Storm Lake by Art Cullen

Author:Art Cullen [Cullen, Art]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Their obvious concerns were borne out in 1996 when there was a big raid run by the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now ICE, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on the IBP plant. They penned up several Asians along with Mexicans out in the tractor-trailer parking lot in the sun. These were our freedom fighters in Laos and Cambodia wearing plastic bracelet handcuffs like hogs awaiting slaughter.

Prosser was disgusted. He said he would never work with the Border Patrol again. He expressed Storm Lake’s outrage over their treatment to anyone who would listen. People backed off the chief because they sensed he had a moral foundation and that he couldn’t be cowed. They started listening.

By now Storm Lake appeared on the national radar. National anti-immigrant groups were using our town as a foil in a distorted national debate over crime and community disintegration. One of them ran a TV ad about Storm Lake with chained factory gates—the picture was actually from Flint, Michigan. They said Storm Lake was the most awful place.

Everyone was offended: the mayor, the bankers, the bosses and the meat cutters, the car dealers. Storm Lake was getting a black eye from fake news.

People who didn’t live in Storm Lake liked Steve King’s American exceptionalist message. He had an uncanny way of getting his zany views of history and European (read: white) culture on national television. While we were trying to defend Storm Lake, he was on the steps of Congress, talking up the garbage that was dragging us down.

But Storm Lake wasn’t having it. The community was alarmed by the beating it was taking. A diversity task force formed by the chamber of commerce prodded everyone to step up their game. Schools added scores of aides to help English-language learners. The police refused to arrest undocumented immigrants just for being here, which got them some guff. The churches started to advocate for the vulnerable, the children of immigrants who were brought here through no fault of their own. Iowa Central Community College filled night classrooms full of adults yearning to learn English. A charter school was formed that allows students to get a high school diploma and a community college degree in a five-year program popular with immigrants. It hooks them into wanting to pursue further education or skill enhancement. Line workers learn to become machinists and earn more money than they ever could have dreamed about in Guatemala. They love Storm Lake and want to hang around. So do their children, who now are matriculating in college. It is organic growth that happens rarely in rural America.

The Times led the discussion by promoting the idea that immigrants are our future, just as the Germans, Swedes, and Irish who broke the prairie were. Every chance we could we found success stories among immigrants to change the tone of the conversation. Yes, there were and are problems with a small community absorbing a score of new cultures—from Mexico to Myanmar. But

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