Stephen Bloom talks about Postville one year after the immigration raids

Six years ago, I moved to Cedar Falls, Iowa where I knew not a soul. I worked as a reporter for the local newspaper. The job helped me wiggle into the community, but it was nonetheless lonely and scary and unfamiliar terrain. I was also the only Jew in the newsroom, and one of only a few dozen in town.

Then, along came a book — Postville: A Clash of Cultures in the Heartland.

The book was one-part autobiography (an urban Jew’s adjustment to white, Christian, provincial Iowa) and one-part investigative reportage (about a tiny town in northeast Iowa, and how it was transformed when Chassidic Jews came to town in the ‘80s to open a kosher slaughterhouse). I loved the book and soon after I read it contacted the author, Stephen Bloom, a professor at University of Iowa. We had lunch.

I contacted him last week when I realized it was the one-year anniversary of the immigration raids that decimated the town. Because he knows Postville so intimately, I was curious to hear his take on the immigration raids and the current state of Postville.

We spoke today via telephone.

J.: Were there ways in which Rubashkins (the family who owned Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse) made Postville a better place to live?

Bloom: Postville, prior to Agriprocessors opening the plant in late 80s, was a really beautiful, pastoral, quintessential small rural Iowa town. And the plant brought a host of problems.

Few locals wanted to work there or wanted their children to work there. The pay was minimum wage. The conditions, as in any meat plant, were appalling. You have to have a strong stomach and back to work there. So it became clear quickly that if the plant was going to flourish, the owners would have to hire non-locals, and ultimately, that meant foreigners who’d come in and work for rock-bottom wages.

But Postville wasn’t set up to absorb so many newcomers. And very quickly, the town developed what became slaughterhouse slums, shantytowns that popped up on the outskirts of Postville. There were poorly constructed apartments, trailers with 8, 10 even 15 men living in them. And the school system was not set up to accommodate such an influx of immigrants. It quickly became a mess.

No one can make the case that the town is better off since Agriprocessors came there.

J.: What was your reaction to the immigration raids last year?

Bloom: I wasn’t surprised. Hiring undocumented workers at the plant was the worst kept secret in Iowa. Everyone knew that that the kosher slaughter plant had scores, hundreds even, of undocumented workers. The question was not whether the place would get raided, but when it would get raided.

J.: Have you been to Postville since the raid? How has it changed from the Postville you documented in your book?

Bloom: I was there six months ago for a six-month anniversary commemorating the raid. It’s a nightmare. It’s now a town where people do lock their doors, front and back. It’s a town that 20 years ago never had any crime whatsoever, and now it’s a town where drug trafficking is not unusual, where arrests for drunk driving are common, where there has been crime ranging from burglary to murder. The town has skidded to a halt.

J.: Can Postville ever recover?

Bloom: I don’t see how. This town really has been changed to its core. Deep down, Postville is really the tragic story of a town that will never be the same again.

J.: What’s the enduring truth to your book today?

Bloom: [When I was researching the book], I was shocked and appalled by how reckless the Chassidim were in creating what became the world’s largest glatt-kosher slaughterhouse.

I don’t look at the undocumented workers as having done anything wrong. They came a long distance to seek work — that’s a very American story. And they found work that Americans themselves would not accept. So I think the undocumented workers are as American, in my mind, as Huckleberry Finn.

The fact is that the Chassidic employers broke the law in hiring them. We know what’s happened to the workers: How their lives have been shattered, how many have been deported, their families left behind. It’s a national tragedy, a disgrace.

What we don’t know is what will happen to the employers, to the managers, who knowingly hired undocumented workers. Shalom Rubashkin's trial is scheduled for the near future. That to me is an interesting American story: What will happen to Rubashkin, who has ample financial resources to hire extraordinarily capable attorneys to represent their case. That’s really the story to watch.

-- Interview conducted and condensed by Stacey Palevsky

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