Re: King: Enforce immigration laws regardless of cost

craigede — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:05:23 -0000

The fiction that it doesn't matter what things cost (as Rep. King expresses here) is the same sort of idea that drove us into the current financial crisis. Unfettered, unregulated capitalism was seen as "correct" so we didn't need to have regulatory safeguards in place to guard against the disaster that has now cost us all at least 700 trillion dollars.

Don't vote everybody out. But vote out those officials who don't have a clue that cost/benefit analysis might be a good way to examine the workings of public policy. (Read: Vote out Mr. King.)

ICE as part of the Department of Homeland Security equates high costs with the validation of its own existence, as do most bureaucracies. Lumping all our enforcement organizations under the DHS seemed like a good idea, but it eliminated the checks and balances of having competing organizations that could say to one another "We won't work with you on that because it doesn't make any sense." ICE created “serious criminals” out of simple immigration violators by charging them with identity theft in order to pump up the numbers of serious criminals ICE has “apprehended”. This is a transparent lie ICE must be called on, as court translator Erik Camayd-Freixas did in his recent essay about the handling of the Postville prosecutions.

Re: Postville property company ends contract with Agriprocessors staffing agency

craigede — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:37:58 -0000

What Postville needs more than a housing code is a renters' rights organization that can provide information about how the various landlords treat their tenants so that renters can make informed decisions about who to rent from.

I'd love to think that this was a move in the right direction by GAL to do the right thing. Maybe it is, but another factor might be that deducting money for rent from checks issued through Jacobsen Staffing makes it very easy to track who is being charged what and who is being paid the rents. Maybe it is seen as better if there is less transparency in thise transactions and that is the reason for the change.

I spoke with a now-homeless woman brought up from Kentucky by a guy named Henry to work for Agriprocessors. She had been "sharing" a small ranch house in Postville with eight (8) others. She finally left, prefering to live on the street, after one of her roomates persisted in "relieving himself" in front of her in their shared bedroom. (The context implyed a sexual relief and not urination.)

Her check stub, which she showed me, listed $100 a week being deducted for housing. Given that rate for her and her roommates, this small ranch house was bringing in $3600/month to this landlord, an amazing amount for housing in small town Iowa. I sincerely hope all this money is being tracked by the IRS and will be suitably taxed. Taking the rent payments off the check stubs will make tracking money paid to
landlords harder to track, and it seems likely this is one motivation for doing so.

St. Bridget's church is still paying a hefty amout for the rents of people under house arrest. I hope they see fit to supply this rental payment information to the IRS as well.

Postville has a population of 2200. The May 12 raid resulted in 389 arrests (and, according to some of those under house arrest, approximately 400 employees who immediately fled the town). Thus about 800 new employees were needed at Agriprocessors to bring them back to pre-raid staffing levels. Assuming all 800 will be renters, this gives you an idea of the captive rental market in this small town where, it seems, all the cards are stacked on the sides of the landlords.

In the neighboring town of Decorah, I have never had to pay for utilities like water and sewerage. They were included in my rent, no doubt, and my rent here over the last 3 years has been $330 and $450 a month for better accomodations than I see people in Postville are getting.

It seems evident that by far the largest user of sewerage treatment facilities in Postville *has* to be Agriprocessors. While there seem to be two sewerage treatment plants (one a multi-million dollar facility on the Agriprocessors site and another smaller one near the trailer park on the east end of town), a question I have is how much of the cost of the plants sewerage treatment and water costs are being passed along to those employees paying rents plus sewerage and water bills. Are the sewerage and water costs being expended to run the treatment facilities on the Agriprocessors site totally separate from those in the town, or are their employees being pinged to pay some of these costs for Agriprocessors?

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