Lake Avenue nearly dead on a warm Wednesday morning

Lean, anxious times for immigrants in The City Beautiful

Sure is quiet in The City Beautiful. Nearly 50 degrees and all sunshiney, and barely a peep downtown that Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.

The notice had just gone out from Trump:

All undocumented residents must register their whereabouts with the government so they could make arrangements to self-deport. If you don’t register, you go to jail. “We will hunt you down,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned.

Imagining a tumbleweed on Lake Avenue because mine was the rare car.

People are scared. They’re tired. Easier to lay low. Those who have the means can stage their shopping boycott if they think they can make Amazon or Walmart wince. Latinos are steering clear just for safety’s sake.

Tough times in the livestock sector keep people at bay, too. Pork has been taking a beating. Bird flu is everywhere — a barn full of turkeys in Sac County was the latest. The avian flu workers down in Ames at the National Animal Disease Labs got canned by Elon Musk, so that won’t help matters much unless maybe his boys from StarLink know something about virology.

A swirl is starting around the drain. Consumer confidence is tanking. A survey of bankers finds them frowning. Tariffs on Canada and Mexico, plus more on China, make most sentient people a little bit anxious — Canadian newsprint is about to go through the roof, and the Times Pilot went to weekly printing. We had been thinking about it, this pulled the trigger. Aluminum and steel, up and up. Coffee, up. Dairy and eggs, yada yada.

If you need to save a little, and would just as soon not be seen, you are not going to relax by shopping. You sure can see it on empty streets. You could ask them about it if you could find them. We have been told: We cannot talk. The Boss is watching. Trump is watching. Noem is on the hunt. Paranoid is a rational state of being.

The pork producers are queasy about tariffs. Mexicans like their pork. Good customers, they were. We got used to that cheap Canadian natural gas.

Legislators responded to this economic cauldron by excising trans people from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Dominate, baby! Oh, yeah. Make ’em squirm. Make ’em suffer.

Fear that you will be hunted. Fear for your job. Fear for your safety.

Sure, let’s go trade on cars! Oops, we can’t get the Fords out of Canada or the Chevys out of Mexico. Price could rise by a third on higher materials costs.

We are kicking some royal tush by relentlessly attacking queers, though. That should help bring down inflation.

You never know when ICE can come crashing. Better go register so they know where to snag you. “You betcha by golly,” Juan says, “I want to make Storm Lake White again. Where do I sign up to self-deport since the website address they provided didn’t work?” It’s true: The website doesn’t work. Musk & Tech Boys are supposed to know this stuff.

Be patient. As Secretary Noem advises: “President Trump has a clear message: if you are here illegally, we will find you and deport you. You will never return. But if you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream.” She cut some ads to that effect. The message is coming through, Roger that.

Tariffs come and tariffs go, but lost markets and higher prices persist. The last trade war sent China to Brazil for its soybeans, and they never quite came back.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said it will take a few months to bring those egg prices down as we ship in substitute supplies from … Turkey? Yes, that’s what they say. Not Mexico, certainly. A half-billion for imported eggs. Eggcellent. What about all these layoffs of USDA folks who work with livestock?

“Who’s going to take care of all the animals? Does she even have an understanding?” That is Dr. James Roth, one of the leading animal disease experts in the world at Iowa State University. He is not woke. He is a button-down farm boy at the top of the vet med profession who last week condemned Iowa’s political class for not standing up to the madness.

Musk says if they go too far they can back up and fix it. Except they don’t. Since 1961, the National Animal Disease Center has gone from 80 scientists to 43. The diseases keep getting worse. Turkeys die, hours are trimmed. Why go downtown when you can’t afford a taco and the governor insists that the cops should collar you for being here?

Storm Lake is contracting right now. Too quiet. Too fearful. That’s what they want, you could guess, for Lake Avenue to look like Sunday on a Wednesday. It is real, and it will get realer as the days grind on.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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