Miserable, cruel and ineffective: Once again, immigration officers clean up what Congress will not

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By Times staff | Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11:45 PM CDT | () comments

So this is what happens when Congress punts on immigration policy. In the absence of political leadership, the hard work of enforcing a flawed immigration law falls on uniformed officers using tactics denounced again and again as unfair and, obviously, ineffective.

Just like the nationwide 2006 Swift & Co., packing plant raids that collared 1,200 immigrants; just like the Joslin, Ill., IBP raid of 1997 that arrested 142 immigrants; just like the unnamed Mexican deportees memorialized by Woody Guthrie in 1948. Federal agents have been rounding up undocumented agricultural workers for decades with zero impact on illegal immigration.

How can we expect a different outcome from the Postville raids?

The heaviest punishment continually falls on immigrants charged with committing one crime: using false documentation to secure a low-wage job. Meanwhile, what criminal accountability goes to the Agriprocessors Inc., which, by inference, committed 833 crimes? That’s the number of employees federal agents discovered at the plant without verifiable Social Security numbers.

When the apparently year-long investigation first revealed rampant fraud, why weren’t Agriprocessors management and owners carted out to federal immigration buses in full view of news cameras?

The human suffering created by this type of enforcement is unconscionable, particularly when the outcome does nothing to stem the flow of immigrants pouring into this country. American employers continue to hire undocumented workers. Some flaunt the law willfully, some inadvertently because no verification system exists.

Those immigrants keep coming, motivated not by evil intent or greed, but by a desire for $8-an-hour job to provide for their families.

What should have happened

With an immigration bill that created a national registry for immigrant workers, Agriprocessors and every employer would have been required to verify the status of every applicant before they were hired. Immigrants without documentation would not get jobs. Without the prospect of employment, these undocumented immigrants never would have come to Iowa. Most wouldn’t have made the expensive, dangerous trip over the U.S. border.

With an immigration bill that treated outlaw employers as harshly as outlaw workers, Agriprocessors might have been shut down the moment federal agents detected fraud. Instead, an undercover investigation allowed the fraud to continue, further endangering children already in trouble because of their parents’ choices.

With an immigration bill that regulated guest workers, Iowa and Illinois meat processing plants would have the workers they need to help grow our area’s agriculture economy. Without immigrant labor, large meatpacking plants cannot exist in either state. Period.

With an immigration bill that worked, taxpayers wouldn’t have to turn the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo into a detention camp.

Our nation has many choices to effectively deal with illegal immigration. Yet, we keep making the same miserable, cruel and ineffective one over and over again.

Editorial Then

Not the American way

(Excerpt from the Times editorial after the June 18, 1997 raid at IBP in Joslin, Ill.)

Make no mistake: The Joslin workers knew the risks of deportation when they chose to settle here in the United States in violation of the law. The IBP workers committed crimes. They were illegal aliens — but they weren’t just illegal aliens.

They also were wage-earning, family-raising contributing members of their community. They did not deserve to be exploited by an employer with a history of hiring illegals for low wages. Nor did they deserve to be shackled, segregated from their families and then herded in chains onto a plane bound for the Mexican border. Their treatment at the hands of the INS agents has more in common with IBP’s cattle-slaughtering operation than with the American system of justice.

The INS must uphold the law but it must do so in a dignified, humanitarian fashion. Compassion is a virtue, not a weakness — and it’s a quality that appears to be sorely lacking within the INS.