Five Years after the Postville Immigration Raid: Revisiting Immigration Reform

It feels like yesterday that ” target=”_blank”>the largest immigration raid in U.S. history took place, with 389 workers from the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meat packaging plant in Postville, Iowa being arrested. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials raided the plant (the main producer of kosher meat in the United States), handcuffed hundreds of immigrants, and bused them to the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa. Most of the detainees were charged with identity theft and were sent to prisons all over the country where they spent five months before being deported out of the country. Postville was severely damaged and hundreds of lives were torn apart. Immigration raids were incredibly destructive to all.

The town of Postville was destroyed, with ” target=”_blank”>stores and restaurants formerly owned by Mexican immigrants closed, and business in many other places also dropped by 50%. Ironically, among the ” target=”_blank”>American citizens did not flock to fill the open jobs. Instead, the owners had to import workers from locales as diverse and remote as Palau (since its workers can work here legally) and Somalia (undocumented alien refugees). Unfortunately, even Hispanics who have U.S. citizenship find it difficult to work in this field, as plant owners are afraid of further raids. Low wages, long hours, and a high accident rate make the jobs unpalatable to most Americans. The pay may be slightly higher than before, but it is still very low and, because the plant is non-unionized, workers are not able to band together to negotiate protections for themselves.

What is true is that immigrants contribute a great deal more to our nation than they receive. A 2006 analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that a ” target=”_blank”>the Partnership for a New American Economy, Open for Business: How Immigrants Are Driving Business Creation in the United States, noted that immigrants now start new businesses at more than double the rate of native-born Americans. Other highlights of the report include:

• 10 percent of American workers are now employed in companies owned by immigrants
• During the past decade, immigrant business income has grown at more than four times the rate of native-owned business income
• Immigrants now start more than a quarter of all businesses in seven of the eight sectors of the U.S. economy that are expected to grow the most over the next decade

Immigrants and their children are also very important in large ” target=”_blank”>• Immigrants founded 90 of these companies, and their children founded 114, for a total of 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies
• If these companies comprised a country, their combined revenues would qualify as the fourth largest in GDP
• Seven of the 10 most valuable brands (including Apple and Google) were founded by immigrants or their children

Today, many of our immigrant workers come from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This was not always the case. More than a century ago, ” target=”_blank”>The Flaums case also caused a lot of damage but Uri L’Tzedek ultimately partnered to get this scandal resolved. The ” target=”_blank”>segments of the Orthodox community still reject the problem and deny our collective responsibility. Much more needs to be done. We must continue to “>Uri L'Tzedek, the Senior Rabbi at Kehilath Israel, the Founder and C.E.O. of “>Jewish Ethics & Social Justice: A Guide for the 21st Century.” In 2012 and 2013, Newsweek named Rav Shmuly