By Liz Goodwin, The Lookout blog @ Yahoo News, Dec. 7, 2011

POSTVILLE, Iowa— [....]This improbably diverse rural town of about 2,000 people in northeastern Iowa suffered a near-fatal shock more than three years ago when a federal immigration raid scooped up 20 percent of its population in a single day.

[....]Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers' immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there.

[....]The wave of (legal) immigrants that replaced them has been less willing to put down roots and call Postville their home, locals say. "From my perspective as a community we were stabilizing in 2008," Brackett says. "Rather than single males working, they had brought their families. We had people who were buying houses and planned to stay here."

[....] What the federal immigration raid did not accomplish, however, is returning the meatpacking plant to how it was in the past, when Iowa-born Postville residents were paid middle-class wages to work on the all-beef kill floor. [....]