Dispatch: Leaving Postville

Driving out of Postville late Saturday, we pulled to the side of the road along a cornfield and spent half an hour staring at the sky in the perfect dark silence of an Iowa night. We could make out the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and what Alan thought might be Venus (I had to rely on Alan for the astral tour, as I�ve seldom been able to make out constellations and have never been up on my planets). I even saw a shooting star.

We needed that quiet time; Postville somehow brought everything to a head for us. Throughout this road trip, we�ve been moving along on a kind of undercurrent of sorrow and discomfort�a feeling I hadn�t quite yet articulated but could feel nagging at me. But I came out of so many of our stops on this road trip with an uneasy sense of regret, and Postville was where the cumulative impact of that sentiment unfolded into what I can only call grief.

When we set out on this journey, our goal was to document how immigration plays out in different locales across the country. I was ready for us to highlight both the bad stories and the good. And there is, obviously, so much that is good. Vibrant areas where there is a sense of community between the immigrant and native-born populations, where immigrants have helped revitalize towns that had become depopulated and depressed, where local leaders recognize the importance of welcoming immigrants into the fabric of their communities, and whose communities are all the stronger for it.

But no matter what, it was hard to get away from the overarching framework for how immigration plays out in the nation at large: a broken system that gives rise to the very �lawlessness� it so zealously, and vindictively, seeks to enforce against.

On Long Island, a span of eight years, and the emergence of the internet and of outside groups and political �leaders� intent on aggravating whatever tensions might exist as local demographics change, meant that Nassau managed its transitions fairly smoothly while Suffolk became�and continues to be�a war zone in the immigration debate.

Even in New Haven, I came away from what was a positive story from our perspective�the city offering a municipal i.d. to folks regardless of status, with positive results�with a feeling of regret. This i.d. program became fodder for the Lou Dobbses of the world, and it didn�t just mean a lot of hot air coming from blowhards on t.v.; it meant outside groups coming into New Haven and trying to foment tensions between African Americans and immigrants; it meant the DC-based anti-immigrant �experts� (who are given credibility by the news media despite their links to organizations that espouse racist views) filing FOIA requests in a witch hunt to uncover the identities of those New Haven residents who applied for the cards.

In New Jersey, Trenton has integrated immigrants with relative ease, but there are places elsewhere in the state where racial profiling is rampant�in Freehold, for example, where a grandfather can be ticketed by cops for driving an unauthorized taxi, when he�s merely bringing his granddaughter and her friends to get ice cream; and where hate groups harass day laborers.

And in towns that are struggling�that have lost their initial economic base and are making a transition, or not, to a new economy�cynical and opportunistic politicians, often allied with hate groups, stoke public anxiety and anger, funneling it all toward immigrants as the cause of people�s woes and trying to ride that wave of discontent into office.

Looking at Riverside, NJ, and Hazleton, PA, I was struck by how world-weary the townspeople seemed, how in some ways the towns seemed filled with the walking wounded, bruised over the ugly immigration battles that have consumed them over the past several years. This applies equally to the native-born as to the immigrant population. Until these towns� leaders put forth their anti-immigrant proposals, folks more or less got along�the native-born and the immigrants might not have interacted all that much, but they co-existed peacefully, and over time they got to have at least a passing familiarity with each other. Not that there might not have been tensions, but they were tensions that could have been addressed, and with productive measures that could have brought the communities together. Instead, whatever sparks of conflict there were became all-consuming conflagrations.

And then there is Postville. How could we have arrived at this place, where the government storms the plant like paratroopers and pursues criminal charges against the workers for using fake i.d.s, while taking only halfhearted action against the plant�s management for their abhorrent labor practices?

And to what end? We could storm a plant every day for a year and round up 400 immigrants each time, and that would still net only 146,000 undocumented immigrants at the end of a year. Are we going to do this every day for ten years to make sure we get every last undocumented immigrant?

And how many families will be torn apart, communities sundered, and economies destroyed in the process? And what kind of nation does that make us?

We�ve been riding a terrible tide these past several years, and the fallout is glaring. We�re no closer to solving our immigration �problem,� but we�ve inflicted untold hardship. In the process, we�ve become a government that rules by fear and intimidation and showboating, one whose political leaders too often posture and demagogue on the issues, or avoid them altogether.

It makes me angry, but the overwhelming emotion I have as I near the end of this road trip is one of sorrow, at all we have lost as a nation as we�ve embarked on this fruitless and destructive course. There is so much good within our grasp, and yet we squander it with outdated laws, ineffectual policies, and acquiescence to those who pursue a divisive agenda.

Standing by the roadside as we left Postville, I saw a star shoot across the sky and then fade away.