The work has always been stupefying and hard. Hour after hour standing on the line, soldering or welding or drilling in screws.

Even in today’s nightmare economy, most people wouldn’t want this daily grind that steals the soul in 12-hour shifts paying as little as $280 a week, before taxes.

But such labor prospers here in mostly rural Jones County, home to Laurel, where the area’s biggest employer, Howard Industries, maintains a sprawling factory that builds electrical transformers and other big equipment behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

For a long time, Howard workers were poor blacks and whites in this town of 18,000, where an estimated 30 percent of the population lives in poverty.

But in the past few years, immigrants poured across the Mexican border, eagerly applying for work on the Howard line and not complaining about long hours or menial labor.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency swept in last summer and staged the largest single workplace raid. When nearly 600 Hispanics were herded past black and white Howard employees, jeers and applause and wide grins erupted.

“Bye-bye,” some trilled in falsetto, fingers wagging. “Go back where you came from.”

The assembly line rattles on. But now mostly blacks work it, with a smattering of whites, for the same wages paid to Hispanics.

Increase in raids

Workplace raids reached an all-time high in 2008 with 6,287 arrests – a tenfold rise since 2003. After the 9-11 attacks, in the name of national security, the Bush administration announced it wanted to detain, and then deport, every illegal immigrant in America. Such a drastic change in immigration policy was necessary to safeguard the country against terrorists, said the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

But swooping down on low-paying jobs has yet to produce terrorism suspects. Asked if any of the raids had produced terror-related arrests, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez replied, “Not to my knowledge.”

Such raids have netted sweatshop workers in Massachusetts, kosher slaughterhouse employees in Iowa and federal courthouse janitors in Rhode Island.

But the biggest roundup – 592 people arrested, mostly for the crime of illegally entering this country – was here in Laurel.

Since then, 414 Hispanics have been deported; 23 have left voluntarily and 27 were released on bond pending immigration hearings. One remains incarcerated at a federal detention center in Jena, La. Nine were charged with identity theft for using false identification.

“We just want to work,” says Ismael Cabrera, a 37-year-old father of two, who paid a smuggler $2,000 to walk him across the desert into Arizona, then paid $1,000 more to get a ride to Laurel, where he first worked in a chicken slaughterhouse.

“It’s not that we took the jobs from other people,” he says in Spanish. “It’s that they don’t want to work them.”

New brand of hate

Blacks in Mississippi know plenty about exploitation. Laurel itself had long been Klan territory, where hooded, robed men marched proudly down the main thoroughfare before the civil rights movement.

White Knights Imperial Wizard Sam H. Bowers, suspected in hundreds of attacks including the infamous “Mississippi Burning” murders of three voter registration workers, lived in Laurel.

These days, hate has a new target.

“Time for Mexico and Mexicans to get the hell out!!!” blasts a recruiting message on a Klan Web site.

Last year, Mississippi passed the most restrictive law in the nation against undocumented workers, making it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job.

Facing deportation

Cabrera doesn’t know what will happen to him, or what he will do if deportation is ruled his fate.

Angelica Olmedo, a 32-year-old single mother, has already decided what to do. She will volunteer for deportation to Vera Cruz, where her parents grow sugar cane.

Her 13-year-old son, who was 5 when she paid for him to be smuggled to Mississippi, will return with her. After she was swept up in the Howard raid, she was released on “humanitarian” grounds because she was a single mom.

She was outfitted with an electronic ankle bracelet and told not to leave the state. “I feel like a dog,” she said, sitting in the doublewide trailer she shares with her sister, her brother-in-law, their two daughters and her son. “They told me I have to charge it every two hours, and I said, ‘What am I? A cell phone?”‘

It took about two months for Olmedo to realize that apparently no one was monitoring the devices. In time, the clumsy plastic device slipped off her foot. No one from ICE has said a word to her since.

Rough on both sides

At Howard Industries, where the day crew is just getting off, a freezing rain pelts workers walking to their cars, heads bowed to shield their faces.

They are mostly black and mostly male. Some carry the stooped shoulders of the bone-weary. Others bound toward the employee parking lot with the glee of the newly freed.

Larry Jones, 24, sits in his car with the heater blasting, sucking the life out of a Swisher Sweets cigarillo. He has been on the job as a coil winder for two months.

He makes $8.20 an hour. And he is thankful for the raid.

“Now they got to hire us. The illegals will work for less than we will, and they’ll work more. They were getting jobs everywhere.”

He added: “I know they got to work, but it’s rough over here, too.”