In Iowa, GOP-leaning voters give voice to worries over immigrants

PERRY, Iowa - Noel Holtan has a raft of concerns about illegal immigration, including that unauthorized workers are taking jobs from Americans.

"An illegal will work for so much less," said Holtan, 68, a retired farmer and postal service employee from Forest City.

He's also worried about security. "Terrorists and totally undesirable" people are coming in, he said. "We have no say in who comes."

In a presidential campaign season that has featured debate over the merits of building a wall across the southern border, deporting millions, and ending birthright citizenship, the voices of Iowa voters anxious about a variety of perceived threats provide insight into why immigration has taken hold as a hot-button issue, though not all of the concerns are well-founded.

A Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll released in September found that 47 percent of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers supported rounding up the 11 million people estimated to be in the country illegally and sending them to their home countries.

In recent interviews with more than two dozen Iowans, few saw deporting millions - as proposed by Republican Donald Trump - as feasible. But many GOP-leaning voters said curbing illegal immigration was important.

Immigrants in the country illegally "take advantage of the health care," said Chris Moore, 48, of Schaller. "A lot of times, they're not paying taxes."

Richard Baldwin, 79, of Iowa Falls, said illegal immigration was "raising hell with the economy in this country," with people "living on the dole."

Others forecast crime and terrorism spreading from over the southern border - as well as through the migration of refugees from Syria. "I'm afraid of ISIS coming in from Mexico," said Jan Kiewiet, 67, of Buffalo Center. "We've had one 9/11. We don't need any more."

Such fears have been voiced by some Republican candidates. Trump, who shot to the top of GOP presidential polls this summer while talking tough on immigration, has said that if he becomes president, he would send back Syrian refugees accepted by President Obama. "These are strong young men. . . . Why should we be taking chances?" Trump said in a Fox News interview last week.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, "we've consistently seen these kinds of claims" about terrorists infiltrating the United States through the southern border, said David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and an associate professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. But "there's no real evidence of that."

Crossing the southern border wouldn't be an effective way for Islamic State members to enter the United States, because recruits would likely stand out, said Daniel Byman, director of research and senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.

Others said assertions that vast numbers of immigrants in the country illegally were not paying taxes or were living off welfare were myths.

Unauthorized immigrants pay "an awful lot in state and local tax revenue," including sales taxes, and property taxes paid indirectly as rent, said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. About half of undocumented workers also have income taxes withheld from paychecks, Gardner said. Others work off the books.

Immigrants here illegally are not eligible for most public assistance, said Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration and a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa. An exception, Grey said, is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children - a federal program that provides grants to states for low-income mothers and children up to age 5 at nutritional risk.

While the issue has commanded significant attention this presidential campaign cycle, the pace of illegal immigration into the United States has slowed in recent years.

The population of unauthorized immigrants, estimated at 11.3 million in 2014, has been "essentially stable" for five years, after peaking at 12.2 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.

The unauthorized immigrant population of Mexican origin in the United States has been on the decline, from 6.4 million in 2009 to 5.9 million in 2012, according to Pew.

In the 1990s, the risks of illegal immigration were low, while "rewards were really high," Grey said. "Now that ratio has shifted."

Foreign labor has been drawn to Iowa by the meatpacking industry, Grey said, following a shift in the 1980s to a lower-wage, higher-turnover workforce. At the time, unemployment was relatively low. Companies turned to immigrants to fill production jobs, Grey said.

But companies have faced more pressure - including immigration raids in the 2000s at meatpacking plants - not to hire unauthorized workers. Now, Grey said, the industry has moved toward hiring more refugees.

Forty-five minutes northwest of Des Moines, the city of Perry is dotted with Hispanic-run businesses - a Mexican market, a Salvadoran restaurant - which grew as workers were drawn to a local meat plant.

"If we were to lose our Hispanic population, Perry would not be a viable community," said Steve Parnell, a music-store owner involved in a group called Hispanics United for Perry.

In 2010, Perry had 7,702 residents, 35 percent of whom were Hispanic, according to U.S. Census data. In Iowa as a whole in 2010, 5 percent of the population was Hispanic.

Perry now has second- and third-generation Hispanics, and "we're seeing more assimilation," Parnell said.

But resentment also exists. You'll "never see Perry host a national white person day, but we have Hispanic celebrations constantly," said Jerry Anderson, 51. "There's no reason they should be treated differently, or better."

On his way into Casa de Oro, a Mexican restaurant in Perry, Anderson said the United States spends "far too much money catering to . . . people that can't speak our language, can't follow our laws." Anderson likes Trump, who's "not worried about being politically correct."

Inside Casa de Oro, Salvador Lepe, 35, whose family owns the restaurant, said he planned to vote, but not for Trump. "He says something all the time about Mexicans," Lepe said. ". . . I've been here for 22 years. I've been working all my life. I'm not a drug user. We've done nothing wrong to be here."

Some Iowans questioned the immigration rhetoric.

"We hear they're all illegal, but are they?" asked Wayne Hansen, 53, a real estate broker who has a weekend home in Storm Lake, a city in northwestern Iowa with a sizable immigrant population. He wondered whether immigrants had taken jobs, or whether Americans hadn't wanted to do them.

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