It was difficult to get Souder to give his own take on immigration. At one point, he said, “I’m on the side that says that immigrants in this country have always had the crappiest jobs.” Later, he told a story about his great-aunt Elly, who come to Indiana from Germany, the point of which was that two people can look at one thing and see great differences. When pressed, though, Souder framed the debate first by blaming U.S. workers for their unwillingness to do hard jobs—a contention for which he offered no evidence—and then by highlighting the power of the large corporations that import foreign labor. As he put it, “Maybe Americans will do these jobs. Or maybe they won’t, and we have to have Mexicans and OTMs [other than Mexicans] to do them. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if we make the companies pay higher wages, they’ll go offshore. It’s as simple as that. And when that happens, we’re not only going to lose the six-dollar jobs; we’ll lose the twelve-dollar and the quarter-million-dollar jobs, too. That’s just reality.”
When I suggested the often-repeated potential solution of fining companies that employ illegal immigrants while heavily taxing the products of those that move offshore, Souder ignored my suggestion. He instead recited from memory the statistics that had become the pivot points of 2005’s national debate on immigration: three hundred thousand illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border each year; at least one million undocumented people living in the United States (according to the Pew study, the number is twelve million); rampant identity theft; overburdened hospitals going bankrupt by treating people who can’t pay their medical bills. Souder said that he—along with the Republican Party and the support of many Democrats—was advocating heavy new investments in eye scans and computerized fingerprint images to keep track of people who enter the country. He said this would ensure that companies employing guest workers would be better equipped to keep track of their employees. He reiterated the need for infrared sensors and unmanned planes—the very things advocated by Tom Vilsack, then the Democratic governor of Iowa, and Republican senator Jim Talent of Missouri, both of whom I’d also recently interviewed.
My visit in 2005 to the Nogales, Arizona, border crossing underscored the ridiculousness regarding the idea that illegal aliens desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the desert will stop at checkpoints for eye scans. Given the distance between the checkpoints as well as the harshness of the terrain, one could understand how the term border checkpoint is oxymoronic. The idea that someone in this environment would go out of his way to be checked—or would be stopped by a fence—is beyond reason. Further, my private conversations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents served to reiterate doubts about the usefulness of drone planes sending immigrants’ geographic coordinates to ICE agents, when in fact the agency is hopelessly understaffed. Really, though, spending time with illegal immigrants in Iowa is all it took to convince me that, as long as there are jobs, there is no reason to think people will not cross the border to get them. In that way, talk of increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with—and as a cynical addendum to—an utter lack of interest in removing the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.
Representative Souder, who admits he has never been to Nogales, Arizona, is a strong supporter of DEA and law enforcement. The day we spoke, he said he knew all about the DTOs. He’d been following Steve Suo’s stories in the Oregonian, which implicitly linked the rise of meth to the rise of the Mexican DTOs. Souder had lauded Suo, and had used his reporting as the foundation of his arguments before Congress that something must be done about meth, even veering wide of party lines by very publicly taking to task President Bush’s drug czar, John Walters. Souder was, in that way, as informed and knowledgeable regarding meth as any member of the United States government. If he was unwilling or unable to see the complexities of the issue, I thought, who would be? When our time was up, I asked Souder, as I’d done at the beginning of the interview, if he saw any connection between immigration policy, small-town economies, the meth problem, and Big Agriculture as it existed in a place like Indiana’s Third District.
Souder paused a long time before he said, “My constituents tell me we have two problems in northern Indiana: meth and immigration. As far as how they’re connected, I don’t know. I just deal with what I’m given. Like I say all the time, I’m just a weather vane.”
CHAPTER 10
LAS FLORES
Shortly after Christmas 2006, Oelwein’s Main Street looked like a movie-set version of its former self. Phase II of Mayor Murphy’s revitalization was complete. The street, which had been ripped up six months before, was neatly and freshly paved. The updated, evenly graded sidewalks were cleanly plowed of snow. Saplings had been planted along both sides of the street, and though they were leafless in winter, they nonetheless promised new life in the spring. Above them, the refurbished streetlamps were hung with wreaths and wrapped in red velvety ribbon. No fewer than nine new businesses lined the sidewalks, all of them in long-empty storefronts, including Las Flores, the Mexican restaurant that had opened that fall.
Las Flores is equidistant from the movie theater on the north and the Do Drop Inn on the south, and is right across the street from Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. One night I had dinner at Las Flores with Larry Murphy, Nathan Lein, and Clay Hallberg. It had been months since all three men had seen one another; life had gotten busy, and then suddenly the holiday season had descended, replete with its innumerable chores. The 2006 Christmas pageant, which had been the new and improved Oelwein’s de facto coming-out party, had gone swimmingly, by all accounts. Now, life was settling once again into the slower rhythms of what promised to be a long, cold Iowa winter. At six P.M. on the night we met for dinner, the large digital thermometer in the Iowa State Bank parking lot said it was seven degrees, with a wind chill of twenty-four below zero.
I came into Las Flores with Nathan. We’d been pheasant hunting all afternoon in the cattail breaks and creek bottoms that bisect the land of a farmer known around town as Puffy. Clay and Murphy were already seated in a booth when we got to the restaurant. Keeping the indoor temperature tolerable, if not quite comfortable, seems to be a point of pride in northern Iowa in the winter. As such, it was cold inside the restaurant—not enough to see your breath, but enough so that Murphy and Clay, like the other dozen or so customers, still wore their parkas, albeit unzipped to the middle of their chests to expose heavy wool sweaters beneath.
Las Flores is the only outward sign, save for occasional sightings in the aisles of the Dollar General or Kmart, of the growing but largely invisible Mexican immigrant population in Oelwein. According to a local RE/MAX broker who specializes in rental properties, there are neighborhoods, particularly in the town’s southwest quadrant, where Nathan lives, in which thirty or forty Mexicans share a few small two-bedroom homes. Most work at the John Deere plant over in Waterloo, though until January 2006 a few dozen had been employed by the now-defunct Tyson meat-packing operation in Oelwein. For well over a century, ever since the Pirillos and the Leos opened their bakeries and restaurants, immigrants in Oelwein have used food as an assimilative lever. Indeed, the mélange of immigrant cuisine and American curiosity is a principal socializing force in our culture, a fact that was once as true in San Francisco’s Chinatown as it is today in small towns throughout the United States, as the number of Mexican immigrants has grown alongside a taste for tacos and fajitas.