Mundt: Well, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 5 percent of the nation's workforce is undocumented. 6.2 percent of Iowa's workers are unauthorized, that is compared to nearly 20 percent in states like California, Texas, and Arizona. Before last year's raids the numbers of American workers who are not citizens and who are unauthorized had been growing. Stronger enforcement, along with the combination of more daunting barriers, more immigration officers and military reserves patrolling the border, along with judges issuing jail sentences for illegal entry rather than just deporting detainees, has caused many to determine the risk of entry is now greater than the reward. While the proponents of stronger immigration policies are heartened by the rollback of illegal entries, the human and community impact of last year's raids in Iowa endures.

Narrator: For the nearly 30,000 residents of Marshalltown, Iowa, December 12, 2006, was the day their town made national headlines for all the wrong reasons. One of Marshalltown's largest employers, the Swift & Company meatpacking plant, was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Agents arrested 90 workers believed to have entered the U.S. illegally.

Whitaker: The bottom line is that if you want to have the most impact on illegal immigration, you're going to go to where those illegal immigrants are finding jobs.

Narrator: Despite the federal government's tough talk against employers, one year after the raids meatpacking giant Swift & Company has yet to be charged with any crime. Today the Swift plant in Marshalltown is back to normal. Truckloads of hogs still pull up for processing, and a steady stream of workers come and go from the front doors.

Whitaker: Swift paid $2 an hour more after they realized that we were probably going to come in there and do something about their illegal workforce. So I think that would suggest to most Iowans that, hey, we support higher wages, we support a legal workforce because it's better for Iowa.

Narrator: Nationally, Swift suffered $30 million in lost production in the days surrounding the raids. But members of the Marshalltown community claim the true damage was not economic, it was emotional.

Miller: This raid didn't do anything good for Marshalltown. It took the workers but they didn't take anyone involved with drugs. They didn't take anybody involved with gangs. They took the best and that's the sad part of these raids; they're taking the best.

Narrator: Marshalltown's religious community rallied behind the families affected, and some even criticized the manner in which ICE agents arrested and deported the plant's workers. Marshalltown's mayor, Gene Beach, questions the motives behind the federal government's use of force.

Beach: If they're going to seriously continue to do the raids, they need to do the raids much more efficiently and more often then they're doing them. It's sort of -- I may get in trouble for saying this. It's a little bit like ICE is willing to do a raid if it generates a great deal of publicity for them, because then they can say we're dealing with the issue.

Narrator: Dealing with immigration in small-town America is controversial. Despite immigration's importance in the minds of the American people, many local governments avoid the subject altogether. But last February Marshalltown embraced the topic by holding a national immigration summit.

Kamatchus: The individuals who have been smuggled across that border, who have come across that border, they form - They're nothing more than a form of contraband to this country. And that same form of contraband is what brings us our drugs. That same base on contraband could bring us WMD, weapons of mass destruction.

Rios: Immigrants are human beings like you and me. Immigrants are more than just workers. They are our neighbors and members of families and are an essential part of the fabric of the United States and for the future of the United States.

Narrator: Discussions at the summit covered everything from immigration enforcement and worker rights to creating a temporary worker program. But the ongoing case against workers from the Swift plant was not openly debated. Critics claimed the town's immigrants were a strain on the local economy and that undocumented workers were siphoning away the lifeblood of a small Iowa community. Their mayor disagrees.

Beach: But if you work at Swift, you're going to have FICA withheld and you're going to have W2 income withheld. Now if they don't file their taxes, that income is to the government for free. We have 44 businesses in town that are Hispanic owned. They're paying and collecting sales taxes. They're paying property taxes. They're paying income taxes on that income. So economically they are making a contribution. And for people to say they don't pay taxes, they just take, they're on welfare, they're wrong.

Narrator: At Marshalltown High School, where minority students make up 35 percent of the entire student body, Principal Bonnie Lowry acknowledges that Hispanic immigrants may place a strain on educators. But she added it's not the high school's place to determine a student's immigration status.

Lowry: In the academic realm, we're not concerned whether students are documented or undocumented. As they walk through our doors, we are going to provide them with the best possible education that we can. And that's kind of where education separates itself from other parts of our community. We have undocumented students in this building that have great brains, and they're good learners. Standing in their way to allow them to be the best adult that they can be seems a disservice to me.

Narrator: So what has changed since the raids? At Marshalltown High School, where the hallway signs evenly display English and Spanish lettering, students and educators remain unaffected by the community's immigration debate.

At the Swift plant, company executives say they have not altered hiring practices. Last summer Swift & Company was acquired by JBS, a leader in Central and South American meatpacking. The newly-merged JBS-Swift is now the world's largest meat processor.

On Capitol Hill, last summer's failed immigration policy appears to be the closest attempt at reform until after the 2008 election. But at city hall, Mayor Gene Beach still is hoping for change.

Beach: I guess I'm an incurable optimist. I think we have a chance of doing that, and it's not whether it's the Democrats who are in power or it's the Republicans. I think they're going to have to realize this is an issue that isn't going away and just burying your head in the sand isn't going to solve the problem.