Thursday, December 21, 2006
Immigration - The ripple effect
Illegal immigrants affect everyone; even legal immigrants...
In the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Chao Xiong and Richard Meryhew combined on this news article:
"The sweep last week shook immigrants here illegally and legally. As many residents leave, towns and schools feel the effects.
Any other Thursday, the aisles of the Rincon Latino grocery here would be full of customers. But last week, in the aftermath of an immigration raid in nearby Worthington, store owner Maria Amaya could only throw up her hands in despair.
Business was bad. Real bad.
By midafternoon she had made only two sales. One was to a husband and tearful wife so frightened by the raid they had quit their jobs at a beef processing plant and bought bus tickets for Mexico.
The couple told Amaya that their son was one of 230 illegal immigrants arrested in the raid on the Swift & Co. pork processing plant, part of a crackdown on the rampant use of stolen identities by immigrants hoping to land jobs in the United States.
News of the raid, one of six carried out at Swift plants across the country, has rattled immigrant workers in food-processing plants across Minnesota. And nowhere is the impact more intense than along a 75-mile stretch of Hwy. 60.
That's where a half-dozen processing plants between Worthington and Madelia employ hundreds of immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic."
