Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Mass deportation is not a viable solution to the country’s immigration problem, and Iowans will have to come to terms with the fact that undocumented workers are now a part of state and local economies, Democratic Senate candidate Roxanne Conlin said in an interview with Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa.
In a visit to Carroll earlier this month, Conlin was asked about immigration by the paper’s editor, Lorena Lopez. She said a policy of deporting everyone in the country illegally would be a “nightmare” that would crippled the economies of many Iowa communities.
From La Prensa (translation):
She continues, “Storm Lake’s economy would collapse. Denison’s economy would collapse. People who are here illegally are going to work every day and taxes are withheld from their paychecks. They also pay Social Security, for which they receive no benefit. We have to recognize the fact that right now, workers who are undocumented are already an integral part of our economy. What we have to do is make sure they are out of the shadows and not being exploited.”
And as the nonpartisan Iowa Policy Project pointed out in a 2007 report, the average undocumented family in Iowa pays about $1,254 in sales and excise taxes, $110 in property taxes and $307 in income taxes, for a total tax contribution of $1,671 each year. This represents approximately 80 percent of the total amount of taxes paid by a documented family in Iowa earning the same income.
In the interview, Conlin also voiced support for allowing undocumented immigrants to pay a fine, pay any back taxes owed and “tidy up” their documents here in the U.S. instead of forcing them to return to their native country to do so. A spokesman for Conlin’s Republican opponent, incumbent U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, called her stance, “incredibly unfair to people who follow the rules and drastically out of touch with Iowans’ sense of fair play.”
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