Mark A Grey - Postville: USA: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America

Praise for

T HIS IS A BOOK THAT HAD TO BE WRITTEN, and Mark Grey and his colleagues are the right peopleperhaps the only peopleto write it. The story of Postvilleits small triumphs and failures and its one big disasteris a made-for-the-movies drama. The authors have spent months and years in Postville. Theyve painted the broad story of the drama, and theyve also captured the nuances that the TV cameras missed. Anyone who wants to understand immigration and diversityand needs to understand that they arent necessarily the same thingmust read this book. So must those who think this nation can survive without immigrants, and those who think any of this will be easy. Postville, U.S.A. is both a great yarn and a signpost to the American future.

RICHARD C. LONGWORTH

Caught in the Middle: Americas Heartland in the Age of Globalism

Senior Fellow, Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Former senior correspondent, Chicago Tribune and United Press International

My parents are from small town Iowa, so Ive seen the rapid demographic changes that have transformed some parts of this American Gothic landscape, as elsewhere. This book is an important close-up look at how the global economy, US labor policy, and a dysfunctional immigration systemforces beyond any city councils controlhave buffeted one community, and how residents drew on traditional Midwestern tolerance to accommodate this change.

JENNIFER LUDDEN

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award and the Society of Professional Journalists Award for Excellence in Journalism

This fresh, thoughtful take on Postville shows a town crushed by greed, federal indifference and a badly flawed immigration system, all fueled by Americas demand for cheap food. It is a sobering read.

SUE FISHKOFF

The Rebbes Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch and Kosher Nation, (forthcoming) on kashrut and kosher food production.

Postville has been called an inflection point in Americas immigration debate and the most egregious case of abusive interventionism in decades. This book offers a timely inside portrait of the town, its background, struggles, and hopes. The authors longtime, intimate local knowledge makes this an invaluable historical document. Their subject matter expertise as social scientists makes it a piercing wake-up call to our nation and generation.

ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS

Professor, Florida International University; Federal Court Interpreter; and Co-Author, Postville: La Criminalizacin De Los Migrantes [Postville: Criminalization of the Migrants]

In Postville, U.S.A.: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America Mark Grey, Michele Devlin and Aaron Goldsmith expose the absurdity of destroying a small town in the name of enforcing archaic immigration laws. Does anyone believe the ICE raid on Postville really accomplished anything? But Postville, U.S.A. is more than just the story of a tragedy. Its a testament to one small Iowa communitys citizens refusal to let adversity destroy their town.

Postville, U.S.A. is a must read for anyone concerned about Americas illegal immigration problem and the obvious lack of solutions.

BOB BRUCE

The Bob Bruce Radio Experience
600 WMT, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Postville,
U.S.A.

Surviving Diversity
in Small-Town America

Mark A. Grey
Michele Devlin
and Aaron Goldsmith

POSTVILLE, U.S.A: Surviving Diversity in Small-Town America

First published by GemmaMedia in 2009.

GemmaMedia
230 Commercial Street
Boston MA 02109 USA
617 938 9833
www.gemmamedia.com

Copyright 2009 Mark A Grey, Michele Devlin and Aaron Goldsmith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Night & Day Design

12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 978-1-934848-64-7

Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN) applied for

From Mark to Mary, Megan, and Julia Cameron

From Michele to Daniel, Tim, Alli, Carol, and Jack

From Aaron to his wife, Esther Miriam; his children,
Yitzy, Mimi, Shmuly, Chani, Shuky, Moishy, and
Rochel; his mother and father; his sister, Bryna; Rabbi
Y. Newman; and his friends Chani, Chaim, and Hall

From all of us to the good people of Postville

Meanwhile, Back at the Shtetl:
One Year after the Raid

D RIVE EAST ON HIGHWAY 18 in Iowa long enough, past the rolling hills of corn and soybeans, and youll come to Postville, Hometown to the World. Its an impressive, urban-sounding slogan for a town with no stoplight. Keep traveling past the rows of big leafy trees shading open-air porches built a century ago, and youll come to the closest thing youll find to a traffic jam: the four-way stop at Tilden and Lawler Streets. The next stoplight is in another town, miles and miles away, where one can also find a proper big-box retailer like Wal-Mart. Yet this intersection, with a Mexican restaurant, Jewish library and Somali grocery store represents the epicenter of a truly global society and economy.

Here in the most improbable of places, the abstract, sweeping themes of free market capitalism, religious politics and immigration policy intersect with cold, hard realitythe human drama that unfolds when people from thirty-five different countries converge on an isolated town of 2,000 people and decide to call each other neighbor. I cant think of a grander, wilder social experiment. What emerges from this preposterous brew is not only a story of hope and beauty, but also of pain and devastation.

As towns across the country embark on the road toward ethnic diversification, Postville should serve both as a beacon of hope and an uncompromising cautionary tale. Postvilles recent past will be rural Americas future. If the lessons presented in this book arent heeded, then Postvilles fractured and fragile present could be the future of too many rural towns.

The story of Postville is one of the most nuanced, layered, and frankly, compelling stories in America. Part of Postvilles magic is that everyone loves an underdog. As a journalist writing dozens of articles and conducting hundreds of interviews in Postville, its still hard to believe these impossibly huge global themes all landed here, in the unlikeliest of places. Its no surprise then that it has drawn journalists from around the world, from the New York Times to an Academy Award-nominated Guatemalan filmmaker.

It has been a privilege to document this little towns happenings on a regular basis. Like any good story, it contains much laughter, but also many tears of sorrow. As the son of a recent Mexican immigrant, I take the Postville story to heart. I can also empathize with the difficulties that accompany conflicting languages and cultures in this tiny Iowa town. Only a few years into my career, I wonder if Ill ever stumble into a meatier assignment with so many serious implications for the future of our society.

What makes this book special are the years of sweat and tears Grey, Devlin and Goldsmith poured into the issue of trying to make multiculturalism work. To understand this interconnected world we live in, theres really only one option: extract yourself from the plush office chair in your air-conditioned office, and get your boots dirty. Then go home, wash up, and head right back into the grimy, dusty field, all the time thinking, You know, I really dont get paid enough for this. In other words, be a good journalist. Of course, journalists like me have deadlines, write many stories every week, and have limited column inches to explain complex issues. With these restraints, we journalists can focus on only one aspect of the community at a time. It takes many resources, continuity and unique, in-depth knowledge to provide comprehensive perspective of a community over several years. In todays journalism world, devoting those kinds of resources to a small, isolated town like Postville is simply not an option.