officials are now pushing a national immigration policy that will target the employers who hire and sometimes abuse illegal immigrants, more than the illegal immigrants themselves.

“Postville will one day be remembered as a dark chapter in U.S. history that served as a catalyst for reforming our nation’s immigration system into something we can take pride in again,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a nonpartisan, pro-immigrant advocacy group in Washington.

Whether that reform will ultimately lead to amnesty for the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, or guest worker programs for those who follow, remains to be seen.

But either way — as with most preceding swings in U.S. immigration policy — the question is more likely to be decided by politics and passion than by economics and common sense, observers say.

A travail of two towns
Chicago Tribune

In Postville, a place of proud Midwesterners, many resent being in the spotlight yet are frustrated that more has not been done to offset the unanticipated damage.

When the meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc., opened in the late 1980s, Orthodox Jews arrived to work as kosher butchers and envisioned a rural paradise for new synagogues and religious schools. Migrants, mostly from Guatemala, began arriving in the 1990s -- creating an ethnic stew with natives of mostly Eastern European descent.

After the raid, the family-like community of high school football game gatherings and homey weekend meals at local cafes began to unravel as the plant faltered. Agriprocessors has since gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is up for sale with no apparent buyer.

…Former City Councilman Aaron Goldsmith, an Orthodox rabbi, fumed over the damage. "We still haven't done anything about illegal immigration" in the state, he said. "All we've done is devastate northeastern Iowa."

Photo: Keith Myers
A GPS monitor tracks Nohemi Hurtado as she waits for a decision on her residency status in Postville, Iowa. Daughter Jocelyn Bustamante plays at her feet.