The strangers in our gates

Thus did the Des Moines Register lead with a front-pager yesterday, the Sunday paper, a follow-up to Mollie Tibbetts' horrifying death, at the hands, allegedly, of an undocumented worker. 

Except the man who confessed wasn't, by definition, "undocumented." He had "documents," but they were falsified. He'd worked in Brooklyn, Iowa--and basically for the same employer--for several years. He was not a member of MS-13, nor was he unknown to others in the community. He was a murderer, a man who took the life of another human being, a young woman jogging along a road. 

Ironically, he'e worked for people who were politically involved and connected Republicans, a long-time Iowa farm family who run a dairy, not some kind of sanctuary city, people who dole out considerable financial support to the very Republican politicians who love to argue "law-and-order" when talking about the emigrants among us (even when they employ them). 

What the Register's article does is pinpoint Sioux County, Iowa, "an agricultural powerhouse," for its employment record with undocumented workers, the same Sioux County who in 2016 voted overwhelmingly (83.5 per cent) for Rep. Steve King, a virulently anti-immigration Representative who regularly mouths lines most Americans find not only tasteless, but bigoted, and racist. 

That kind of majority vote is monstrous, really. Consider the remarks attributed to Kent Pruisman, a Sioux County cattleman and former President of the Iowa Cattlefielders in the Register article: "If all of Sioux County's immigrant labor left tomorrow, we'd have a huge problem. . .We don't have the people to replace them. .  .Agriculture wouldn't be possible, because of the amount of immigrant labor needed in the dairy industry, in the hog industry, in the cattle industry."

Two thousand immigrant farm workers hold down jobs in Sioux County, Iowa. Take those workers away, send ICE in after them, put them on buses, and the county's economic heart goes into cardiac arrest. An old friend who is in charge of finding workers for a significant employer in the county says it's nigh unto impossible to get enough people to fill the jobs his company needs fill. Unemployment here is just 1.8 percent.

Years ago, an undocumented local resident, a good friend, described her first job at a local meat packer, where she jerked the brains out of bloody hogs killed just moments before. As Darrin Dykstra, of Dykstra Dairy, says later in the Register article, mothers don't raise their kids to work the kind of dirty jobs the agricultural industry requires. I wouldn't have wanted either of my children to get a job on a kill floor. 

Fixing immigration laws isn't as easy as Donald Trump and Rep. Steve King like to say it is--and they know it. Building a wall is not the answer to our problems, even if Mexico pays for it. Comprehensive immigration reform has to include some means by which a county such as the powerhouse we've become can hold on to its huge illegal workforce because without it, as Pruisman says, without them, "agriculture wouldn't be possible."

That's the simple truth.