Sunday, June 1, 2008 << Previous Next >> Post a Comment
Casa Americana
Immigration debate hits tri-states, as Dubuque reaches out to growing Latino population
By MARY NEVANS-PEDERSON TH staff writer
<< Prev 1 of 2 Next >>

Photo: Jessica Reilly
Sister Kathleen Grace, OSF, participates in a vigil for the 20 Postville, Iowa, immigrants who were detained at the Dubuque County jail.
Gabriela Nesler became an American citizen less than three weeks ago. It took her eight years and cost her thousands of dollars, but Nesler feels it was worth it all.

"It's like being pregnant: there is a lot of waiting, but when you hold your baby in your arms, you forget all that," Nesler recently said, sitting at her neat dining room table surrounded by her citizenship study guides.

Her American journey has been different from that of the hundreds of illegal immigrants arrested last month in Postville, Iowa. Nearly 400 workers, mostly from Mexico and Guatemala, were taken in the May 12 raid conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Agriprocessors, Inc. meatpacking plant. The undocumented workers have been sentenced and face prison, probation and deportation.

The raid, the biggest in ICE history at a single site, brought the immigration debate home to the tri-states -- a debate politicized and proselytized from candidate speeches and sound bites to work sites and dinner tables.

In many ways, "Gabe" Nesler represents the dividing line Advertisement

of that debate.

Coming to America

Nesler's journey to American citizenship began 10 years ago when she met Robert Nesler in Mexico, in her hometown of Durango. Although she had a law degree, she was working in a library and volunteering at a school for the blind. He was in Mexico to improve his Spanish. They are both blind.

Robert returned to Dubuque and the two called each other frequently. Two years later, armed with a tourist visa, Gabe and her two small children traveled to Dubuque, where she and Robert married. Then she started the long process toward legal citizenship.

"When you begin, you have to make a lot of papers. We never paid a lawyer," said Nesler, 48.

She sought help with legal issues and documentation from the Immigration Outreach Office of the Dubuque Archdiocese's Catholic Charities and signed up for English classes at the Presentation Lantern Center. Early on, federal immigration officials mixed up her documents with someone else's, setting her progress back nearly a year.

Because of her blindness, Nesler required extra help getting to official appointments for fingerprinting, medical examinations, identification photos and certification meetings. She has traveled numerous times to administrative offices in Omaha, Neb., Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. In addition, she transcribed all her study guides into braille on a portable transcription machine.

"The process was very long, very hard and very expensive," she said.

One way for the government to make it easier for immigrants to complete the citizenship process would be to make immigration services available in more cities, she said. Since being naturalized, Nesler has applied for citizenship for her children and sent the government the required $460 fee with each form.

Nesler's eyes light up when she talks about being able to vote as an American for the first time in November.

"I will really feel like part of the country then," said Nesler, who said she has not yet decided who to support for president -- Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama -- because she likes things about each candidate.

Learning the language

Immigrants to the United States, like Nesler, add color and flavor to American culture. They bring new languages, foods, music, traditions and religious practices with them. At issue -- among many issues in today's U.S. immigration debate -- is to what extent they should preserve their culture or embrace the traditions of their adopted country.

"The U.S. was born with immigrants," Nesler said, "and we have a multicultural country."

She said she feels strongly that immigrants should integrate into the American cultural milieu. "We can enrich with our culture, but we need to respect the American culture first," she said.

But assimilation doesn't happen overnight. As immigrant numbers grow in a community, having services in place to support them eases the transition process.

A number of private and public agencies in Dubuque provide that support in Spanish to the Latino population (the preponderance of immigrants both locally and nationally are from Latin American countries) and offers venues for learning English.

Northeast Iowa Community College offers English-as-a-second-language classes. The Presentation Lantern Center has provided English-language tutoring for more than five years in Dubuque. Scores of center volunteers have helped immigrants or temporary residents from 33 countries.

"They want to learn English to be able to find their way in a new country, to overcome their isolation," said Sister Corine Murray, executive director of the center, operated by Dubuque Presentation Sisters. "They want to be able to shop, read notes from school, understand the doctor, make sense of the news, basically to participate in the civic life of the community. They understand that language is power."

Services in Spanish

Since the mid-1990s, the Dubuque police department has employed Spanish-speaking officers. The department also uses community volunteers as interpreters and subscribes to a language translation phone service.

"We started when we noticed an influx of Spanish-speaking people. These allow us to communicate with them more easily," said Assistant Police Chief Terry Tobin. The new immigrants have not brought an increase in crime, he added.

Latinos often are reluctant to talk to law enforcement authorities, Tobin said, because of traumatic experiences at the hands of officials in their homelands. Local police do not initiate federal immigration investigations. They inform federal agents if they run across such violations in the course of criminal investigations and assist immigration officials if they conduct local arrests.

In Dubuque Community Schools, Latinos are the largest immigrant group, but they still account for less than 1 percent of all students -- 179 of 10,739. The district employs 12 Latinos on the staff, said Kris Hall, director of equity operations. In the Holy Family Catholic School System, the percentage of Latino students is similar -- 27 of 1,980. Seven Spanish-speaking teachers or aides work with the Our Lady of Guadalupe Spanish immersion program, which teaches Spanish to English-speakers.

In Dubuque, a few restaurants and stores cater to the Latino population. Eli Rubio, owner of El Paisano grocery store, said nearly all of his customers are Latino immigrants, and his shop would shut down without their business. Many of them also rent apartments or houses in town.

In response to a growing demand for more permanent residences, a first-time homebuyers workshop was offered in Spanish last summer by a coalition of local mortgage lenders, the city's housing department and the Dubuque County Extension's Multicultural Family Center, among other agencies.

"These are new families in Dubuque looking to stay and home ownership is part of the American dream, isn't it?" said Beverly Berna, extension family life field specialist.

Gary Jaeger, former Realtor, former Spanish teacher and current mortgage lender with DuTrac Community Credit Union, taught the home-buying class. Five Latino families signed up to learn about credit reports, income guidelines, government programs and other details.

"They were all really happy with Dubuque and wanted more stable living arrangements, something to call their own," Jaeger said. Each of the couples decided to wait until they were better set financially before taking out a loan to buy a house, but Jaeger felt the one-day workshop was worth his effort.

"It was an opportunity to make them feel welcome here. It meant a lot to them for someone outside of their (Latino) community to be willing to help them settle down in Dubuque," he said.

Postville postscript

It has been three weeks since scores of federal, state and municipal law enforcement agents swept into Postville, rounding up and hauling away hundreds of its citizens -- representing a sizeable portion of its work force -- and changing the face of the town, likely for good.

In the past two decades, immigrants from several dozen countries had repopulated the rural prairie town originally founded by Germans and Norwegians. The newcomers settled in to work at two meatpacking plants, the largest being Agriprocessors, Inc. owned by Hasidic Jews from New York. The other plant burned five years ago and was rebuilt in Minnesota.

Latino immigrants flocked to Postville in large numbers to work at Agriprocessors, where they were a majority of the plant's 900 workers. Mexicans and Guatemalans had rented apartments and houses, opened stores and restaurants and enrolled their children in Postville schools.

In the first raw days after the sweep, scores of frightened Latino families holed up in local churches seeking comfort, and reporters outnumbered residents on the town's streets. Volunteers, especially Spanish speakers, rushed to Postville to help sort through the chaos for the confused Latinos whose spouses, siblings or children were jailed. Donations of food, diapers, clothing and toys poured in -- at last count more than $100,000 has been sent to the St. Bridget Catholic Parish Hispanic Ministry Fund, according to the head of the parish, Pastoral Administrator Mary McCauley, a Dubuque Sister of Charity.
This past week, McCauley spent her days helping families figure their most desperate needs and handing out funds to pay utility bills, rent, government documentation fees and basic daily necessities.

"Most of these people have no income now. If they were sending part of their paychecks back to their families (in Mexico or Guatemala), those families are suffering now," McCauley said.

The media has mostly gone. The Latinos are no longer living at the church -- some have fled town to escape immigration arrest warrants while others have returned to their home countries without their jailed breadwinners. Property manager Gabay Menahem said most of his 130 rental units were filled with immigrant workers before the raid. Now 70 percent are empty and he cannot predict when or if they will ever be filled.

Half of Postville's 387 students were Latino. For a few days after the raid, many of them stayed home either because they were scared or because one or both of their parents were in jail. Eventually most of the students returned to finish out the school year, which ended this past week.

"Emotions have settled down quite a bit. Kids are doing normal things again, like talking and laughing," said Principal Chad Wahls, who hopes that many of the Latino students will attend the district's summer school classes to maintain contact with other youngsters.

If most of the Latino families affected by the raid leave town in the next few months to follow their deported family members, the school district will lose between 70 and 120 students in the fall. Although state funding (based on each previous year's student count) will ensure that the district will not have to fire any teachers or staff for the 2008-09 school year, Wahls cannot predict what will happen after that.

http://www.thonline.com/article.cfm?id=203852