The past week of Iowa news was not without its irony. If you looked beyond the March Madness coverage, a piece of legislation and the census data probably caught your eye.

The Iowa Legislature’s approval of the bill naming English as the official language of the state made me wish that some of our lawmakers would crawl back under the rock from whence they came.

Thanks to the philosophical ramblings of two-bit savants about the need for one tongue, the Iowa Legislature managed to obliterate any essence of multicultural tolerance in our fair state.

Then the Census figures came out, and surprise, surprise, the Hispanic population in Iowa has nearly tripled in the last decade.

According to 2000 Census data, Iowa is home to 80,000 native Spanish-speakers – more Hispanics than students at Iowa State, University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa combined.

Nearly 50,000 Hispanics immigrated to Iowa in the last 10 years, drawn by jobs primarily in the agricultural sector.

It seems that as soon as Iowa accrued a critical mass of non-Anglos, the Legislature had to crusade for a “solution” to the “problem.”

While I do not believe there is raging debate about whether or not one needs some English language skills in order to advance economically or educationally in Iowa, the message our new law sends is clear.

We want people to come and provide cheap labor in labor-intensive jobs.

We need people to come to work in the packing plants we’ve built and the hog confinements we’ve created. We want an inexpensive labor force to prop up the agricultural economy floundering under an antiquated system of only four commodities.

We want you to come work in Iowa. We just never want to hear you speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart.

You are not welcome on the City Council and we will not pay attention to your needs as a constituency.

We do not want to live next door to you, and we do not want your son to ask our daughter to the prom.

Welcome to Iowa. We’re known for our friendly hospitality.

During spring break I had the privilege to become deeply acquainted with a Hispanic community in central Iowa.

As part of an “alternative spring break” offered by St. Thomas Aquinas, I went on an “immersion trip” to live with a Hispanic family and learn more about their experience through the guidance of the nun who spearheads Hispanic ministry in a parish about an hour north of Ames.

I spoke more Spanish in four days in north central Iowa than I would have if I had gone to Cancun.

I left with a strong sense of respect for this first wave of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala. The stories they shared about their journey to Iowa were amazing.

One night several men candidly described their experience crossing the border.

Their families had pooled their efforts to raise the money to get one of the young men to the United States. Invariably he has younger brothers and sisters or nieces and nephews who aren’t guaranteed an opportunity for school or even adequate food and clothing.

The Mexican economy does not allow many opportunities for fiscal advancement, and so one brave family member is sent to seek work across the border. His success in procuring work is providing food, medical and educational security for his family back home, so he is an essential link in the family’s well-being.

The border is more than just an arbitrary political line. It is the line which EPA and OSHA regulations do not cross. It is the difference between being a citizen and an alien.

But for our new friends who comprise Iowa’s modest, yet growing population of Hispanic immigrants, crossing the border was an arduous journey and a dangerous risk for the goal of better lives for their families.

They told us about walking for 12, 16, 18 hours in the desert. They carried with them nothing that would become too burdensome while trekking in the hot sun but with enough water to avoid the fate of others who died trying to cross.

While evading the border patrols and looking for a ride, they encountered bodies of people who did not carry enough water.

Say what you will about illegal immigration, but anyone who travels through several Central American countries, evades the corrupt Mexican police and is able to survive the desert crossing is courageous.

Imagine arriving to the American Southwest with the clothes on your back and then making a journey for work in Perry, Muscatine, Storm Lake or Hampton. Arriving in a cold place without a good command of the language. Arriving to take a relatively low-paying job and work long, tiring hours.

During our immersion, we were able to visit the workplaces of our host families.

Many of them work packing eggs in a facility attached to a laying house that is home to more than a million hens. Some people spend 12 hours a day pulling dead hens from their cages.

We visited a farrowing operation, a large hog confinement for more than 6,000 sows that shoot out piglets on a hormone-induced mechanized schedule.

While large hog confinements have taken over the Iowa agricultural landscape, they have also taken advantage of people willing to take virtually any job that will hire them.

The men in our families left home around 5 in the morning and returned around 5 in the evening, after a full day in the musky hog confinement, pulling pigs stuck in the sow’s birth canal, castrating and cleaning on a grand scale.

The claim that these immigrants take “American jobs” is a load of hog hooey. “No Anglos work with us,” pointed out one of the men in our host families. “They don’t want these jobs.”

These families taught us the pain of long separation from their parents, siblings and spouses.

They are willing to sacrifice to provide for people they love. Some of the immigrants we met were professionals: engineers, social workers, teachers.

Without opportunities for professional advancement, they came to Iowa to do labor-intensive work, frustrated that they can’t use their professional skills.

For all those who claim that immigrants come to the United States to skim off the largess of our social programs, a moment of reality with a Hispanic immigrant community in Iowa will dispel that notion.

Not only are illegal immigrants unable to collect any social security or unemployment, they still have to pay taxes.

And for those urban legends that denounce pregnant women who walk into hospitals to have their babies, it would be a sad day in our society when women were ensured their right to abortion but not to safe delivery.

The recent immigrants in the Hispanic community in Iowa shatter the myths surrounding illegal immigrants.

The community I was immersed had were people of family, of faith, of hard work and sacrifice, exactly as Iowans idealize themselves.

They attended English classes provided by the Catholic church in the evenings. Thanks to the English-only bill, funding for ESL classes provided by schools and communities will be slashed. Come speak our official language, but we refuse to provide the tools to learn it.

I was helping with the advanced English class, and while doing a reading on women’s rights, I quizzed them on the vocabulary.

They didn’t understand the phrase “gender gap.” Unfortunately, they did know the word discrimination.

Rachel Faber is a senior in Agronomy from Emmetsburg.