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One year after the raid on a meatpacking plant netting 389 undocumented workers in Postville, Iowa, the town is dying.  The plant, Agriprocessors has filed for bankruptcy, the town nears bankruptcy, and the population has declined by half.

Once a bustling small town, with two main streets, the town is trying to cope with the loss of hundreds of residents.  Town revenue is down and businesses have been hit hard.  Most have closed.

"Anybody that would tell you that (Postville) is in recovery, that's not true. We're holding on by our fingernails," said Trevor Seibert, a landlord with several local businesses.

The housing market, too, has collapsed.  One rental agency says that nearly 70 percent of its properties are vacant.

"It's like you're in an oven and there's no place to go and there's no timer to get you out," said former ex-Mayor Robert Penrod, who resigned earlier this year.

In such a harsh economic climate, it's clear that these brutal raids help no one.  Reactionary policies that force people into the shadows haven't worked, and they aren't consistent with out values.  Those policies hurt all of us by encouraging exploitation and low-wage, under-the-table employment that depresses wages.  We need policies that help immigrants contribute and participate fully in our society.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda's blog.

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If you're like me, you've had it up to here with the refrain of "what part of illegal don't you understand" from right-wingers trying to use the immigration debate to distract hard-working Americans from the structural reasons behind their ongoing economic woes.  

Rather than running scared from this simple-minded chorus of xenophobia, it's high time progressives stood up and called a spade a spade.  Allowing immigration status to be used as an excuse to exploit workers is not only morally wrong, it's bad for other workers.  Standing by while hundreds of working parents are rounded up like cattle, separated from their children, and detained for days to weeks without regard for due process is not only cowardly, it's un-American.

Instead of tolerating the completely impractical solution of deporting 14 million undocumented immigrants, we need to come up with practical plans for integrating them into our society and helping them continue contributing to a national economy that they are already propping up.  In the meantime, we need to make sure that the hysterical calls for cracking down on "illegal" immigrants doesn't continue to victimize the very same class of "legal" workers that the crack-down is putatively intended to protect.

Fortunately, a few enlightened state leaders in Iowa are taking some moderate but laudable steps toward achieving this agenda.

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