Column: Immigration reform is a local issue

It may demand a national fix, but there's no doubt immigration policy is a local issue.

A critical one - that much is still glaringly obvious here nearly two years after federal immigration officials' raid on the Agriprocessors plant in Postville.

It wasn't the only dramatic workplace raid we've seen in Iowa, but it was the most recent. And we're still dealing with the aftershocks as U.S. senators once again pick up the sticky issue of immigration reform.

They're talking reform even as former Agriprocessors manager Sholom Rubashkin waits on a prison sentence that could stretch for hundreds of years, as more former Agriprocessors workers get ready for deportation back to their countries of origin.

It was Postville that got people like Polk County Sheriff Bill McCarthy calling for enforceable, humane immigration policies. Postville that has activist Erik Camayd-Freixas touring Iowa cities talking about immigrant rights and American values.

The raid “disrupted families at the core level and terrorized children,” McCarthy said late last fall when he joined other law enforcement officials in calling for reform: “We don't operate that way in this country.”

Camayd-Freixas was a Spanish interpreter at the following court arraignments and proceedings at the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, where hundreds of undocumented immigrant workers were processed through like - well, like cattle.

He's said those defendants had inadequate access to counsel, no meaningful presumption of innocence, no clear understanding of their rights and charges against them.

He's raised some serious issues with the way current policy is being enforced by federal agents, but, so far, it seems that senators haven't focused terribly much on those kind of concerns.

Instead, there's been a lot of talk about bulletproofing identification to make it harder to employ illegal immigrants.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that some lawmakers are proposing a national biometric identification card that would eventually be required of all American workers.

Well, that's one way to help Americans see that we're all affected by this country's dysfunctional immigration system.

Senators will discuss other immigration issues, too. Ideas not quite as wild as a fingerprint ID. Even then, they must consider how all their grand ideas will affect our communities here in the real world.

It's up to us to remind them.

Jennifer Hemmingsen's column appears on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Contact the writer at (319) 339-3154 or jennifer.hemmingsen@gazcomm.com