
For years, Guatemalans traveled thousands of miles for jobs in Mt Pleasant, Iowa - nkurz
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-27/two-towns-forged-an-unlikely-bond-now-ice-is-severing-the-connection
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Spooky23
I love the Casablanca style “what, we have illegal immigrants here” put-on.

The situation is a joke. The meat industry broke the unions and shipped out
jobs to nowhere decades ago, empowered by federal and state policy. You really
need to have your eyes closed to not know that if you’re a state
representative!

~~~
AaronFriel
Just moved from Iowa to the Bay a couple months ago. You're right, they know.
From the federal level on down to the local, everyone knows that immigrant
labor keeps rural communities going in Iowa.

It's the worst kept political secret in the state, and I'd guess other states
too.

When an immigration raid occured in Postville, Iowa in May of 2008, it
devastated the local economy. The chief executive of the plant was actually
charged and convicted on other crimes (commuted by President Trump last year).
The city council called it an economic and humanitarian crisis.

Residents of the two counties Postville resides in voted almost 2 to 1 for
President Trump.

~~~
tossaccount123
>everyone knows that immigrant labor keeps rural communities going in Iowa

What? I know people who made $30 an hour with full benefits in the 70s doing
those jobs. It amazes me people can claim to support the poor/middle class and
illegal immigration at the same time

Illegal immigration killed those communities by driving down wages and forcing
people to go to college and move to a city to find a job that provides a
living wage. The result is the death spiral of many rural communities as young
kids are forced to leave

I won't blame illegals completely, big business and corporate farms are the
ones that pushed for it in the name of better profit margins for investors

~~~
Spooky23
Yes and no. They made $30/hr in Des Moines or Chicago or other cities. There
were profitable union slaughterhosues in New York into the 80s.
Slaughterhouses were moved out to the country to break the unions, period.
“Saving money” by being closer to farms is a contrived argument. A good place
to start is the book “Fast Food Nation”.

Illegals are a symptom. The problems are industrial facilities with heavy
manpower requirements, high turnover, designed to operate in a way that
guarantees chronic medical problems with workers, placed in places with no
people.

The big waves of Mexicans chose to move to places like rural Iowa in the 90s
not out of a desire to break their bodies hacking at meat at high speed, but
because trade policy flooded cheap corn into the market and exploded the
Mexican agricultural economy.

Rural communities have been conned hook line and sinker. Their death began
when the alliance between western resource barons and southern democrats (ie
segregationists) began with Nixon. Trade policy, financial sector
consolidation, offshoring of industrial economy dug the grave.

I grew up in a beautiful northeast rural community. It’s a shell of what it
was when I was a child. All of the dairy operations are gone, and most of the
full time farms will cease operations when the owners retire. The economy runs
on social security, public assistance, government workers commuting up to 90
miles away, and a couple of small industrial operations. Nobody with any
ability will stick around, and that has nothing to do with people trying to
escape life in Central America.

~~~
Fjolsvith
It occurs to me that if there had been a border wall, companies couldn't have
utilized underpaid immigrants to break the unions up.

~~~
sliken
A theoretical perfect wall sure. But it's the nature of long walls that they
1000s (if not more) times cheaper to defeat than build. Witness the various
tunnels, drones, ladders, and even catapults used to cross the existing border
fences.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Well, I watched a wall defeat a caravan of migrants on TV back in November and
December...

------
gumby
> “When you walk out here in the central park, if it’s a warm day, they’re
> sitting around on benches out here. I mean, it’s like Europe. They don’t
> stay in their apartments. They come out in the street, and they sit around
> and talk, and it’s all in Spanish. I don’t hear any English.” This bugs
> him...why don’t they embrace Mount Pleasant?

Sounds like they _are_ embracing it — in fact they are using the parks rather
than hiding in their apartments. What’s his _real_ issue?

~~~
JCharante
> But why don’t they embrace Mount Pleasant? “Don’t get me wrong,” says
> Heaton, who’ll retire from the legislature in 2019. “The only thing that
> upsets me is if they’re coming, they need to blend. I don’t need ‘barrios.’
> I don’t need these certain sectors where everything is still the way it was
> where they came from. If you’re going to meld, then meld.”

While it's a good thing that he wants the population to assimulate, it's
disturbing that he considers the lack of English to be a problem.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Many countries require you show proficiency in the country’s native language
to acquire citizenship.

The desire to assimilate as well as having the ability to communicate with
your fellow citizens should be mandatory for those who a pursing
naturalization.

~~~
cafard
Over the holiday, I went through some old family stuff. There is a certificate
attesting to great-grandparents' marriage from a church in Indiana ca. 1881.
The document is entirely in German. Both parties had been in the US for
several years by then. Now, their children grew up speaking English (and
Platt-Deutsch), and any of their grandkids who knew German learned it in
school.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Interesting from a historical perspective, but an anecdote doesn’t make for
good input when setting public policy, especially with it being almost over
140 years ago.

~~~
cafard
The comment I responded to said:

>> Many countries require you show proficiency in the country’s native
language to acquire citizenship. The desire to assimilate as well as having
the ability to communicate with your fellow citizens should be mandatory for
those who a pursing naturalization.

My point was that the use of Spanish/German/Chinese/whatever in conversation
with other native speakers of that language does not per se indicate
unwillingness to acquire English or communicate in it, or reluctance to
assimilate. I did not intend to say anything about public policy, and really I
don't see that I did.

~~~
cafard
I also don't see how I posted twice, but let that be..

------
dnewms
For more on this, check out the PBS Frontline on child slave labor in an Ohio
egg farm: [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trafficked-in-
americ...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trafficked-in-america/)

------
stevenwoo
This makes the long trip by the Guatemalans understandable, the lack of
interest in politics by the main immigrant father is surprising though
understandable - he can't do anything about it. On the other hand, if in the
past we just placed juveniles with anyone as described, there's an incentive
to risk it all and just send the kids for those stuck in poverty without hope.
It's complicated and I can sympathize with a lot of ideas about immigration in
this particular circumstance - though the companies moving jobs close to the
farms in very rural areas and changing the work and not wanting to pay enough
for citizens to take the job bears the brunt of the responsibility and in our
political system they almost never do.

------
bsder
Where are the arrests of the _employers_?

Until that happens, this is all a charade.

~~~
dominotw
As an outsider this boggles my mind. Why not just implement strict employment
verification instead of walls ect. what i am missing here.

~~~
defen
We have that, but if the name given by the worker matches the social security
number given by the worker, "nothing more can be done" and everyone looks the
other way. Example: [https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-
court...](https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-
courts/2018/09/05/mollie-tibbetts-murder-defendant-bahena-rivera-mexico-used-
alias-john-budd-employment-records-farm/1207117002/)

~~~
barry-cotter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Verify](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Verify)

> Research shows that E-Verify harms the labor market outcomes of undocumented
> immigrants and improves the labor market outcomes of Mexican legal
> immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics, but has no impact on labor market
> outcomes for non-Hispanic white Americans.[4] A 2016 study suggests that
> E-Verify reduces the number of undocumented immigrants in states that have
> mandated use of E-Verify for all employers, and further notes that the
> program may deter illegal immigration to the US in general.

