The Casa Fiesta arrests are just the latest in what has become a disturbing pattern of workplace raids by ICE. In Postville, Iowa, this past May, ICE arrested over 400 workers at a kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors, Inc. Other raids have been carried out at restaurants, plants, and workplaces in Texas, California, and across the nation. According to Reuters, "ICE said it had made 949 criminal arrests in worksite-related raids since October 2007, including the arrests of 105 owners, managers, supervisors or human resources employees who face charges ranging from harboring to knowingly hiring illegal aliens."

However, the impact of these raids extends way beyond the 949 arrests. They impact the lives of the immigrants' families, children, and homes. They extend to the children who fear ICE arrests when they go to school, families who are impacted by raids for life, and to the communities where they live. As David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration lawyer, said of the Casa Fiesta workers, "These people are not criminals. The worst thing you can say about them is they came here to feed their families."

Within these communities, both immigrants and non-immigrants have felt the effects of the raids. Restaurants have been shut down and family businesses have closed. Churches have lost their members, and businesses and factories struggle for workers. For example, after the Iowa raids the town struggled to recover:

The tiny northeast town was home to the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, which recently lost nearly half of its work force after a huge raid by immigration officials. The raid sent shockwaves through the town, which has served as a multicultural model...But after the raid, many here are wondering if the future of the town is in jeopardy. Some 2,300 people lived in Postville before the raid; about half of them were Hispanic.

Our country is economically reliant on immigrants. Immigrants pay taxes -- between 1996 and 2003 alone, undocumented immigrants alone contributed nearly $50 billion in taxes -- and contribute to our struggling social security system. They increase consumer demand and generate economic growth. In 2004, the expansion of Hispanic and Asian-American consumer markets was an estimated 12% of America's purchasing power. Raids like the one in Oberlin aren't just bad for the immigrants themselves or for all those college students who will be missing their Mexican food -- immigration raids are bad for the nation as a whole.