Nick Reding (18 page)

It was difficult to get Souder to give his own take on immigration. At one point, he said, “I’m on the side that says that
immigrants in this country have always had the crappiest jobs.” Later, he told a story about his great-aunt Elly, who come
to Indiana from Germany, the point of which was that two people can look at one thing and see great differences. When pressed,
though, Souder framed the debate first by blaming U.S. workers for their unwillingness to do hard jobs—a contention for which
he offered no evidence—and then by highlighting the power of the large corporations that import foreign labor. As he put it,
“Maybe Americans will do these jobs. Or maybe they won’t, and we have to have Mexicans and OTMs [other than Mexicans] to do
them. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if we make the companies pay higher wages, they’ll go offshore. It’s as simple
as that. And when that happens, we’re not only going to lose the six-dollar jobs; we’ll lose the twelve-dollar and the quarter-million-dollar
jobs, too. That’s just reality.”

When I suggested the often-repeated potential solution of fining companies that employ illegal immigrants while heavily taxing
the products of those that move offshore, Souder ignored my suggestion. He instead recited from memory the statistics that
had become the pivot points of 2005’s national debate on immigration: three hundred thousand illegal immigrants crossing the
Mexican border each year; at least one million undocumented people living in the United States (according to the Pew study,
the number is twelve million); rampant identity theft; overburdened hospitals going bankrupt by treating people who can’t
pay their medical bills. Souder said that he—along with the Republican Party and the support of many Democrats—was advocating
heavy new investments in eye scans and computerized fingerprint images to keep track of people who enter the country. He said
this would ensure that companies employing guest workers would be better equipped to keep track of their employees. He reiterated
the need for infrared sensors and unmanned planes—the very things advocated by Tom Vilsack, then the Democratic governor of
Iowa, and Republican senator Jim Talent of Missouri, both of whom I’d also recently interviewed.

My visit in 2005 to the Nogales, Arizona, border crossing underscored the ridiculousness regarding the idea that illegal aliens
desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the desert will stop at checkpoints for eye scans. Given the distance between
the checkpoints as well as the harshness of the terrain, one could understand how the term
border checkpoint
is oxymoronic. The idea that someone in this environment would go out of his way to be checked—or would be stopped by a fence—is
beyond reason. Further, my private conversations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents served to reiterate doubts
about the usefulness of drone planes sending immigrants’ geographic coordinates to ICE agents, when in fact the agency is
hopelessly understaffed. Really, though, spending time with illegal immigrants in Iowa is all it took to convince me that,
as long as there are jobs, there is no reason to think people will not cross the border to get them. In that way, talk of
increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with—and as a cynical addendum to—an utter lack of interest in removing
the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.

Representative Souder, who admits he has never been to Nogales, Arizona, is a strong supporter of DEA and law enforcement.
The day we spoke, he said he knew all about the DTOs. He’d been following Steve Suo’s stories in the
Oregonian
, which implicitly linked the rise of meth to the rise of the Mexican DTOs. Souder had lauded Suo, and had used his reporting
as the foundation of his arguments before Congress that something must be done about meth, even veering wide of party lines
by very publicly taking to task President Bush’s drug czar, John Walters. Souder was, in that way, as informed and knowledgeable
regarding meth as any member of the United States government. If he was unwilling or unable to see the complexities of the
issue, I thought, who would be? When our time was up, I asked Souder, as I’d done at the beginning of the interview, if he
saw any connection between immigration policy, small-town economies, the meth problem, and Big Agriculture as it existed in
a place like Indiana’s Third District.

Souder paused a long time before he said, “My constituents tell me we have two problems in northern Indiana: meth and immigration.
As far as how they’re connected, I don’t know. I just deal with what I’m given. Like I say all the time, I’m just a weather
vane.”

CHAPTER 10

LAS FLORES

S
hortly after Christmas 2006, Oelwein’s Main Street looked like a movie-set version of its former self. Phase II of Mayor
Murphy’s revitalization was complete. The street, which had been ripped up six months before, was neatly and freshly paved.
The updated, evenly graded sidewalks were cleanly plowed of snow. Saplings had been planted along both sides of the street,
and though they were leafless in winter, they nonetheless promised new life in the spring. Above them, the refurbished streetlamps
were hung with wreaths and wrapped in red velvety ribbon. No fewer than nine new businesses lined the sidewalks, all of them
in long-empty storefronts, including Las Flores, the Mexican restaurant that had opened that fall.

Las Flores is equidistant from the movie theater on the north and the Do Drop Inn on the south, and is right across the street
from Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. One night I had dinner at Las Flores with Larry Murphy, Nathan Lein, and Clay Hallberg. It had
been months since all three men had seen one another; life had gotten busy, and then suddenly the holiday season had descended,
replete with its innumerable chores. The 2006 Christmas pageant, which had been the new and improved Oelwein’s de facto coming-out
party, had gone swimmingly, by all accounts. Now, life was settling once again into the slower rhythms of what promised to
be a long, cold Iowa winter. At six P.M. on the night we met for dinner, the large digital thermometer in the Iowa State Bank
parking lot said it was seven degrees, with a wind chill of twenty-four below zero.

I came into Las Flores with Nathan. We’d been pheasant hunting all afternoon in the cattail breaks and creek bottoms that
bisect the land of a farmer known around town as Puffy. Clay and Murphy were already seated in a booth when we got to the
restaurant. Keeping the indoor temperature tolerable, if not quite comfortable, seems to be a point of pride in northern Iowa
in the winter. As such, it was cold inside the restaurant—not enough to see your breath, but enough so that Murphy and Clay,
like the other dozen or so customers, still wore their parkas, albeit unzipped to the middle of their chests to expose heavy
wool sweaters beneath.

Las Flores is the only outward sign, save for occasional sightings in the aisles of the Dollar General or Kmart, of the growing
but largely invisible Mexican immigrant population in Oelwein. According to a local RE/MAX broker who specializes in rental
properties, there are neighborhoods, particularly in the town’s southwest quadrant, where Nathan lives, in which thirty or
forty Mexicans share a few small two-bedroom homes. Most work at the John Deere plant over in Waterloo, though until January
2006 a few dozen had been employed by the now-defunct Tyson meat-packing operation in Oelwein. For well over a century, ever
since the Pirillos and the Leos opened their bakeries and restaurants, immigrants in Oelwein have used food as an assimilative
lever. Indeed, the mélange of immigrant cuisine and American curiosity is a principal socializing force in our culture, a
fact that was once as true in San Francisco’s Chinatown as it is today in small towns throughout the United States, as the
number of Mexican immigrants has grown alongside a taste for tacos and fajitas.

The menu at Las Flores is enormous, as though trying to please both the locals and the Mexican workers. There’s a selection
of authentic Mexican food, which includes several fish dishes marinated in lime juice and sautéed in homemade sauces; a selection
of Tex-Mex, dishes invariably ending with the word
gringo
(as in
taco
gringo
); and a selection devoted solely to fajitas. That the fajitas section is at once the largest and the one with the fewest
entries, a kind of billboard built into the menu itself, speaks loudly to the fact that, according to Eduardo, he sells a
hundred “chicken sizzlers” to every
tilapia al ajillo
.

Murphy and Nathan and Clay all thought the change to Oelwein, at least as measured by food, was great. Overstating the case
more than slightly, Murphy slipped into mayor mode while perusing the margarita list and said, “Where else in this county—or
even in Iowa—can you get good Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food on the same block?”

Clay was smoking a Marlboro Light as he looked at the menu, tilting his head by degrees, trying to line up his eyes with the
reading-glass half of his bifocals. Looking over the frames, he said, “Um, have you heard of Des Moines, Murph? If I’m not
mistaken, isn’t that in Iowa?”

“Even Greek food,” said Murphy, pressing the point. He was referring to Two Brothers Greek Restaurant, a block north, whose
windows had neon signs advertising steaks and pizza. Nowhere on the menu was there a trace of tsatsiki, taramosalata, or even
a gyro.

“Since when does Salisbury steak count for Greek food?” said Nathan.

Murphy was unfazed, though his smile served as a slight crack of irony in his facade. “To me, it’s just incredible the ethnic
diversity in our little town.”

“Scribe,” Nathan said to me, “my guess is that Murph wants you to write that down.”

Heritage in Oelwein is not something that is taken for granted; in a farming culture predicated on the changeability of seasons,
history is in some ways what there is to hold on to. And yet the Irishman, the German, and the Norwegian sitting in Las Flores
that night truly celebrated the influx of Mexicans into their town. It seemed only fitting, therefore, that Las Flores occupies
the ground floor of one of the oldest and prettiest buildings in Oelwein. Four stories tall and made of hand-laid stone with
a vaulted entryway, it’s one of the most interesting as well, the street-level windows tinted nearly black, adding a sleek,
modern aesthetic to the place. The restaurant itself is sixteen hundred square feet, enough to accommodate fourteen tables
and nine booths. The smoking section seems to expand and contract depending on shifts in the clientele. The walls are fake
brick from the baseboard to the sconces, and above that, synthetic adobe painted a pale yellow. Every few feet, and in no
apparent pattern, hangs some kind of artisanal memento—a garish poncho, a gigantic sombrero, and a photo of a shoeless peasant
strumming his guitar next to a burro. The cheesiness in no way undermines the authenticity. To the contrary, what makes Las
Flores enduring—in an old building in an old American town—is in some ways the paradox of its novelty.

That Mexican immigrants stereo typically work hard, I was told, is considered the highest form of praise in Oelwein. That
they are brown-skinned and speak a language which sounds fast in a town where people typically take their time formulating
their sentences is, just as with the Italians in the early twentieth century, going to take some getting used to. There is
respect, to be sure, though with predictable limits. As the real estate broker told me, “Not many landlords are lining up
to rent to Mexicans.” The feeling that the new arrivals are taking away jobs from the locals is up for debate, and does not
seem—by my count, anyway—to be the flash point it is sometimes portrayed as being in newspapers across the country. On the
other hand, the fact that the immigrants lack medical insurance, says Clay, is a tremendous strain on the already overtaxed
local hospital. And then there is the question of the drugs, particularly meth. According to Jeremy Logan, meth is distributed
by a few well-placed Mexican dealers who are increasingly busy ever since the Combat Meth Act went into effect.

Still, no one was on a witch hunt. Far from it. Everyone at the table—the doctor, the mayor, and the prosecutor—accepted that
Eduardo, the owner of Las Flores, was probably an illegal immigrant without feeling the need to verify it as fact. As Nathan
said, you wouldn’t have to look very far into anyone’s history around those parts, his own included, to find a similar story
told in another time. He instinctively grasped what Representative Souder—for one—did not, which is that if you encourage
people to come to your country, you cannot then hold it against them for showing up. As a prosecutor, Nathan simply didn’t
ask people’s status. That way, he wouldn’t be party to forcing someone out “through the gate,” as he put it, “which is left
perpetually and invitingly open.”

One of the attractions at Las Flores is the sixty-four-ounce margarita, which is drawn from a clear plastic machine inside
of which three large mechanical spatulas stir separate vats of red, green, and yellow slush. Murphy ordered strawberry, no
salt, while Nathan asked for regular, extra salt. Meantime, Clay lit another cigarette. In front of him was a twenty-four-ounce
Diet Coke in a brown plastic glass with crushed ice. Clay had been sober five months and counting—long enough to have had
the Intoxilock removed from his truck.

Clay had also, though, been having trouble at Mercy Hospital, where he was chief of staff. After ordering tortillas and salsa,
chimichangas, and fajitas, Murphy and Nathan listened as Clay launched into a critique of the hospital’s owner, Wheaton Franciscan
Health Care, which drew heavily on the anti-corporate formulations of Noam Chomsky—Clay’s latest hero. Clay, a devout but
non-churchgoing Methodist, was a fan of God in his specific way and suspicious of churches generally—especially the Catholic
church. According to him, the Wheaton Franciscans, technically a nonprofit order of the church, had “systematized their disrespect
for human life to such a degree” that Clay was either going to quit or be fired as chief of staff. What galled him even more
than what he deemed the hospital’s substandard equipment was the fact that, in order to save money, patients’ tests were being
sent by computer to doctors in Australia and India to be read and analyzed, with the results e-mailed back.

“I mean, what the fuck?” said Clay. “How ’bout no, okay? How ’bout, I’m not trusting my mammogram to some guy in Mumbai? It’s
not that they’re not talented doctors,” he went on, “it’s that they’re not here. Part of being a doctor is holding your colleagues
accountable. If some guy in India misreads my patient’s biopsy and the patient dies of cancer, do you think we’ll get the
guy from India deposed at the civil hearing that takes my license and sues me for all I’m worth?”

Clay stared at Nathan, who stared back impassively. As things around him heated up—Clay’s temper, for instance—Nathan’s heart
rate seemed to slow considerably.

“Not likely,” said Clay, finally answering his own question.

“Okay,” said Nathan.

Murph said enthusiastically, “I’ll be darned.”

As Clay saw it, the hospital and insurance systems lacked critical oversight. For example, Wheaton Franciscan had recently
begun placing physicians, most from India, in underserved areas across the rural United States. Like the Mexicans who worked
in the slaughterhouses, the Indian doctors would work for less money than the American doctors. The trouble was, said Clay,
few of the foreign doctors stayed for the entire two-year rotation, for the reason that the Indians’ cultural milieu didn’t
mesh with that of places like Oelwein. These shortened terms, said Clay, drove the quality of care down and destabilized the
staff. At Mercy, he continued, three doctors had left early in the past eighteen months, keeping the ER in utter turmoil.
What’s more, insurance companies used high doctor turnover as a criterion for raising premiums. Practicing medicine in Oelwein
felt more and more difficult, said Clay, and morale was low.

Murphy nodded sympathetically. He said, “The insurance companies have a monopoly. What can you do?”

What Clay was considering doing was quitting. He’d been thinking about “freelancing,” as he put it, by taking pay-by-the-hour
jobs in rural emergency rooms.

“That’s the only place I can do any good,” said Clay. “I mean, who needs you more than an elderly lady with no insurance who
comes to the ER at two P.M. on a Tuesday?”

“What’s stopping you?” asked Nathan.

“My dad,” said Clay. “This hospital—it’s where Dad practiced for half a century. Our family practice
is
our family. This whole town, kind of, is our practice. I don’t know how to just walk away from that.”

“That’s just the rub,” said Nathan.

“Yes,” agreed Murphy, “it truly is.”

Still, the men had a lot to be happy about that December. One of Clay’s two daughters had just had her first child out in
Sacramento, California, where she lived with her husband. Nathan had won convictions against the twin brothers Tonie and Zonie
Barrett—the former for first degree murder, the latter for conspiracy—in the June 2005 killing of Marie Ferrell. And Murph
was getting good feedback on the improvements around town. The new library was a smashing success, and its patrons enjoyed
two dozen computers with free high-speed Internet connections. Not only had Oelwein High School avoided bankruptcy, but 2006
was the first year in a decade that the student body had grown—by three students. Though the call center talks had stalled,
Murphy and the city council had persuaded Northeast Iowa Community College to build a campus at the Industrial Park. The Regional
Academy for Math and Science was also planning to move there, just west of the college. Murphy and the city council had decided
to build a technology center on the remaining land as a gamble to lure more businesses, especially now that they could offer
a new septic system. Finally, the second-largest ethanol plant in Iowa had recently been built seven miles west of town; this
had resurrected some traffic on the local rail lines, allowing several Oelwein businesses to save significantly on transportation
costs. Thanks to the plant, corn prices had risen by five cents a bushel. The hope was that things would just keep getting
better and better.

Perhaps the most encouraging yardstick was that methamphetemine, measured by the number of labs that had been dismantled,
had all but ceased to be an issue around Oelwein. In fact, the Cop Shop hadn’t had a single call about a lab in nearly six
months, dating back almost exactly to the week when ground was broken for the Main Street refurbishments. Things truly felt
different around Oelwein since I’d first been there. In June 2005, it was not uncommon to see meth cooks in the headlights
of your car late at night, riding around the town’s more peripheral neighborhoods single-batching dope in bottles strapped
to their mountain bikes. Just a year and a half later, the streets no longer felt unsafe, or like you weren’t sure what would
happen if you got a flat tire in the wrong place at the wrong time. Houses no longer blew up in the middle of the afternoon,
and no one phoned in reports to the police about a strong smell of ether coming from a neighbor’s garage. Even the Do Drop
Inn felt vaguely (if somewhat lamentably) secure.