The following opinion piece was published in the JewishJournal.org [1].

Sitting in the visitors' gallery of a makeshift federal courthouse in Waterloo, Iowa, I watched as Angela Noemi Lastor-Gomez was sentenced to five-months probation for using fake documents to get a job at the country's largest kosher meatpacking plant, 75 miles away in Postville.

Lastor-Gomez was shackled at the waist and ankles, and she flashed me a smile as she was led from the courtroom. Under the plea agreement with the federal government, she will serve her probation in her home country of Guatemala.

Sitting in the visitors' gallery that day were a handful of law enforcement officers and four journalists. Other than myself, none was from a national news agency.

How could this happen? How could the federal government conduct the largest work-site immigration raid in U.S. history, a raid so large it had to rent out a cattle exhibition center to process the detainees?

How could it approve plea agreements within days to send people back to their home countries, breaking up families and threatening a fragile community with economic disaster?

And how could it do all this without virtually any national media attention?

Five months ago, illegal immigration was all anyone could talk about. There were parades of immigrants around the country. Presidential contenders were weighing in. As Barack Obama might say, the country was clamoring for change.

To be sure, the issues are confounding and it's far from obvious what change should look like.

Postville was deep in economic distress before a group of Chasidim from Brooklyn arrived to open a kosher meatpacking plant in the late 1980s.

Today that company, Agriprocessors, is the largest employer in the region, and Postville is, or was, thriving. It has the only semblance of diversity in the largely white Christian reaches of northeast Iowa.

But tensions have long existed between the natives and the newcomers.

And, of course, the immigrants are breaking the law. As a result they live in fear of the authorities, a fear that leads to reluctance to speak up about worker abuse, which many former employees have alleged in the wake of the raid.

In short, Postville is emblematic of the difficulties and competing interests that have bedeviled the effort to fix the immigration system.

That the system is broken is the one thing all parties seem to agree on - the workers whose fates now lie in the balance, the employers whose need for cheap labor drives the whole system, and the locals who recognize the need the workers are filling but who chafe at the thought of unregulated hordes disrupting their quiet Iowa lives.

There are no easy answers here. But the least one might have hoped is that the nation might have paid some attention as a town was ripped apart and its economic future put in peril.

Instead, the biggest news story in Iowa for two weeks has been relegated to wire copy, if even that much, in the major dailies.

The Jewish media is keeping the story afloat because of the concern over the raid's impact on the country's kosher meat supply.

Perhaps at some point, the rest of the country will take notice.

Ben Harris writes from New York.

source: JewishJournal.org [2]

Copyright 2008 New England Ethnic News, EthnicNewz.org. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express permission of the news source. Contact Newz for more information.

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