Crazy Talk

By ART CULLEN

Iowans should keep their heads about them when it comes to solving our immigration problems. Republicans are criss-crossing the state saying the craziest things trying to gin up support. Some threaten to send U.S. troops to Mexico, if not Venezuela, incognizant of history. Donald Trump is clear off the rails, taking a page from Mein Kampf when he claims that immigrants are “poisoning our blood.” He calls them terrorists.

Immigration is among the leading issues of the campaign. Refugees from countries with repressive regimes or fraught with cartel terror indeed have been showing up at the border in waves. They present themselves legally to US authorities, who then detain and release them pending a hearing. Meantime, they end up in New York and Chicago without work permits, affording the grandstanding mayor of the Big Apple the opportunity to say that they will destroy his city. Immigrants built New York and Chicago.

People who have an interest exploiting fear are doing a bang-up job of it.

In Storm Lake, those people who have been demonized as drug runners out to spread crime and disease light candles and place flowers at a mosaic mural in St. Mary’s Catholic Church that pays homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Latinos pooled their funds to bring a statue of her into church. Are these the people we are talking about?

They work hard at the meatpacking plant. They pay taxes. Lord knows we need them. Without immigrants, Tyson would shut down. The food supply would be a wreck. Grocery prices would skyrocket without migrant workers in California. We could not find help for the dairy barns in Sioux County, where Trump won by a landslide.

Rural Iowa needs help. It needs people. We need a system that locates people where they are needed. We need to rationalize immigration to make it secure. The food processing industry needs the help. The Venezuelans are stuck in the cities by design, to create an unmanageable situation that serves politics but not common sense or justice. They are needed in Storm Lake and places like it, where there are ready jobs and solutions are easier. There is room. We are just directing immigrants to the wrong places.

Iowa is aging out. Immigrants rejuvenate the state. We are approaching a demographic crisis in which we will not have enough younger people to do the work. Immigration is necessary. It brings people with courage, ideas and resolve. So long as the United States remains open to the world, it will lead the world.

It is one thing to talk about drugs. Most of it comes through legal points of entry. Demand comes from the United States, seeded by the drug industry that hooked Middle America on opioids. We have to work on the demand side, as always, and support legitimate Pan American efforts to weaken cartels. That means supporting democracy, not sending in the troops.

The drugs are not coming on the backs of families attempting to cross the razor wire in the Rio Grande. They are the victims.

Let’s think about the poor people lighting a candle for the folks back home. Let’s think about why they come: for freedom and opportunity, so lacking in Latin America. Then let’s have a discussion about how to bring order to the border. The main problem for refugees is a lack of immigration judges and federal district court judges to process their claims. We need more agents at the border. We need better electronic surveillance to catch drugs at points of entry. We need to connect immigrants with communities where they are needed. We need to create pathways to citizenship. We need to bring the undocumented out of the shadows. We need to get serious about climate change, which drives conflict and migration.

We need all those things, and you don’t get them by talking crazy about sending in the Marines or borrowing Hitler’s thinking. Jesus save us, that is why we fought World War II. Let’s keep our thinking straight. Mainly, in Iowa that means Republicans have to moderate their conversation to a better sense of reality. Just how are you going to milk the cows if you wage war on Mexicans? Iowa owes the nation that sort of honesty and pragmatism. We used to be known for it.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2023

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