Big business and Welcoming America working together to change your towns

01/29/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Be sure to see my post just now at American Resistance 2016!

We learned that Rupert Murdoch’s Partnership for a New American Economy is working in collaboration with Welcoming America (Obama’s pals) at that Open Borders Leftwing community organizing group we have been writing about ever since 2013 when we first heard about them in Lancaster, PA, here.
It is really quite stunning to me to learn that the Open Borders activists (LOL! the “humanitarians”) are working in concert with Chambers of Commerce and large global corporations to assure that the business community has a ready supply of cheap (slave!) labor!
No wonder they hate Donald Trump so much.

Professor: War on poverty should include refugees

01/25/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, but, but….we are told that refugees are self-sufficient very quickly—that they are not costing federal, state and local taxpayers much! In fact, we are told repeatedly that they are actually adding to the local economy!

Although it’s an overt pitch for more taxpayer dollars for refugee resettlement, there are a couple of points worth making about this opinion piece by Dr. Jill Koyama at The Huffington Post.

Dr. Jill Koyama: “…refugees funneled into pipelines of poverty.”

First, for long time readers, you know that the Resettlement contractors are always bragging about how quickly refugees become self-sufficient and get off welfare. You know it can’t be true or why would this author and others suggest refugee programs need more money from the US taxpayer. The contractors can’t have it both ways! Either refugees are in poverty or they are quickly self-sufficient. Which is it?

If they need more money from the taxpayer to survive, then we are led to two obvious questions: WHY ARE WE IMPORTING POVERTY? And, if we can’t afford them, why not lower the numbers being admitted to the US each year?

Dr. Koyama, in her op-ed, is pushing for more English language training and says of the system now: “…refugees are funneled into pipelines of poverty, with little hope of upward mobility.”

Here she makes a point we often make on these pages—a driving force behind refugee resettlement, for all its talk of helping the world’s downtrodden, is driven to a large degree by employers wanting cheap reliable laborers. Once the first refugees move upward, employers need to import more at the lower rungs.

My two-year anthropological study, ending last March, of the educational and employment networks of 100 refugees in upstate New York confirms that a lack of English proficiency pigeon-holes refugees into low-wage service and shift work with limited possibilities of promotion. In fact, one fourth of the 12 employers interviewed preferred to hire refugees with “just enough” English skills who were, as one employer stated, “less likely to leave when they landed better paying jobs with more English.” According to the director of a refugee resettlement agency in the area, the focus on getting a job quickly leads many refugees to accept positions below their abilities, especially because refusing any job can jeopardize the receipt of benefits used to support their families, especially their children. This has multi-generational effects on educational outcomes and livelihoods for refugee children and children born in the U.S. to refugees.

A reminder to readers, the Refugee Act of 1980 also foresaw a public-private partnership where the contractors were supposed to use some of their own resources and not use the federal taxpayer as a piggy bank. I am fully convinced that contractors could, if they worked at it, find enough people willing to do charitable work to teach refugees English without further dipping into the US Treasury.

Progressives: Tyson Foods exploits immigrant labor, destroys small towns

12/18/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is not often I agree with anything from “Progressives,” but when a reader sent me this piece from Progressives for Immigration Reform I couldn’t believe my eyes. It is more on the report we posted the other day on Noel, Missouri and the poverty the town is experiencing as it is flooded with mostly REFUGEE laborers for Tyson Foods.

How on earth our federal CHURCH contractors can be aiding and abetting this travesty continues to be beyond my understanding.

From Progressives for Immigration Reform (emphasis mine):

In her NPR news story, In A Small Missouri Town, Immigrants Turn To Schools For Help, writer Abbie Fentress Swanson chronicles the plight of newly arrived immigrants to the small, rural town of Noel, Missouri. It seems that longtime residents there are not dealing well with sudden demographic changes. Consequently, immigrants from Mexico, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and the Pinglap region of Micronesia are among those feeling unwelcome and isolated in this formerly white community, which saw its population double to 2,000 in just two decades.

Many of these immigrants are so poor they cannot afford housing or healthcare. Their children often lack shoes and clothes. As Swanson notes, about 90% of the community’s children would go hungry most of the school day, if they didn’t qualify for free or low-cost meals. With such an influx of people, Noel has not been able to keep up with providing social services. There is a long wait list for units from the local housing authority, and building more housing would strain the town’s sewer system, already at 80% capacity.

Immigrants are attracted to Noel by jobs at the chicken processing plant of Tyson Foods, which employs 1,600 people. The starting wage is a paltry $9.05 per hour, which comes to $362 a week before taxes for an eight-hour, five-day week. Despite health and injury risks to workers in this industry, Swanson calls this a “decent” wage and declines to hold Tyson culpable for perpetuating widespread misery in the cash-strapped town.

The nation’s largest U.S. meat processor by sales can easily afford to pay its employees in Noel a living wage, but prefers to have the community subsidize the resulting human wreckage. After all, profit is the overriding goal, even if it must be achieved by driving wages so low that most American citizens no longer can afford to work at its processing plants. No matter – the continuous stream of cheap, compliant foreign labor will do just fine. The results are compelling….

Read about the profits Tyson Foods is making. Then this:

Assimilation is not the real problem facing Noel, Missouri nor is it street-level bickering about matters of race, religion and values. The larger issue is what to do about rogue corporations that run roughshod over small communities in pursuit of profit, little of which is invested locally. Of greater concern is that our government wants to overload the job market even more through mass immigration policies, which will lay waste to many more small communities throughout America.

And, what do you do about federal contractors for the US State Department wearing the white hat of do-gooderism while helping Tyson Foods make the profit!

Just a reminder, Senator Jeff Sessions called out the meatpackers as being one of the driving forces behind so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” when S.744 passed the Senate in June.

Oh boy, here we go again “meatpacker” sob stories; demands for “rights”

11/30/2012 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a story about meatpackers and their immigrant labor. Heck, a few years ago we set up whole categories on the controversy. We had stories from Emporia, KS, Greeley, CO, Shelbyville, TN, Ft. Morgan, CO and Grand Island, NE.* Most of those involved Somali refugees demanding their rights to worship their religion on the job (and some stories about other immigrant groups angry at the company for bending to Somali demands).

The long and short of these stories is that the “international” meatpacking companies (some are not even owned by Americans) figured out that they could use cheap immigrant labor and keep wages low. I’ve been told by Americans who worked in meatpacking decades ago that wages were very good at Midwest meatpacking companies, BEFORE the illegal aliens were hired. (This article I’m about to report tells us that too.)

Then the giant corporations realized that they couldn’t function with immigration raids of their plants where the feds were looking for the illegals, so BINGO! they hit on the refugee population—not only were they in abundant supply, they worked cheap and were captive (most refugees can’t get back home even when they want to).

Bill Clinton’s Bosnians!

Bill Clinton was among the first (that we know of!) to bring large numbers of refugees for his corporate buddies in Iowa. I told you about that here in 2008. And, I continue to maintain that the US State Department is working as the head-hunter for large corporate interests and supplying them with cheap subsidized labor. I say “subsidized” because some of these companies are getting tax breaks for hiring poor people—and the refugee employees are getting welfare on the side. It is a very sweet deal for these companies! And, it’s doubly good for the Hard Leftwing Socialists because they get the third world population pouring into the US.

But, it’s not just the Lefties who want cheap labor for their Corporate friends, see Mark Krikorian at NRO on Republicans looking for cheap immigrant labor as well. The difference is that the Republicans only want the cheap labor while the Leftists get a twofer—cheap labor and they get to change the US population (and they can demand “rights” for the downtrodden as this article tells us).

I almost forgot—and the Islamists get the Hijra.

Now to the latest story on the poor and suffering meatpacker immigrant labor force from the Daily Planet (the reporter is Somali).

First the requisite sob story (LOL! is this basic Leftwing media reporter training—sob story right up front!).

Mohamud Kahin left his war-ravaged country five years ago, promised his siblings in Somalia they would never have to go to bed unfed and rolled up his sleeves for a new life in the United States.

Kahin arrived in Minneapolis in 2007. He has never been to school, and English remains a forever-foreign language to him.

It’s almost impossible to find a job around the Twin Cities, his relatives in Minneapolis told him when he first arrived. They gave him the most common advice given to a new adult immigrant with no English: go to the meat processing companies.

And Kahin did.

In 2008, he moved to Postville, Iowa, joining hundreds of Somali immigrants with similar stories. The 26-year-old Kahin got his share of large knives and cleavers on the fast-moving animal slaughtering and processing lines of Agri Star Meat & Poultry LLC — formally Agriprocessors. It’s the largest producer of kosher meat in the country and the biggest employer in Postville.

Kahin worked more than 40 hours a week as a meat packer in both frigid and oven-like conditions.

“My feet got really swollen,” Kahin said of the first few weeks of the job, speaking in Somali. “There were blisters on the bottom on my heel. The pain was constant.”

He had to stick with the job so he could send $500 a month to his family in Kismayo — it was a way to keep the promise he had made to his siblings: they would never go to bed hungry.

And, we sure don’t want those Al-Shabaab Jihadists going to bed hungry either. Remember, the US government stopped this money transfer awhile back because some was surely going to the Jihadists.

In the early 1980s [at the same time the Refugee Resettlement Act passed Congress and was signed by Jimmy Carter—ed] meatpackers left US cities and moved to the countryside—surely because property taxes in the cities drove them out and they discovered cheap immigrant labor.

According to the report, 20 to 50 percent of workers at meat processing industries are immigrants and refugees from Africa, Central America, and Mexico.

More than 30 years ago, meatpacking and processing industries were located in the heart of Midwestern cities, including St. Paul, Chicago and Kansas City. New immigrant workers [there weren’t many then, it was mostly American labor—ed] and many Americans in the industries enjoyed “comparable salaries to middle-class workers in the auto and steel industries,” according to the report.

In the early 1980s, however, these jobs were relocated to rural parts of the Midwest and South because “of a much broader reorganization of the industry,” the report said. And a sharp decline in wages has followed. [So tell me why a move to the country would necessarily reduce wages?—ed]

Today, new immigrant communities, documented or undocumented, are finding themselves in rural areas in search of meatpacking job opportunities.

Poor discriminated-against Muslim workers! Can’t speak English, can’t take prayer breaks—boo-hoo!

Many meatpacking immigrant workers are undocumented or don’t speak enough English. Most don’t know their rights as employees or are afraid to complain. Consequently, they fall victims to supervisors.

“Abuse was often based on race, ethnicity, and immigration status,” the report said. “Undocumented immigrants were insulted and singled out for the worst jobs because they were unlikely to complain.”

Two years ago, JBS Swift was alleged to be a hostile work place for the Somali and Muslim workers because of their race, immigration status and religion, according to a 2010 news release from The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

If you have the energy, check out our 83 previous POSTS (Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy category) on what really happened with those Somali demands and turmoil created in those midwestern meatpacking plants a couple of years ago. By the way, JBS Swift is a Brazilian Company and we get to help support their immigrant labor force through our social services! Cool huh!

*Type each of those city names into our search function for more fun with refugee meatpacker stories.