LAUREL, Miss. -- 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 per 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.

Assembly lines like these offer tenuous lifelines to those desperate enough to toil on them. And sometimes, competition for these jobs pits have-nots against have-nots.

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

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labor.

A festering resentment began to take root in the hearts of some black and white residents, producing an odd alliance in a place that has seen decades of racism. Now, even the Ku Klux Klan has turned its hatred against Hispanics.

Many blacks and whites claimed Hispanics were taking over their city and taking away jobs by not complaining about safety issues in a factory that faced $193,000 in fines last year from federal inspectors citing dangerous working conditions.

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. The plant, which has been working without a union contract since August, is mired in bitter negotiations over higher pay and safety issues.

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.

More than 100, mostly women with children, were released pending the outcome of their cases. They wade through a long, confusing current of immigration hearings that will determine their futures. Many fear venturing out, lest they receive withering glances in the Wal-Mart aimed at the electronic monitoring devices on their ankles.

Immigrant groups, religious leaders, and various Democrats have expressed hope that the raids will be curtailed under President Barack Obama. The immigrants in Laurel know this, and they hope Obama's promise of change applies to them.

"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."

He waits on a deportation hearing and weeps at the prospect of going back to his hometown near Mexico City, where he made little money. His son, Cesar, has few memories of that place. He left when he was 6.

Now a sweet-faced boy of 13, Cesar respectfully interprets for his father in perfect English delivered with a Mississippi drawl. Cesar is asked how he feels about going back to Mexico.

His gaze drops to his feet. His eyes brim with tears. He wipes his nose with the back of his wrist, sitting in the Pentecostal church his family attends. "Bad," he manages to get out. "It would feel bad."

Cabrera wipes his own face with the sleeve of his shirt. "Sometimes I ask myself if it was worth it to come here," he says.

At Howard Industries, meanwhile, there is a different feeling in the employee parking lot.

Larry Jones, 24, sits in his car with the heater blasting. He has been on the job as a coil winder for two months. He makes $8.20 per 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."