Immigration in Iowa

Though Iowa has a fairly small number of immigrants compared to other states, there's no question they have left their mark on the state's culture and its economy.

Immigrants constitute about 5 percent of Iowa's population, according to the American Immigration Council.

They are a diverse group of people coming from different parts of the world and performing a variety of tasks once they arrive. The largest share of the state's immigrants come from Mexico, comprising 29 percent of the total, followed by China with 7.7 percent, India with 7.1 percent, and Vietnam with 4.5 percent. Surprisingly, the small eastern European nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population just over Iowa's at 3.5 million, is next in line with 3.3 percent of the total. Iowa Public Television reports that many of those people came in the 1990s as war refugees.

Immigrants comprise a large share of certain occupations in the state such as computer and math sciences, where they are 20 percent of the labor force, according to the AIC. They are also well represented in production (12.7 percent of total), food preparation and serving (8.6 percent), physical and social sciences (8.4 percent) and transportation and material moving (7.9 percent).

Jim Pearson is an attorney in Fairfield who has been practicing law since the 1970s and has done exclusively immigration law for the past 12 years. His clients are chiefly two kinds of immigrants: 1) Those who have found a job with a U.S. employer and need a temporary work permit, and 2) Those who are attempting to join a family member already in the county, such as an immigrant marrying a U.S. citizen.

'The public does not realize the importance of immigration to this country,” he said. 'We see on TV everything about people coming here illegally, but there is a whole spectrum of people coming here legally. The U.S. and Iowa in particular has an aging population. A lot of our young people are not staying here, so Iowa is facing a shortage of highly skilled workers. I've talked to employers who told me that, ‘Without foreign workers, I'd have to move our company somewhere else.'”

Asylum

Pearson remarked that, although the issue of asylum-seekers has been in the news because thousands of Central Americans have appeared at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum, he handles very few asylum cases in southeast Iowa. On occasion, he has dealt with students who came to the United States to study and sought to stay because it was not safe to return to their home countries.

Obtaining asylum is not as simple as proving that one's life was miserable in their native country. In fact, it's not enough to prove that one is fleeing violence back home. The federal government only grants asylum to those being persecuted for specific reasons. The persecution must have occurred because of the person's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Pearson noted that there is no asylum category for 'economic” refugees who are fleeing poverty.

Members of the Trump Administration have sought to restrict the scope of asylum even further. The Washington Post reports that in 2016, the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals decided that an abused woman from El Salvador was eligible for asylum. However, in 2018, then U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that victims of domestic abuse and gang violence would no longer qualify for asylum. Later that year, a federal judge struck down Sessions's new policy as 'arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.”

Changing interpretation

Pearson said there have been changes to immigration law over the years. A few occurred in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when the government increased funding for deportations and was more reluctant to grant certain visas. However, Pearson said that legal immigration has changed more noticeably since Donald Trump took office in January 2017.

'One of the things I noticed is that the new director of immigration [Lee Cissna, former head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, who has since been replaced], indicated that he thought the immigration service was being too lenient,” Pearson said. 'When you tell that to a government worker, they're naturally going to get scared about their job. We see that immigration cases are getting more pushback, more requests for additional evidence. … I see areas where the law hasn't changed in 20-30 years, but the interpretation of the law has changed. The [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] seems to be in a continual process of finding new grounds to deny a case.”

The Union asked Pearson if he handles cases where an undocumented immigrant attempts to gain legal status. Pearson said there used to be a program where an employer could help an undocumented employee gain status, but he said the U.S. Congress eliminated that program because some members felt it encouraged illegal immigration.

'As much as that may seem logical, since that law was changed, illegal immigration doubled anyway, so it really had no impact in reducing illegal immigration,” Pearson said. 'People come here because there are jobs. Now that that avenue has been eliminated, there is very little that can be done to help someone who is here illegally now but who would like to become legal.”

Iowa WINS

The Rev. Trey Hegar presides over the First Presbyterian Church in Mt. Pleasant. In the last few years, Hegar and his church have learned a lot about immigration thanks to a commission it formed called IowaWINS, which stands for Iowa Welcomes Immigrant Neighbors.

The commission formed in 2015 as a response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis, but its primary focus for more than a year has been helping families affected by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of Midwest Precast Concrete in May 2018. Thirty-two men were detained. IowaWINS stepped into action by providing a food pantry and other services to the families, who had just lost their primary breadwinners.

Hegar said the most shocking thing he's learned about the immigration system through his contact with these families is the lack of due process afforded to those arrested.

'My biggest surprise was learning of the indefinite detention of immigrants,” he said, referring to how migrants can wait in detention for months or even years to have their cases heard. 'Illegal immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, and because it's not criminal, it means the person detained has no right to an attorney, no right to a phone call, and no right to due process with a speedy trial. If no one knows where they've gone, they can sit and rot.”

The Public Broadcasting Service reports that the Sixth Amendment entitles all those charged with a crime the assistance of counsel, and in the 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that means the government must appoint an attorney if the defendant is too poor to afford one. However, a right to an attorney does not apply to civil violations, only criminal ones.

Hegar said that when the families tried to get in touch with the men arrested that day, they received no help from ICE, which refused to disclose where the men had been taken.

'We had to talk to everyone who was willing to talk from the plant,” Hegar said. 'It took us two weeks to track down everyone who was apprehended. We learned they were taken to three different county jails, plus a jail in Illinois and one in Wisconsin.”

Meeting needs

Hegar said that the niceties of civil vs. criminal violations seem like splitting hairs compared to the important issue at hand: 'meeting people's needs.”

'We can have churches and other organizations go to the border to set up tents and cots, and minister to the immigrants instead of treating them like criminals,” he said. 'I'm shocked to learn about the division between people who see it as a humanitarian crisis and those who see it as a criminal act.”

Hegar said IowaWINS has partnered with Southeastern Community College to provide the families with English courses. He said the group is continuing its food pantry, and its rent and utility assistance for the families affected by the ICE raid. He said that once a member of the family has received a work permit, they are weaned off assistance.

The trouble is that getting a work permit is not easy. Hegar said that when a person is arrested and released on bond, they aren't given a work permit, but they're not allowed to leave the area either because they will have forfeited their bond.

The Union asked Hegar if any of the immigrants he knows would be willing to speak on this issue, but he said most immigrants are worried about the repercussions of talking to the media.

'I was talking with someone yesterday who is a doctoral student who said, ‘We're making sure our kids have passports so they have something to carry all the time,'” Hegar said. 'And these are citizens. They're people who are half-American and half-Hispanic, but they told me, ‘We're brown enough that we're scared.'”

Life as an undocumented immigrant

The Union was able to get in touch with an immigrant who spoke on condition of anonymity. She said people often assume that immigrants are uneducated, but she obtained a bachelor of arts degree before coming to the United States from her native Mexico four years ago. Despite her education, her job working as an accountant did not make ends meet in her home country.

She arrived in the United States on a six-month tourist visa, but added that 'everything gets complicated at some point.” She has remained in the United States ever since, saying that she has nothing to return to in her native land. She said her hometown has seen an alarming increase in robberies and kidnappings.

Without documents, she cannot receive means-tested benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps), regular Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

According to the National Immigration Forum, undocumented immigrants are only eligible for benefits in dire situations such as emergency Medicaid, access to treatment in emergency rooms, or access to healthcare and nutrition programs under the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). Even legal immigrants are ineligible to receive federal means-tested benefits until they have resided in the country for five years. The woman told The Union that she often hears how immigrants are destroying America, but to her, it feels more like the other way around.

'For more than 90 percent of the people who immigrate without documents, the last thing we want is to cause a problem,” she said. 'I don't understand all this hatred. Why does it matter where a person comes from?”

DUO Compassion

Washington County residents have formed an organization they hope will be a bridge between natives and newcomers called DUO Compassion. DUO stands for 'do unto others,” as in the Golden Rule's 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The group's website states its goal as 'creating a compassionate community in which our immigrant neighbors are welcomed and respected.”

Heather Lujano is among the founding members of the group, which incorporated in March. She said the word 'DUO” was chosen not just as an acronym but also to signify diversity, that people from different backgrounds can work and live together in peace.

Five people serve on DUO Compassion's board of directors. The group had a booth at the Latino Festival during Ridiculous Days in June, and has concentrated its early activities on small-group volunteer training and educating immigrants about their rights.

Lujano works with the immigrant community in her day job as a licensed social worker for the Washington Community School District. Her position involves helping students learn English as a second language, and she helped start the multi-cultural group in the secondary schools.

Lujano's official title is the Language Instruction Education Program (LIEP) program coordinator and bilingual outreach. The district has about six foreign languages represented in its student body, but Lujano said more than 95 percent of the non-English speakers are from Spanish-speaking homes.

The district's total enrollment is about 1,700, and 120 of those are English-language learners. She said the district has 230 Latinos, so about half of them require special instruction in English and the other half do not.

'Some of them have mastered English and some don't speak Spanish at all,” Lujano said. 'We have a culturally diverse group of students. The important thing to remember is that, unless our ancestry is 100 percent Native American, we're all immigrants, and we are all human. We populate small communities where we're going to be running into each other, so why not get to know each other?”