Mohamed Maow Photo: Liz Dufour, The Cincinnati Enquirer
Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the employer—DHL Global Mail—since they were apparently unaware of the Somali penchant for setting up such claims against employers once enough of them were hired to make an impact on the workplace. Don’t DHL head-honchos read RRW?
CINCINNATI — For more than three years, Mohamed Maow worked at DHL Global Mail in Hebron, Ky. He said he earned $11.57 an hour to sort mail and was paid time-and-a-half for overtime.
Maow, 27, a refugee from Somalia who came to the U.S. in 2007, said he never received any negative comments about his performance.
Yet on Oct. 9, after he said DHL supervisors reversed a policy of flexible break times that allowed Maow and fellow Somalis time to pray, he was among two dozen Muslims fired for stopping to say five-minute evening prayers required by their religious beliefs.
What a surprise! CAIR Ohio comes to the rescue!
Maow’s is one of 11 complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – of an expected 24 total – that allege DHL Global Mail fired a group of Somali Muslims for exercising their legally protected religious rights.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has filed the EEOC complaints on behalf of the fired workers.
“We are requesting all available remedies allowed under Title VII (of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964) and the Kentucky Civil Rights Act, including but not limited to: damages, reinstatement where appropriate and policy changes to ensure that all worker’s civil rights are respected,” said Booker Washington, CAIR staff attorney. [Washington’s bio is here—ed]
The article goes on to say that about 400 Somalis have moved into Erlanger (the friendship city!) and Florence, Kentucky.
Just a reminder, 7,608 new Somali refugees were resettled in the US in FY2013, here.
For your further reading, we archived the majority of our posts about Somalis protesting in the workplace in our Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy category. You might also wish to view our Stealth Jihad category as well because that is what this is all about.
Garden City’s new logo, The “Yucca Burst!” “The various colors of yucca leaves represent the many different cultures living in unison in the region.”
We’ve written on many previous occasions about Tyson Foods meatpacking town of Garden City, KS (here is our archive).
One of my all time favorites is this post about Somalis in Garden City asking for a separate cemetery for their people (so even in death they needn’t assimilate). And, this postfrom January 2011 was pretty good too—Somali clans squabble in Garden City.
This recent story caught my eye, but at first I figured it was going to be one of those stories about how everything is copacetic after the initial stresses and strains in a town whose population has doubled mostly due to a meatpacking company’s need for cheap immigrant laborers (whose lives, by the way, are subsidized by the taxpayer as you will read below).
From KBIA.org (skipping many paragraphs into the blah, blah, blah). The emphasis is mine:
Despite all the services the local social network provides, there are problems endemic to any place with lots of workers who make low wages. The starting pay at the Tyson plant in nearby Holcomb, Kan., is $13.50 an hour – better than a job at say, Walmart, for $7 an hour. But if a parent with three children takes home roughly $25,000 annually, that’s still below the federal poverty line for a family of five.
The Tyson plant employs 3,400 people, with the top wage $20 an hour for maintenance workers, said Gary Mickelson, a Tyson spokesman. Help wanted ads in the local paper promise medical, dental and vision insurance, paid vacation and holidays and a 401(k) plan.
A majority of “team members,” as Tyson calls them, are Hispanic, followed by Asian and blacks, Mickelson said.
In a press release from August, proclaiming “chicken surges to record earnings and beef rebounds,” Tyson reported record sales of $8.7 billion for the third quarter of this year.
When asked if Tyson provides assistance to the community, Mickelson responded via email that the company and its employees pledged $220,000 to the Finney County United Way last year.
Feeding the hungry here often falls to the Garden City Unified School District 457, where three-quarters of the students get free or reduced-price lunch. The district provides two meals a day and sends supplies home in backpacks for use on the weekend, with help provided by the Kansas Food Bank, said Janie Perkins, the district’s coordinator of supplemental services.
Assistance is also needed away from school, as requests for food stamps in Finney County are up 230 percent in the last five years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The school district, designated as “minority majority” status because 76.8 percent of the students are minorities, have kids who are Hispanic, Burmese, Somali, Ethiopian or are from another ten countries.Documents are printed in several languages and signs at the district offices are printed in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Newcomer classes operate in the elementary, middle and high schools, which separate the children from the rest of their school temporarily so they can assimilate into their new lives. Since most of the Somali and Burmese children were born in refugee camps, they’ve never seen basic plumbing, let alone a pencil, Perkins said. Parents often come to school and express confusion at items in their new life, like a washer and dryer, she said.
In teacher Kay Thompson’s newcomer class at Florence Wilson Elementary School, 14 kids speak four languages – Spanish, Somali, Burmese and Vietnamese. Thompson said she starts each year with the basic school terms.
“Simple directions that they will need in a classroom: How to put away a book. What is the pencil? What is the notebook?” she said. “I’ll say, ‘go to the door.’ They don’t know what the door is.”
[…..]
A housing challenge (indeed!)
The city, which first experienced a large refugee population when the Vietnamese moved here in the early 1980s to work in the plants, is now seeing a surge of Burmese refugees.
Velia Mendoza, coordinator of the Garden City Community Refugee Program, had about 150 Burmese clients when she started there in 2009. Now, she helps approximately 400 refugees with cash, food, medical, language skills and job assistance.
[…..]
Still, one of the services in short supply is housing, thanks to the attraction of the city’s plentiful jobs. Thome said it is her top challenge, and she keeps a running tab on the many mobile home parks and run-down motels on the outskirts of the city, some near the dusty cattle feedlots that supply animals to Tyson.
The school district identified 341 homeless students last year – more than 4 percent of the student body and up from 43 in 2007.Those kids often land with a family member, where two families can be bunched up together in an apartment. Thome has delivered used mattresses that are pushed up against the walls for space during daytime hours.
Seeing so many people sleeping in riverbeds and roadside shelters, struggling for housing and food in a new country, galvanized the local ministerial alliance, she said.
The article makes it abundantly clear that Tyson Foods does little to help solve the problems its need for cheap LEGAL immigrant labor has created. Readers have reported to me that there was a time when meatpackers actually paid a decent wage that did attract American workers, but apparently this business model works better for them—cheaper wages for captive labor (refugees cannot easily go home) and the workers are subsidized by you for their other needs.
Remember back in June, Senator Jeff Sessions called out the meatpacking industry as one of the lobbying groups pushing S.744—the Gang of Eight bill that passed the Senate—which of course will bring them an ever increasing supply of labor.
Read about the creation of the city’s new logo, here. After reading the above you almost have to wonder if it’s a joke (the logo that is!).
Editor’s note: Blog partner Judy posted this today at Potomac Tea Party Report, but it is also important for followers of RRW to read it and consider its implications.
The speech is too complicated to summarize, and it is well worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll give you some excerpts. This one makes one of his key points:
…the West now faces another existential threat—every bit serious as the Soviet Union. And that is mass Third World immigration.
In the U.S., mass immigration as was kicked off again by the 1965 Immigration Act, after a 40 year pause during which there was essentially no immigration at all. Simultaneously, enforcement against illegal immigration collapsed, so that there are somewhere between 12 and 20 million illegals in the country right now.
The demographic impact of this is dramatic. Because immigration is skewed by public policy toward non-traditional sources, by 2040 a majority of people in the U.S. will be non-white. This is a country that was 90% white in 1965, when the Immigration Act was passed.
Now, of course, what that means is that at that point the US will cease to exist. It will not be the historic America that we know. It may be something else. But it’s not going to be America.
And this is going to happen very soon. Within the lifetimes of at least two people in this room!
Now the amazing thing about this transformation is that it isn’t inevitable at all. It’s the result of a public policy that isn’t popular at all–in fact, it is extremely unpopular.
Of course Brimelow has been called a racist and excluded from polite society. I myself would not emphasize the color of the immigrants but rather their culture, which is the important thing. In fact, I recall Pat Buchanan writing several decades ago that he would rather have an educated Nigerian neighbor than a British football hooligan, or something along those lines. Another excerpt:
So now, federally, we have the third major Amnesty drive in the last 10 years, the Gang of Eight’s bill that was put together after the last election—S744. It’s important to recognize that this bill is not simply an Amnesty bill: it also double or triples legal immigration, which was already at record highs. It’s a mind-boggling thing.
Obviously, this tremendous, well-funded campaign for the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill was not put together in 5 minutes after the 2012 election. It was ready to go regardless of who won. I believe that had Mitt Romney won the election, he would have supported Amnesty, just as George W. Bush did. Romney actually said that in the Hofstra debates (“I’ll get it [Comprehensive Immigration Reform] done. I’ll get it done. First year.” But nobody paid any attention to him.
So why the huge gap between what the ruling class wants, including the GOP establishment, and what the vast majority of Americans want? Why can’t we even have a proper debate? Two very interesting points. The first:
Everyone here is interested in the power of ideas and ideas rule the world and we all agree on that. The difficulty in the immigration debate is what I called in Alien Nation back in 1995 “Hitler’s Revenge.” The elites of the West emerged from WWII utterly traumatized by the experience of confronting Nazism. It was so traumatic that they went overboard on the opposite side. They became convinced that any discussion of ethnicity or cultural heritage at all, let alone race, was unthinkable. You couldn’t address these things without being a Nazi.
Second is something I’ve not seen before, at least anything beyond slogans of the rich benefiting from immigration:
But there’s a secondary finding that hasn’t has gotten even as much publicity as the general finding: Although immigration doesn’t benefit in aggregate to the native born, it does cause a redistribution of income from labor to capital. It’s running somewhere at 2-3% of GDP, it’s a very large number.
Republicans who benefit from this redistribution are the big donors.
You hear a lot about how the Republican Party is a captive of an extremist faction—that is, the Tea Party. But I actually think that the real extremist faction is not the voters, but the donors.
In some ways, you can interpret the GOP’s history in the last 20 years as a kind of donor riot. The donors just simply refuse tolerate any kind of restriction on immigration at all. They go straight to the candidates, and above all to the consultant class, and tell them they won’t spend money on elections.
There’s lots more, including an account of how Israel recently solved its illegal immigration problem. Solved it. Because they knew it was a matter of national survival. But Israel has an identity as a Jewish state. We have lost our identity, as those who asserted there was such a thing as an American culture (not popular culture but one concerning traditions, morals, politics, religion, etc.) have been stigmatized as racists and have, for the most part, shut up.
Tysons’ pork processing plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa still bringing in the refugees—Burmese this time.
This is probably going to be inside baseball for some readers here. But, when we first began writing Refugee Resettlement Watch in 2007, there were TEN major federal refugee contractors instead of the NINE today. The tenth contractor was the State of Iowa.
Here then is a long story about workplace legal wrangling (wade through the first 25 paragraphs or so) and this is what the upshot of the mess in the office created for the resettlement program. I had wondered how they fell out of favor with the US State Department.
From the Des Moines Register(emphasis mine):
Colbert and Phillips contend that problems in the Refugee Bureau outlined in the court records are a window for the public to better understand the downfall of the agency — specifically its decision in 2010 to stop its resettlement service.
Phillips said that the agency, under Wilken, failed to apply for grants and key subsidies for the resettlement program.
Resettlement was for decades the lynchpin of the bureau, which dates back to former Gov. Robert Ray’s legacy work with Tai Dam refugees. The agency has since helped hundreds of refugee families escape war-torn or politically rife countries.
Today the agency — which is federally funded — focuses on social services instead of refugee resettlement.
“People are afraid that in two years, refugee services will completely cease to exist,” said Phillips, who now works in the human resources department at the Mitchellville Correctional Facility.
Lorentzen McCoy, the DHS spokeswoman, noted that the resettlement decision was made when the U.S. Department of State determined that the Iowa agency did not meet the criteria to continue with the placement program.
Colbert, who was hired in 2007 around the same time that Wilken was promoted to the bureau’s director, said federal officials had alerted Iowa of concerns it had with the resettlement program.
She contends that Wilken, who was the bureau’s deputy director for roughly 20 years prior to his promotion, didn’t act to save the program and even told her he would be satisfied if that part of the program would be terminated because other federal program money would keep the bureau going.
Records provided by the state show the bureau’s current budget of $1.9 million is about $200,000 lower than it was in 2010, when the resettlement program ended.
“I can tell you that when I got there they were in trouble. It was pages and pages of stuff that was wrong,” Colbert said of the Department of State’s assessment.
But, if you think you are off the hook in Iowa, you aren’t, there are at least two agencies resettling refugees in the state—Lutheran Services and Catholic Charities.
In fact, if we are going to have resettlement in the first place, I would get all the churches out of it and get the states back in control. Not that I have a lot of faith in government, I just think there is a little more accountability with a government agency overseen by elected officials (and presumably watching the purse strings). You can’t get at the inner workings of a “church” through normal sunshine legal provisions in the same way government is required to be transparent.
The photo is from this storyabout the impact of Burmese refugees on Columbus Junction (400 refugees to a town of 2000), but since its a pork plant at least they aren’t members of the Religion of Peace.
There is a pattern to these stories that even Aljazeeraunderstands. The formula goes something like this: struggling immigrants arrive in an American town, townspeople are mean and unwelcoming (examples are given), but hardworking immigrants overcome and are ultimately accepted with everyone living happily ever after in multicultural nirvana. So, the point is, you don’t have to read most of this article about Ft. Morgan, Colorado.
But, I did find one section of the overlong piece interesting. It’s the discussion about the Cargill meat packing plant.
We learn that 2/3 of its 2,100 employees are Hispanic and 1/3 are East African (Somali mostly) and a Cargill representative leads us to believe that they are not choosing immigrants over American workers. Huh? The trick is trying to figure out how exactly do the immigrant laborers improve their bottom-line. Is it through cheap wages? Tax breaks? A combination of the two. You know it isn’t because Cargill owners and managers are simply good people out to help the downtrodden of the world!
I found this (below) quite informative. And, what do you know—here are the Lutherans again!
Mohamed [one of the stars of the Aljazeera piece—ed] works out of a new Lutheran Family Services office in Fort Morgan. The organization has long experience helping settle newly arrived refugees. The task is slightly different in Fort Morgan, where many of the refugees have lived elsewhere in the United States for years and no longer qualify for the housing and other support offered to new arrivals. Here, Lutheran services include classes to help the refugees apply for citizenship.
The African refugees’ arrival started with just a few, in 2005, according to Mary Ginther, head of human resources at the plant that Cargill has run here since 1987. Word of jobs at the plant may first have reached the large refugee community in Minnesota, where the giant agribusiness conglomerate has its global headquarters. Ginther says Cargill officials at one point were meeting the regular bus from Minneapolis, which arrives in Fort Morgan on Sundays, to hand out welcome kits to new employees. Managers who wanted to improve communications with the new workers also sat down with Somali elders, learning about their culture. That resulted in a workshop that Cargill, at the request of police chief Kuretich, has offered to police officers as well as to company supervisors.
Once new workers are settled, Cargill wants to keep them. From the early days when many of their workers were from Latin America, Cargill had learned that one way to retain staff is to help newcomers settle into town and offer them a chance to learn and be promoted. For two decades, Cargill has worked with Morgan Community College to offer its employees classes in English and job and other skills. Once, students who spoke Spanish as a first language were the main target. Now, students who attend classes on their own time speak more than a dozen languages.
The plant employs more than 2,100 people. Employees come from more than 16 countries, with about two-thirds from Latin America and almost a third from East Africa.
Ginther says some in Fort Morgan cling to the myth that the plant gets federal money for employing refugees, or accuse Cargill of giving foreigners special treatment.
They obviously benefit from employing immigrants—how?
There is a pattern to these stories that even Aljazeera understands. The formula goes something like this: struggling immigrants arrive in an American town, townspeople are mean and unwelcoming (examples are given), but hardworking immigrants overcome and are ultimately accepted with everyone living happily ever after in multicultural nirvana. So, the point is, you don’t have to read most of