[Commentary] When Mexican president Vicente Fox portrayed Mexican-Americans as the latest in a long line of immigrants to western Iowa during an appearance in Storm Lake, his remarks served as a reminder that passions about immigrants ran just as high a century ago as the they do today.

In 1874, German immigrants in Carroll County launched The Demokrat,a  German-language newspaper, with the declaration that the publication would battle to preserve the interests of recently arrived immigrants against “nativisim and fanaticism.”

In her magisterial book on the administration of President Lincoln,”Team of Rivals,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out that vicious attitudes toward German immigrants were very much alive and well in the politics of the 19th century.

In fact, a man widely regarded as far more qualified for the presidency in his time than
Lincoln, William Seward, lost the nomination to Lincoln in no small part because he dared defend German immigrants.

Instead of seeing a version of their own family history in western Iowa’s Latino immigrants, too many in our part of the state buy into the same ugliness their forefathers endured from Protestants with roots in other parts of Europe.

When so many people in this area make heartbreakingly ignorant comments (and I’ve heard many) about Latino immigrants they may as
well be time-machining back to days of the Der Demokrat and slapping their own great-grandmothers.

This clearly isn’t the case with everyone.

Some people get the connection – and have for years.

“Most of us are not that far removed from people who emigrated from other countries,” former Carroll Mayor Tom Gronstal told me in an
interview in 2000. “Iowa’s been settled for only 150 years. None of us go back that far.”

Gronstal was part of then-Gov. Tom Vilsack’s 2010 Council, a bipartisan organization that said the state’s No. 1 goal should be to attract new residents and embrace diversity.

“We arrived at that conclusion by looking at the basic demographics of our state,” Gronstal said at the time. “We’re going to have to become welcoming to all kinds of people.”

Gronstal, whose family’s bank was known as the “German” financial house in the not-too-distant past, said then that Iowa hasn’t made immigration a priority.

Well, it is today.

But not for the reasons Gronstal and others with foresight desired.

For years, western Iowa’s agricultural economy has benefited from the back-breaking labor of Latinos, many legal workers, many illegal.

With that latter class, Iowa winked and nodded and let them into Denison and Storm Lake and Sioux City.

They contributed. They built lives.

As a matter of basic human decency, not to mention economic reality, we owe these immigrants a path to lawful residency and citizenship.

For years, western Iowa has known the score with what amounts to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to immigration.

Political leaders and the God-fearing, church-going everyman sat largely silent in Iowa as books like “Fast Food Nation” exposed the
horrors Hispanics faced on the kill floors of Midwestern meatpacking houses. One national magazine even carried a cover story on race in
Storm Lake.

At the time, there was no battle cry for a massive overhaul of immigration.

Western Iowa wanted an invisible underclass, one not heard or seen.

And for years this bargain worked.

Now, because caught between two cultures, some of Iowa’s Latinos fly two separate flags many want them branded as confederates, trucked away as felons, dismissed as would-be terrorists.

Conservative Republicans are nothing if not good poll-readers.

They see the president’s approval rating dipping to numbers that would send most Iowa gardeners outside to cover the flowers. They’re losing
the debate on character and competence and the war and economy.

They need new enemies, new images for television ads in the 2008 elections.

And they found at least some in Marshalltown.