Remember the bad as well as the good

I’m certain that the people of Storm Lake have grown rather tired of people outside your community commenting on its interactions with immigrants. Despite all of the research that myself and my classmates have done, the fact remains that I do not have any experience interacting with the town as a whole or the community outside of several interviews with current and past residents. People can only take so many critiques on how they handle their lives and homes before getting sick of it. While Storm Lake has done an admirable job welcoming its legal immigrants, I’d like to explore how the town has viewed illegal immigrants in the recent past.

It can be rather easy to say that such rhetoric is the result of a few bad actors. Former Congressman Steve King is an excellent example of this. His opinions against illegal immigrants are as infamous as they are disturbing. One well known example is came in 2013 where, as the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune reported, King gave remarks on illegal immigrant children under the DREAM Act that “‘For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that they weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of Marijuana across the desert.’” When such low hanging fruit as King exists, it is easy to distance oneself and say, “I can’t be that horrible towards illegal immigrants, because I don’t act like this guy.”

⇒ MORE: A national example

While Steve King is a blatant example of someone being prejudiced towards illegal immigrants, he was hardly alone in his thinking towards them in Storm Lake. Through the archival research that myself and others have conducted, a pattern emerges in the recent past that shows how some people within the Storm Lake area have viewed illegal immigrants. The following quotes are merely a few examples to demonstrate what myself and others have encountered in the archives for Storm Lake’s newspapers.

With the editorial “Take the profit out of illegal immigration,” Jeannie Claire claimed in 2007 that “Many illegal immigrants harbor fatal diseases that American medicine vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, and others.” This idea of illegal immigrants carrying diseases helped to push her argument to alter this nations’ immigration system to keep such individuals out. That same year, Yeh Ling Ling wondered (“Sharp response to Fox comments”) if illegal immigrants from Mexico were part of some sort of dastardly plot against the United States, questioning, “Is Mexico using both legal and illegal migration to strongly influence our policies, future elections and eventually to extend the Mexican nation as Mexican population has exploded in many parts of the U.S.?”

On the national scene, Paul Harvey wrote a 1993 editorial “Our over-full house,” which was published by the Pilot Tribune. It stated that the United States was far too open with the number of illegal immigrants it allowed to slip past its defenses. “Our West Coast has been awash with illegals from Mexico for a generation, from China for the past two years. Our East Coast has been awash with Cubans, Haitians, and immigrants from a dozen Caribbean nations and recently more Chinese.” Harvey goes on to state that “When they [illegal immigrants] buy their way aboard the smugglers’ boats, they are taught to mouth all the appropriate political phrases, thus to take maximum advantage of our present laws and regulations.” Steve King may have been a blatant example of bigotry towards illegal immigrants, but it seems that some of his constituents were of equal mind with him.

There are multiple reasons why people hold these stances against illegal immigrants, and only a few will be discussed here. One is the view that illegal immigrants “steal” jobs away from hardworking Americans, and that they should be kicked out of the country because of that. Storm Lake is a meatpacking town, with many immigrants (legal or otherwise) coming to the city for meatpacking jobs. How many native-born Americans would be willing to do the monotonous and dangerous work that such a profession requires? Not to mention the fact that some sectors of the economy seem to rely upon illegal immigrant labor. In 2011, the state of Georgia passed heavily restrictive legislation against illegal immigrants, which resulted in farmhands not showing up to work like they normally would. This lead to a labor shortage in the state, which forced farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of crops to rot in unattended farm fields. Where were all of those Americans claiming that illegal immigrants stole their jobs when said jobs were left open?

Another argument is the belief that illegal immigrants are akin to parasites, constantly sucking away resources and tax payer dollars for their own needs while giving next to nothing back. Aside from all the labor that they provide to numerous sectors of the U.S. economy disproving this sentiment, there is also the fact that illegal immigrants still pay federal, state, and local taxes, as well as providing funds to certain social safety net programs such as Social Security. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 50-75% of illegal immigrants pay billions in taxes every year, and have done so for at least the past 25 years. Parasites normally do not provide something in return to their hosts, so either illegal immigrants are horrible and inefficient leeches on society, or they provide more benefits than detriments.

Then there is the argument of not “rewarding” illegal immigrants with citizenship for breaking the law by coming here without documentation. This supposes that everyone has the ability to pay the average nonrefundable application fee of $725 and can wait the average of 6-12 months to see if they became a citizen. Not everyone has enough money or time to be able to do that safely, or has the option to remain where they are and go through the entire process. It also supposes that there should be some sort of punishment for crossing a line in the dirt without the proper paperwork, as if wondering if you were going to be deported every time you walked out your door and the harrowing journey to enter the country were not punishment enough.

That does not even dig into the fact that the illegal immigrants that law enforcement officials arrest are the lucky ones, the ones who survived the journey to get into the United States. And the reason for death is not always criminals trying to take advantage of their plight. According the 2019 Washington Post article “For 25 years, Operation Gatekeeper has made life worse for border communities,” a United States policy called Operation Gatekeeper has made border crossings as difficult as possible. While it began in San Diego, Calif., it would gradually spread its influence as far as Brownsville, Texas. The stated goal when the program began on Oct. 1, 1994 was “prevention through deterrence,” with the rational being that if crossing the U.S.-Mexico border was harder and more likely to result in death, less people would try to cross it. That did not work, and conservative estimates for the number of people who have died because of Operation Gatekeeper is more than 8,300, nearly one per day for over 25 years.

How many of those people could have become hardworking and productive members of society? We will never know. However, one thing that can be known is that we determine our attitudes towards illegal immigrants. I am not asking everyone to throw open their doors to them, or to bend over backwards to ensure that they are protected from harm in your community. As someone outside the community, I cannot make any such demands of you. I am suggesting that there is plenty of improvement to be had with how various people have viewed and may continue to view illegal immigrants. My studies have shown that the community has taken great strides to peacefully interact with legal immigrants coming into the Storm Lake area. The question is if that same hospitality has extended as completely to illegal ones as well.

Hieber is a student at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio.