Tag: Meatpackers

Aberdeen, SD: Somali refugee sentenced to 3 years for attempted sexual assault of a mentally challenged woman

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When we first reported this case, it was learned through an apparent miscommunication by lawyers for the defendant that he had only arrived in the country the week before the incident occurred in July of last year. Now we learn he was a wandering Somali who had first been resettled in Idaho three years ago and had drifted from state to state ever since.
Before this case hit the news we had heard about the mayor there supporting the proposed opening of a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen and that citizens were upset. Click here for our first story on Aberdeen.  I then visited the city during my travels throughout the Midwest and West last summer where I was mostly interested in seeing meatpacking towns that were being changed with the influx of refugee laborers.

Mayor Levsen gave a state of the city address last month. Note “immigrants” adding to Aberdeen population. http://www.aberdeennews.com/news/photo-gallery-state-of-the-city/collection_46caa9fe-e98d-11e6-ad76-3389dd13c3c0.html

 
Here is what happened in an Aberdeen court yesterday, from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:

Liban Mohamed, a 39-year-old Somali refugee living in Aberdeen, South Dakota, was sentenced Monday to three years for attempting to sexually assault a severely mentally handicapped woman at a group home.

Speaking through an interpreter, Mohamed said he didn’t know English. Yet, he was seen communicating with his lawyer in English.

Judge Richard Summers sentenced Mohamed to five years, with two years suspended for a total of three years and gave him credit for time served of 228 days. Mohamed is not a U.S. citizen, but he has been living in the United States on a green card.  [I assume there was no order for deportation after he finishes his sentence, will he be wandering to your state in three short years?—ed]

The incident happened July 30, 2016, just three days after Mohamed had arrived in Aberdeen to work at the Demkota Ranch beef-processing plant. He’d been in the country for about three years at that point, having been first resettled in Idaho. He then moved to Missouri, Kansas and on to South Dakota.

It’s not the only case recently of a Somali refugee running afoul of the law. Another man from Somalia, 24-year-old Abdirhman Noor, was charged with the attempted murder of two men on July 8, 2016, outside the Foxridge Apartments in Aberdeen. Noor jumped bail, failing to show up for a pretrial hearing in February. He has been missing ever since.

Still, the mayor of the small city, Mike Levsen, supports the continued arrival of refugees, many of whom are put to work in the local meatpacking plant and at a molded fiberglass plant.

The Liban Mohamed case was also notable for the way it was handled by the local media in and around Aberdeen.

Despite the facts – that a helpless woman was preyed upon by a refugee who had arrived in town just days earlier – coverage by the local newspaper, the Aberdeen News American, and local TV was non-existent until WND brought it to light.

When it did finally report the story, the News American refused to tell its readers that the perpetrator, Mohamed, was a refugee and buried the story on page 3.

The Brown County Sheriff’s Office refused to give WND a mugshot of Mohamed.

There are many more details.  Continue reading here.
I wonder what his arrest, his legal counsel, his interpreters and his incarceration is costing the taxpayers of South Dakota? So much for refugees adding to local economies!
Aberdeen citizens might wish to review the ‘Rutland model’ regarding mayors.

Brazil: JBS and another BIG MEAT company raided in tainted meat scandal

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So how does this affect you in America? It doesn’t directly, but it gives me another opportunity to educate new readers!
The story, which I first heard on my regular early morning scan of CNN, is about JBS, the Brazilian meat giant, that is changing American small cities because of it voracious desire for refugee labor!
Meatpacking companies get the cheap labor.  American towns get the cultural upheaval.

I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

For new readers I have contended for years that the US Refugee Admissions Program is more about supplying large global corporations with cheap/captive labor than it is about ‘humanitarianism.’ 
Wages are low and we (taxpayers) subsidize the workers’ families through welfare. What a business model!
JBS (BIG MEAT) and other companies it owns (BIG CHICKEN) are changing towns like Greeley, Colorado where a large influx of Somalis have moved to the area to work for the global corporation, or have been directly resettled there by federal refugee resettlement contractors.
Be sure to see this story by Bloomberg about BIG MEAT and the Trump refugee slowdown.
Although this happened in Brazil, it places, once again, front and center the question of our food safety!
From the New York Times (emphasis is mine):

Brazil’s Largest Food Companies Raided in Tainted Meat Scandal

RIO DE JANEIRO — Federal agents raided the operations of Brazil’s largest food companies on Friday over accusations that their employees oversaw a scheme that included bribing inspectors to allow rotten meals to be served in public schools and salmonella-contaminated meat to be exported to Europe.

The investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police, an agency similar to the F.B.I., deals yet another blow to the country’s business establishment, which is struggling to recover from colossal graft scandals around Petrobras, the national oil company, and Odebrecht, a huge construction company.

In the newest corporate scandal, investigators said that employees at two food-processing giants, JBS and BRF, paid federal inspectors to ignore the adulteration or expiration of processed foods.

Inspectors also falsified sanitary permits, and bribes were channeled to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party of President Michel Temer, according to the authorities.

Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at Tendências, a consultancy in São Paulo, called the meatpacking inquiry “one more element that will add to the picture of political instability.” Brazil’s political establishment was already reeling from an array of other graft cases.

The meatpacking investigation also casts doubt on Brazil’s agribusiness industry, a relatively resilient pillar of the nation’s weak economy. JBS is one of the world’s largest meat producers, with the United States chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride among its foreign subsidiaries. BRF is a major exporter of meat to the Middle East and Asia.

Continue reading here.
See my tag ‘meatpackers’ for many more stories on the industry that once paid a decent salary and employed Americans.
You should know that then Senator Jeff Sessions (now Trump AG) called out meatpacking lobbyists behind the ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty legislation in 2013, here.
Endnote: If you live in a state with a lot of meatpackers/refugee labor, be sure to investigate how much your elected officials are getting in campaign donations from the meat/poultry companies.

Nebraska Republican Governor supports security screening, BUT wants refugee admissions to resume ASAP

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

My question is, so how much of the governor’s enthusiasm for refugees is because the meat and poultry industry in Nebraska has gotten addicted to cheap LEGAL immigrant labor?
 

nickerson_nebraska_downtown_1
Last May we reported on tiny Nickerson, Nebraska where residents objected to a new poultry plant that wanted to locate there partly because they did not want the town changed with a huge influx of migrant labor. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/05/02/tiny-nebraska-town-says-no-to-chicken-plant-migrant-labor-one-important-objection/

 
There isn’t much different here than in dozens of sobs stories in recent days (that I can’t keep up with) about Refugee Resettlement contracting agencies having to reduce staff as the number of refugees arriving in the US begins to slow.
‘Religious charities,’ helping to supply BIG MEAT with laborers, are paid by the head (from the US Treasury) to seed refugees into your towns, and so obviously their money is drying up.
Nebraska was on my summer tour of states where meatpackers and poultry plants are changing the face of heartland towns with their greedy desire for cheap labor. Humanitarianism is only the cover!
Be sure to see Bloomberg’s ‘Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage.’  I wrote about it here.

By the way, it is a fabulous business model for BIG MEAT (BIG TURKEY! BIG CHICKEN!) because US taxpayers bring the laborers directly to them, they pay wages much lower than they did 20 years ago, ‘religious charities’ get them settled in town, and then the refugee families’ lives are subsidized by taxpayers again in the form of social services (aka welfare).
This is the sob story from the Lincoln Journal Star yesterday:
pete-ricketts
Let’s get moving! “…so we can continue to safely welcome refugees from all parts of the world.”

Two of Nebraska’s three refugee resettlement agencies are cutting back their staffs in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, the largest of the three, announced Friday that it will eliminate 15 jobs in anticipation of a significant decline in refugee arrivals. Six of those jobs are in Lincoln.

Omaha’s Refugee Empowerment Center has also experienced cutbacks.

[….]

Trump’s order reduced the overall number of refugees allowed into the U.S. this year from 110,000 to 50,000. [Here we go with the bs again. Obama only wished for 110,000 in the year he would no longer be in office, 50,000 is still higher than 4 of George W. Bush’s years!—-ed]

That will have a significant impact in Nebraska, which led the nation in the number of refugees it accepted per capita last fiscal year.

[….]

The president clamped down on refugee resettlement and other travel into the U.S. following a wave of questions, mostly from Republicans, about the vetting process for refugees from Syria and other war-torn Middle East countries.

Gov. Pete Ricketts has said he supports Trump’s efforts to “strengthen security screening in the refugee process” but urged the White House to “quickly put new vetting processes in place, so we can continue to safely welcome refugees from all parts of the world.”

Continue reading here.
I fear that with everyone focusing on the security screening that most Republicans, who are driven by corporate donations and Chambers of Commerce, will not have any desire to reform this program with its huge economic and cultural costs.
Grassroots investigators should be looking for evidence that your elected officials are being lobbied by, or funded by, the meat and poultry giants in your states.
See our Nebraska archive by clicking here. Note the problems Nebraska has with TB in the migrant population there.

Bloomberg: Trump's refugee ceiling of 50,000 could hurt BIG MEAT

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, check out who admits that Meatpackers have been drivers behind the importation of cheap immigrant labor, specifically refugees!
Thanks to reader Deena for spotting this!

Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage

Reporters Lauren Etter and Shruti Singh at Bloomberg (emphasis below is mine):

jbs-greeley
I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

Word of President Trump’s executive order barring the entry of international refugees shocked Fort Morgan, a town of 11,000 on the snowy plains of Colorado, some 80 miles northeast of Denver. Many of the workers at a Cargill Meat Solutions plant that’s the town’s largest employer emigrated from Somalia and Myanmar and had been waiting months, if not years, for relatives to join them. Now they’re afraid that reunion might never happen. As a result, the plant in Fort Morgan and other meatpacking plants in the U.S. that have dozens of openings may have to scramble to find a new labor pool.

[….]

Trump’s decision to sharply curtail the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. may lead Big Meat to recalibrate its recruitment practices.

While a federal court has temporarily suspended the administration’s four-month ban on new arrivals, not affected is Trump’s plan to slash refugee admissions from 110,000 to 50,000 in the current fiscal year.

lavinia-limon

Refugees have been a fixture within the meat processing workforce since 2006, when immigration officials under President George W. Bush raided plants in several states, leading to the arrest of about 1,300 undocumented workers. Companies “realized that their business model of hiring undocumented people was causing problems for them,” says Lavinia Limón, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization. “So they moved to the refugee population.”

More here.  I’m quoted saying that maybe it’s time BIG MEAT paid higher wages and hired American workers!
Ms. Limon must have forgotten that it was Bill Clinton in the mid-1990’s who first made Bosnian refugee labor available to his meatpacking pals (remember those cattle futures!) in Iowa, see here.
Ms. Limon was his Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the time! How could she have forgotten!

“And IBP’s good fortune didn’t end there,” Limbacher continues, “turns out the Clinton administration’s Bosnian refugee resettlement efforts also helped to keep labor costs down. Since 1995, for instance, the town of Waterloo, Iowa — population 65,000 – has been swamped with 6,000 Bosnian refugees, many of whom wound up working for the No. 1 local employer, IBP.”

(Iowa Beef was ultimately absorbed by Tyson Foods).

If you missed my post this morning where I argue that Trump could still stop most of the flow from terror hotspots by further reducing the refugee ceiling for this year from 50,000 to 35,000 (we are at over 33,000 now), be sure to have a look.

US Refugee law must be reformed and curtailing the program might serve as an incentive for Congress to get off the dime and do it!  If threats of terrorism can’t move them, maybe threats in a decline in cheap immigrant labor for big global corporations and the Chamber of Commerce might.

Maine to Minnesota, residents of small cities overloaded with Somalis happy with Trump

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“I think he’s doing a lot, every day I’m turning on CNN to see what he did and who he pissed off.”

Mainer Jim Nelson

They may not be protesting in the streets, but voters in towns seeing their communities transformed by refugees almost overnight, support Donald Trump’s efforts to rein-in immigration from certain countries.
No time to thoroughly analyze both reports, but here is a bit of the story from Lewiston, Maine where many residents are happy with President Trump’s temporary slowdown of refugees from certain countries.  I don’t know this guy, but he speaks common sense, and I know exactly how he feels about watching CNN!
From Maine Public Radio:

I think he’s doing a lot,” says Jim Nelson. “Every day I’m turning on CNN to see what he did and who he pissed off.”

Somali women and their children walk through downtown Lewiston, Maine, Tuesday, in a May 8, 2007, photo. Over the past six years, as many as 3,500 black refugees from the wartorn African country have settled in this nearly all-white, heavily French-Canadian and largely Roman Catholic city of 36,000, giving Lewiston the highest concentration of Somalis anywhere in America."Their children are the only assets they have. They left everything else in Somalia," said Said Mohamud, manager of the Mogadishu Store. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
As we reported here years ago, it was generous welfare in Maine that drew the first Somalis up from places like Atlanta, GA.  https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2009/11/22/somali-migration-to-maine-its-the-welfare-magnet-stupid/ (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

 

Nelson says he voted for Trump and he’s happy he did. He says doesn’t always like how the president acts, but that Trump is quickly fulfilling campaign promises.

That includes the president’s recent travel ban, which affects immigrants from seven countries, including Somalia.

“This country was made on immigrants. I mean, that’s exactly why the United States exists. We’re a melting pot. We can’t lose sight of that,” Nelson says.

But he says he’s truly mystified by the local protests sparked by Trump’s order.

“On the front page of yesterday’s paper you got this little girl crying, and she’s a Somalian (sic) and she can’t see her grandmother, and ‘Oh, my God.’ You know, she can’t see her grandmother for six months. What about the people that got blown up down in Florida? What about those people? They can’t ever see their people again.” Nelson says.

More here.
We have a huge archive on Lewiston, see here.

Faribault, Minnesota:

Here is the Minneapolis Star Tribune about reactions in Faribault, another small city being overloaded with Somali refugees.  By the way, the population of Faribault was 23,594 in 2014, and Lewiston was 36,299 in 2014 (it had lost 293 residents since 2010, wonder why?).

FARIBAULT, MINN. – In her years of selling burgers and omelets in the heart of downtown Faribault, Janna Viscomi has seen changes she never expected.

[….]

For Viscomi, the new travel ban ordered by President Donald Trump that suspends refugee resettlement for 120 days and blocks entry for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries comes as mostly welcome news.

“I think slowing things down would be good,” she said this week, taking a short break after the lunch rush. “I don’t want to see families separated, but in the other regard, there needs to be somebody saying, ‘Hey, Let’s breathe here. Let’s breathe.’ ”

jennie-o
Like so many other towns I’ve visited in Minnesota, large meat and poultry companies are transforming small cities as their desire for cheap legal immigrant labor drives refugees to the area.

Reporter then describes pro-immigrant rallies in big cities. (Faribault is Trump country as was Lewiston on November 8th!)

Yet in other places, such as Faribault, the move has been welcomed by residents who feel the cost and pace of immigration is too much too fast. Trump won Faribault’s precincts with 50.4 percent of the vote in November, compared with 41.5 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Faribault, like other small- to medium-sized cities throughout Minnesota in recent years, has seen its mostly European ancestry make room for new arrivals from Cambodia, Laos, Mexico, Central America and Somalia.

And, of course, like much of Minnesota we see Somalis are supplying the cheap labor for BIG MEAT!

In many places, it’s the food processing plants that draw immigrants eager for work. It’s no different here, where the Jennie-O Turkey Store operates.

Continue reading here.
See our previous post on the welfare costs of refugee resettlement.  Somalis are among the greatest users of welfare including benefits provided at the state and local level.

So next time you are tempted to say that you want your meat to be cheap, remember it isn’t! Your tax dollars for refugee welfare subsidize the meat industry!