One Iowa city's mixed views on immigration

As the caucuses loom, residents of Waterloo want the nation's broken immigration system fixed – but they don't want any one group to become penalized or singled out.

from the December 19, 2007 edition

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From Jennings's perspective, that has paid off for Waterloo. A decade ago, the downtown was full of empty, boarded-up storefronts. Today it's thriving, in part because of immigrants like Edin Miskic, who came from Bosnia in the mid-1990s. He worked first as a translator at a meatpacking plant, then opened a small European grocery store with some saved money. Now he owns several large stores.

"When I first came here, the downtown didn't have much life to it: It was like a ghost town, almost," he says. "Now there's a lot of renovation, community projects, new businesses coming in: Waterloo started to look good and now it attracts a lot of different cultures and businesses to the area."

But even with all the appreciation expressed for the economic benefits that immigrants have brought, there is still an undercurrent of concern about those that are here illegally.

Police Officer Hector Camrin, himself the son of immigrants from the Philippines, says from his perspective, it's not a law-enforcement issue. As he patrols the streets here, he's found there are no more "bad" people in the illegal community than there are in the legal one. For him, and others interviewed here, it's a question of fairness.

"My personal feeling is that if you're in this country, there are ways to become citizens," he says. "When illegals come here and don't make the effort [to become citizens], then that just tarnishes everything my parents did and what every other immigrant did for years past before that."

People within the immigrant community – many of whom know people and are related to people who are here illegally – are just as adamant that the system needs to be fixed.

Ana Avila became a citizen two years ago, even though she's been in the country since she was a child. She now has three children who are also citizens, but her husband is not.

"We are not bad people. We are just here to make a living, and if we can be here legally, it's better," she says. "There's a shadow now, when my husband goes out: I do worry about him, and there are a lot of people who live like that."

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