An inside view of a rural Iowa town torn apart by greed, failed immigration policy and misguided view of diversity. Postville (population 2400) is an obscure meatpacking town in the northeast corner of Iowa. Here, in the most unlikely of places, in the middle of endless cornfields, unparalleled diversity drew the curiosity of international media and outside observers. In 2008, however, people who hoped Postville would succeed declared the town’s experiment in multiculturalism dead. It was not native Iowans, or the newly-arrived Orthodox Jews, or the immigrant workers and refugees from around the world who made Postville fail. Postville’s momentum towards a sustainable multicultural community was stopped in its tracks when the town was crushed by a massive raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on May 12th 2008. 20% of the town’s population was arrested, forcing the closure of the town’s largest employer, a kosher meatpacking plant. The raid exposed the disastrous enforcement of immigration policy, the exploitation of Postville by activists, and disturbing questions about the packing house's operators. Today, with managers sitting in jail, workers in federal prison on their way to deportation, and a huge influx of new immigrants to fill their spots, the town is attempting to survive a near terminal blow. Grey and Devlin – with more than 10 years experience in Postville, 20 years experience in meat-packing plants and a life time work with immigrant populations – join with Goldsmith – the only Jew ever to serve on the city council – describe the real events in Postville, which have been subject to misrepresentation in the media and by diversity professionals and detractors alike.

An insider's account of the Postville case, this book gauges the raid's human, social, and economic impact, based on interaction with the main participants and interviews with local citizens and arrestees in the US and Guatemala.

Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists have almost without exception approached religion as a phenomenon that radically marks humans off from other animals, but Gross rejects this paradigm, instead matching religion more closely with the life sciences to better theorize human nature. Gross begins with a detailed account of the scandals at Agriprocessors and their significance for the American and international Jewish community. He argues that without a proper theorization of "animals and religion," we cannot fully understand religiously and ethically motivated diets and how and why the events at Agriprocessors took place. Subsequent chapters recognize the significance of animals to the study of religion in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Jacques Derrida and the value of indigenous peoples' understanding of animals to the study of religion in our daily lives. Gross concludes by extending the Agribusiness scandal to the activities at slaughterhouses of all kinds, calling attention to the religiosity informing the regulation of "secular" slaughterhouses and its implications for our relationship with and self-imagination through animals.

Thoroughly revised and expanded, this is the definitive reference on American immigration from both historic and contemporary perspectives. It traces the scope and sweep of U.S. immigration from the earliest settlements to the present, providing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to all aspects of this critically important subject. Every major immigrant group and every era in U.S. history are fully documented and examined through detailed analysis of social, legal, political, economic, and demographic factors. Hot-topic issues and controversies - from Amnesty to the U.S.-Mexican Border - are covered in-depth. Archival and contemporary photographs and illustrations further illuminate the information provided. And dozens of charts and tables provide valuable statistics and comparative data, both historic and current. A special feature of this edition is the inclusion of more than 80 full-text primary documents from 1787 to 2013 - laws and treaties, referenda, Supreme Court cases, historical articles, and letters.

This updated and expanded edition gives critical analyses of 23 Latin American films from the last 20 years, including the addition of four films from Bolivia. Explored throughout the text are seven crucial themes: the indigenous image, sexuality, childhood, female protagonists, crime and corruption, fratricidal wars, and writers as characters. Designed for general and scholarly interest, as well as a guide for teachers of Hispanic culture or Latin American film and literature, the book provides a sweeping look at the logistical circumstances of filmmaking in the region along with the criteria involved in interpreting a Latin American film. It includes interviews with and brief biographies of influential filmmakers, along with film synopses, production details and credits, transcripts of selected scenes, and suggestions for discussion and analysis.

An eye-opening, unapologetic explanation of what "racial profiling" is in modern-day America: systematic targeting of communities and placing of suspicion on populations, on the basis of not only ethnicity but also certain places that are linked to the social identity of that group. In 21st-century, post–civil rights era America, "race" has become complex and intersectional. It is no longer simply a matter of color—black versus white—contends author D. Marvin Jones, but equally a matter of space or "geographies of fear," which he defines as spaces in which different groups are particularly vulnerable to stereotyping by law enforcement: blacks in the urban ghetto, Mexicans at the functional equivalent of the border, Arabs at the airport. Dangerous Spaces: Beyond the Racial Profile demonstrates how society has constructed a set of threat narratives in which certain widespread problems—immigration, drugs, gangs, and terrorism, for example—have been racialized and explains the historical and social origins of these racializing threat narratives. The book identifies how these narratives have led directly to relentless profiling that results in arrest, deportation, massive surveillance, or even death for members of suspect populations. Readers will come to understand how the problem of profiling is not merely a problem of institutional bias and individual decision making, but also a deeply rooted cultural issue stemming from the processes of meaning-making and identity construction.

At the center of what was once the tallgrass prairie, Iowa has stood out for clearing the land and becoming one of the most productive agricultural states in the nation. But its success is challenged by multiple issues including but not limited to a decline in union representation of meatpacking workers; lack of demographic diversity; the advent of job-replacing mechanization; growing income inequality; negative contributions to and effects of climate change and environmental hazards. To become green, fair, and prosperous, Connerly argues that Iowa must reckon with its past and the fact that its farm economy continues to pollute waterways, while remaining utterly unprepared for climate change. Iowa must recognize ways in which it can bolster its residents’ standard of living and move away from its demographic tradition of whiteness. For development to be sustainable, society must balance it with environmental protection and social justice. Connerly provides a crucial roadmap for how Iowans can move forward and achieve this balance.