Postville, Iowa is in the heartland of America. Not far from the Mississippi River, it describes itself as “Hometown to the World.” The authors — two academics and a Lubavitch businessman who ran for public office in the town — provide a straightforward and balanced account that focuses on two main themes: the challenges of transcending ethnic, religious, and class differences in a small town; and the dimensions and consequences of a raid on the town’s largest employer by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on May 12, 2008.
The two elements of the narrative are intertwined. Postville became a magnet for immigrants, many of them undocumented, because of employment opportunities in the town’s meatpacking plant. Unlike other towns where similar raids have taken place, this one had a distinctive quality that further added to the town’s diversity: its meatpacking plant produced glatt kosher meat which necessitated the presence of low paid workers who did menial, dirty, and unpleasant work, but also the Lubavitch Jews who did the slaughtering and other aspects of the operation.
The coexistence of the long-term locals— farmers, small businessmen, and those in other sundry occupations and professions — with the immigrants from many nations and the Lubavitch was the subject of an earlier bestselling book called Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America written by Stephen G. Bloom. According to the authors of this new book “…many Postville residents argued that it did not portray their community accurately. Many Orthodox Jews saw it as a disdainful view of their conservative group by a liberal secular Jew. Many of the local Christian Iowans in town felt they were made out to be backward country hicks.”
The town’s residents tried mightily to bridge their differences, holding events like an annual Taste of Postville food festival which featured Norwegian dancers and Uncle Moishy. However, these efforts have lost momentum due to a lack of public funding and a limited base of support. According to the authors, there is a widespread belief in the town that “diversity has died in Postville…”
But the signal event that transformed the town was the ICE raid, which was, in actuality, a military operation with two helicopters overhead and federal and state law officials who arrested close to 400 people, loaded them on waiting buses, and sent them to the Iowa State Cattle Congress for detention and booking. Unlike previous raids, where undocumented immigrants were “charged with administrative immigration violations and deported…in the Postville case, the majority of detainees were forced into a plea bargain agreement…they could plead guilty to one set of felony charges and receive five months in jail and deportation, or they could face the prospect of much more serious charges and a considerably longer jail term.”
The raid destabilized both the business and the town. The company tried to hire replacement workers to keep the operation going. With the arrest of company officials and their later convictions, Agriprocessors filed for bankruptcy and the town’s major employer was no more. The site was purchased by SHF industries in the summer of 2009 for operation as a meat processing plant.
In an era of enormous transnational migration, Postville tells yet another story: the ability of companies like Agriprocessors to recruit people to do society’s dirty work at minimum wages because of the enormous economic pull of the U.S. in much of the third world. Yet, this is not an entirely new story. Upton Sinclair told a similar story a century ago. But it has a new and tragic dimension: the federal government’s willingness to tackle a family-owned company like Agriprocessors which, according to the authors, grew so rapidly that it exceeded the owner’s managerial expertise. At the same time, the public officials have looked away from similar operations throughout the country, especially in Midwestern towns like Postville. Some attribute the Postville raid to anti-Semitism. For the authors, the reason is traced to the company’s ownership: Agriprocessors was a family firm while other plants are part of large bureaucratic corporations and conglomerates where the lines of authority and responsibility are far more complex. The reader is encouraged to come to his or her own conclusions.
