Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

Non-Somali workers protest special accommodations for Muslims in Grand Island, Ne. (Grand Island Independent, via AP)

Like many local law enforcement offices around the country, the sheriff’s department in Outagamie County, Wisc., reports suspected illegal immigrants to I.C.E. through the Criminal Alien Program. But the Appleton Post Crescent reports that many of the people on the list of 352 names the department turned over to federal authorities over a 17-month period were not illegal immigrants at all. Some were U.S. citizens, some legal immigrants. In an ironic twist, one of the arrestees was actually a Native American.

The stated goal of the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, a Senate bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) is to prevent this sort of thing. Though it’s likely the bill’s actual goal is to prevent embarrassing immigration raids from taking place, findings like those in Appleton add urgency to the measure.

Meanwhile, it appears that immigration raids do not even have the effect of removing illegal immigrants from the country. Two years after a raid on a Swift & Co. meatpacking plant, in Nebraska, the Grand Island Independent reports, immigrant workers are back on the job, though the community remains skittish. As in Postville, Iowa, tensions are arising between whites and Latinos in Grand Island and the Somali refugees–in the country legally–who arrived to replaced arrested workers.