Saint Patrick’s Day in Postville

Saint Bridget is one of Ireland’s patron saints.  Born to Dubhthach, a pagan chieftain of Leinster, and Brocca, a Christian Pict who had been baptized by Saint Patrick, Bridget went on to found an important monastery in Kildare or Cill-dara, the “church of the oak.”  Her symbol is the Saint Brigid’s cross, representative of a time when she wove some reeds together to form a cross in the house of a dying peasant in order to teach him the Gospel story.

Driving into Postville, Iowa, on Saint Patrick’s Day, I was immediately struck by the ghost-town feel of the western half of this town that used to boast a population of 2,000.  Dozens of chicken-coop semi-trucks were parked outside the abandoned Agriprocessor’s slaughterhouse.  Hundreds of coops sat outside, vacant, waiting.  A piece of heavy machinery was driving through the property, disposing with some of the tons of junk littered around the lot.  With the whine of its engine, it seems to be disposing with the evidence of what happened here last May.

Agriprocessors slaughterhouse

On this dusty day, one can hardly imagine the cacophony of sounds here before the ICE raid on May 12, 2008.  Chickens squawking, machines whirring, blades thudding, trucks chugging, people shouting to be heard over the din of machinery.  Spanish mixed with Yiddish mixed with Arabic numerals preceded by $ signs.

In this abandoned slaughterhouse site, though, it is all too easy to imagine the eerie silence when the machines stopped, when 900 ICE agents increased the town’s population by 40%, when 389 immigrants were detained and interned in a cattle barn, when the chickens lived to squawk some more and this peaceful Iowa town screeched to a halt.  Only five immigrant workers had prior criminal records, but all were sentenced with working under false documents.  (Bobo, Kim. Religious Leaders Protest Postville Raid)  The public defenders, the translators, the immigration judge – everyone had been told to keep this date open on their calendars, ensuring a speedy process where nearly all the immigrants from Central America pled guilty to charges they didn’t understand in hopes of reduced sentences.  Professional interpreter Camayd-Freixas was so appalled that he published his eyewitness account with the New York Times.

Just down the street, I sit with Father Ouderkirk for a half-hour.  He is the father of St. Bridget’s Catholic Church here in Postville, a safe haven for many of the terrorized families still remaining after that fateful day in May.  “You should have been here earlier,” this once-retired priest tells me.  “On Tuesdays and Thursdays, this turns into the best restaurant in town.'”  Taking his job seriously as pastor to this reeling community, Ouderkirk serves Latino food to needy families on these days, in addition to working to provide housing funds for the scores of families who lost dads, moms, and children in this raid.  “You wouldn’t believe how much we spend each month, trying to keep a roof over their heads.”

Some of the women he serves at St. Bridget’s have been wearing an ankle bracelet for 10 months.  Some of the children haven’t seen or heard from their fathers for almost a year.  Many of the mothers are torn between returning to Central America to reunite with their husbands or staying here so their citizen children can receive a good education.  These families are facing excruciatingly difficult choices, choices one should never have to make.  Father Ouderkirk wipes with his handkerchief and tells me what we really need is comprehensive immigration reform.

As I leave Postville on Tuesday, the day after the mayor announced his resignation, the boarded-up windows and streams of For-Sale signs are a constant reminder that this town was dealt a devastating blow last May.  With a new administration and new DHS Secretary Napolitano, many are hopeful that the days of Postville and Oxford, Mississippi raids are over.  It is not enough, though, to merely hope that this administration will make the hard choices it must to ensure that comprehensive immigration reform wins out over high-profile, low-impact raids such as this.  We must make it very clear that criminalizing immigrant families is useless and inhumane, while opportunistic employers who lure workers under false pretenses (and, as here, actually provide the false identification documents to their unknowing workers) is the appropriate focus of workplace reform.  We must remind Obama that, if he is really attempting to out-do the New Deal, he should learn from FDR’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins who shut down the Department of Labor division that was then carrying out workplace raids (Bobo, Kim). We must encourage Napolitano to ensure that such Sinclair-like Jungle conditions never occur again, where immigrants are both victimized and criminalized.  We must urge our judicial department to reexamine current immigration policies which allow such a rushed, clandestine mockery of Due Process.

Father Ouderkirk will be traveling to my home in Rochester on April 2, to give a presentation at Pax Christi Catholic Church.  I encourage anyone and everyone to come and hear this man of faith who is earnestly working for immigration reform.  For all those afar, it is vital that we do not forget such tragedies as Postville.  We must stare at such instances with unblinking eyes and learn from them.  Please urge our administration to do the same.

Saint Bridget's Catholic Church, Postville, IA

Unjust Laws Create Both Criminals and Victims

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” (Why We Can’t Wait 82)

    Martin Luther King’s differentiation of just and unjust laws was used in the civil rights movement to condone the breaking of Jim Crow laws which were perpetuating immoral segregation. Our nation’s current immigration laws, which themselves hinder real integration for at least 4% of our resident population. Just as in the civil rights movement and today’s unresponsive immigration laws, unjust legislation creates criminals out of moral men and women.

    Another important distinction, however, is that unjust laws create victims and victimizers. With more than 12 million people currently living on the other side of our nation’s immigration laws, more than half of whom have just overstayed visas, corruption and victimization are rampant. A New York Times article which ran yesterday detailed the sad story of several women who have been subjected to rape and sexual assault in hopes of procuring the ever-elusive Green Card. Nina Bernstein writes, “..it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.” (Bernstein, Nina “An Agent, A Green Card, and a Demand for Sex” New York Times: Mar. 21, 2008. ) The chilling reality is that these sobering tales of corruption in low-level immigration positions belie the thousands and potentially millions of similar stories where people without rights, recourse, and protection of the law are taken advantage of by citizens, most of whom are legal through no merit beyond their birthplace.

    Gone unchecked, this long victimization of immigrants has been below the national radar. With nativists calling for massive deportation, which would run upwards of $94 billion and shock jocks emphasizing the few extralegal residents who break other laws, the American public has been unaware of the power game going on in immigration agencies, businesses which hire undocumented workers, and in the hearts of normal people who are tempted to profit from the precarious position of these extralegal residents. Bernstein notes that,

Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency’s internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations. (Bernstein, Nina “An Agent, A Green Card, and a Demand for Sex” New York Times: Mar. 21, 2008. )

Because unjust laws fly in the face of a higher law, they make a mockery of the Justice which laws are designed to approximate. As a result, the “criminals” created by unjust laws become helpless victims and law-abiding citizens are tempted to use the law to their advantage. Victimized and victim become dehumanized because, as Dr. King stated, unjust laws degrade human personality and make us tend toward the worst in human potential.

    At the risk of alienating some of my Christian brothers and sisters, the parallels between abortion legislation and immigration legislation are haunting and worthy of note. There are two reasons why many Christians, like the revered evangelical author Jim Wallis, are opposed to absolutely overturning Roe v. Wade: 1.) because when abortion becomes illegal, unsafe, makeshift clinics would instantly pop up and endanger the lives of thousands of women; 2.) to ban abortion while not simultaneously increasing welfare and child-care programs would be to sentence these children and their mothers to a bleak future. The main problem with overturning Roe v. Wade, then, would be the resulting victims and victimizers. Jim Wallis, along with many Christians, advocate a pro-life instead of pro-birth stance, by trying to rid the underlying causes of abortion. A simple scan of countries where abortion is illegal, such as Mexico, shows that instead of ending abortion these laws simply mar human rights by making the practice more dangerous and lethal.

    In much the same way, unjust immigration laws like a quota system based on national origin and a lottery system based on mere chance create victims and victimizers. Our country must strive for comprehensive immigration reform so that our laws uplift human personality by granting immigrants and their native neighbors every opportunity to realize their full potential.