Tag: Meatpackers

Refugee resettlement is driven by a desire for cheap compliant labor, not humanitarianism

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“….these are really good workers. They show up on time. They say ‘yes’ when they are told what to do. They do what is necessary for their survival.”

(Lavinia Limon, CEO USCRI)

 

Ten years ago, when I first started writing this blog, NO ONE ever said a word publicly about refugee admissions being desirable for big business, especially for BIG MEAT, so it is gratifying to see stories like this one at the LA Times (even if it’s spun to sound like a good thing for the struggling refugees) that tells us the truth.

(See Bloomberg earlier, here. And, the NYT here.)

It is past time for the truth!

If we need laborers willing to work cheap, just say so!

I want to say to the refugee resettlement contractors—cut the c***! Stop propagandizing that refugees, like these Muslims in the story, are here out of the goodness of your hearts (and America’s heart!).

This is about money and the reason that there is no real effort by the Republican establishment to reform the US Refugee Admissions Program is because BIG MEAT (BIG CHICKEN AND TURKEY TOO!) is lobbying and surely contributing to the campaign coffers of RINOs (and Democrats!).

It is also about reliable Democrat (Union!) voters.

An aside: I wish him only the best, but surely you noticed that one of those injured on the baseball field that day with Rep. Steve Scalise was a lobbyist for Tyson Foods (huge consumer of refugee labor).  Do average Americans who are concerned about disruption to their hometowns and their security, and taxpayers concerned about the US Treasury have that kind of access to members of Congress—NO!

Here is the LA Times (hat tip: Richard @highblueridge):

Al Souki [Syrian refugee star of the story makes $10.50 and hour—ed] needs the work—and employers in the meatpacking industry say they need workers like him. Refugees have increasingly become vital workers in an industry with high turnover. And the growing unrest and bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere have readily supplied them in places like the Central Valley. [So for those of you wondering if we are purposefully creating refugees through our aggressive foreign policy, maybe so!—ed]

Tom Super, a VP at the National Chicken Council: refugees a big part of our workforce for decades.

The refugee and immigrant populations ”certainly have been a significant part, an integral part of our workforce for decades,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many refugees work in this occupation but roughly one-third of workers in the industry in 2010 were foreign-born, according to a peer-reviewed article in Choices, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Assn., a nonprofit that serves those who work in agricultural and broadly related fields of applied economics.

Mark Lauritsen, director of the food-processing division at the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, estimates that nationwide tens of thousands of refugees are part of the roughly 250,000 unionized meat and poultry plant workers.

Holy cow! Here we have the International Rescue Committee (one of nine federally funded NGOs***) admitting they are finding laborers for a chicken plant.

In 2010, Foster Farms in Turlock began hiring refugees placed by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency, said Christine Lemonda, deputy director of the IRC’s Northern California offices. Since then, the agency has placed more than 150 refugees at the poultry plant. In the last six months, 15 have been hired—an uptick—at Foster Farms, Lemonda said.

[….]

Immigrants have long been integral to the meatpacking industry, but refugees surfaced as a key labor force starting in 2006, according to experts who study the phenomenon.

Queen of Refugee labor procurement, Lavinia Limon of USCRI (98% taxpayer funded!), isn’t exactly telling the full story. Bush might have sped things up, but it was Bill Clinton (she was Bill’s director of ORR) who latched on to the concept of refugees for meat companies when he admitted tens of thousands of Bosnians for his buddies in the meat industry in Iowa. See here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2008/05/17/bosnians-iowa-meatpackers-and-more/

That year the George W. Bush administration directed immigration enforcement agents to raid meat processing plants in six states. Operation Wagon Train—the largest single work-enforcement action in U.S. history—led to the arrest of an estimated 1,300 people working in the country illegally.

Though it did not stop the industry from completely cutting off the hiring of unauthorized workers, the raids had a chilling effect.

The growing unrest and bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere provided a refugee population from which to fill the labor vacuum, said Lavinia Limon, chief executive officer and president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization.

“What the meatpacking industry knows is that these are really good workers. They show up on time. They say ‘yes’ when they are told what to do. They do what is necessary for their survival,” Limon said.”It works really well for employers.”

[….]

The meatpacking industry has become so reliant on refugees that the North American Meat Institute, an industry lobby group, released a statement stating their concerns after President Trump issued an executive action restricting citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees from entry into the United States. [If Trump, the businessman, squishes-out on the refugee issue, you know that globalists wanting the free flow of cheap labor got to him!—ed]

And, here (below) we have an answer to a question I have had for a long time—Do resettlement contractors have formal relationships with BIG MEAT and BIG CHICKEN?  Will the IRC make money supplying the slave refugee laborers? (BTW, we know  the meat industry paid great wages decades ago before they found the cheap immigrant labor!)

There is no formal arrangement between IRC and Foster Farms, but that may change soon.

The resettlement agency and Foster Farms are looking at possibly extending their relationship and formalizing a partnership in the next few months, Foster Farms spokesman Ira Brill said. He declined to talk more about the issue.

Continue here, there is much more!

Again, if we want to debate low-skilled labor needs, let’s do it, and cut the ‘humanitarian’ sob stories.

I have a huge archive on ‘meatpackers’ changing America, click here, and last summer I traveled over 6,000 miles around America to see some of those changed towns.

 

***The Federal contractors/middlemen/employment agencies/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizers? paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities are below.  Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors.

The contractors income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, but they also receive myriad grants to service their “New Americans.”

If you are a good-hearted soul and think refugee resettlement is all about humanitarianism, think again!

These federal contractors act as employment agencies for big companies in need of low-skilled workers and that is why the Republican establishment is loathe to abolish or reform the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

The only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove these contractors/globalist head hunters from the process.

BIG MEAT wants the cheap refugee labor, no wonder Congress won't reform law

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, it isn’t just the Meatpacking industry, it is the Chamber of Commerce, the hospitality industry, other food processing and manufacturing that has become dependent on the refugee labor force that you and I pay to bring to America (and support with our social service dollars!)  See my previous post where CIS refutes a very big lie.

Tyson Foods at Storm Lake, Iowa changing the demographic makeup of heartland towns, paying low wages to refugees and lobbying Congress for more!

In a few days I’ll tell you why I am re-posting this information about greedy companies like Tyson Foods lobbying Congress side by side with the refugee contractors/’religious’ charities who claim they are working for the good of humanity.
Have a look at some of my recent posts on Big Meat (particularly Tyson Foods!):

NYT: How Tyson Foods and its greedy demand for cheap immigrant labor ‘saved’ an Iowa town

Garden City, Kansas to become new poster-city for the joys of BIG MEAT-generated multiculturalism

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

Storm Lake, Iowa: Filling America’s “dead spots” with diversity!

Nebraska: Lutherans, Somalis, meatpackers, mosques (and controversy) in small town America

My list is huge and I could go on, but you get my drift. Click here for my complete archive on Tyson Foods.
Big Meat’s desire for cheap labor, in conjunction with the lobbying efforts by the NGO refugee industry, produce a powerful juggernaut working against taxpaying citizens (we have no lobbyists) just looking for reform of the system that would include some say as to what is happening to our home towns and how much it’s costing us—financially, culturally and security-wise!
If you really want to do something (rather than sending angry comments to blogs and facebook pages), call your member of Congress this week and next—tell them to defund the US Refugee Admissions Program, then get to work reforming it.

NYT: How Tyson Foods and its greedy demand for cheap immigrant labor 'saved' an Iowa town

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is pretty much the gist of the New York Times story here about Storm Lake, Iowa.
The opening paragraphs give the message that I, and others before me, have been giving for years.  When big global corporations like Tyson Foods discovered cheap (first illegal) immigrant labor and now legal refugees, the cultural make-up of American heartland towns was changed forever.

We told you here last November that the Obama State Department was making Storm Lake a direct resettlement site. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/11/22/storm-lake-iowa-filling-americas-dead-spots-with-diversity/

The NYT spins it as a feel-good story as this town that features a PORK (no Muslim laborers) plant would have died.
My question is, why would it have died? If Tyson had kept up the wages over the years, there would be more generations of rural Americans who would consider this work (if they weren’t brainwashed in liberal colleges that is)?
It is especially maddening because immigrant wages stay low and you (taxpayers) help support the families with your welfare dollars. Wow! What a business model!
I’m posting this story for a reason other than the fact that it confirms what I have been yammering about for years—-refugee resettlement is about labor, not first and foremost ‘humanitarianism’ by our government and its resettlement contractors***.  But, I am posting it to give readers an example of what you can do!
Here are the opening paragraphs about how Tyson Foods is ‘saving’ a town:

STORM LAKE, Iowa — When Dan Smith first went to work at the pork processing plant in Storm Lake in 1980, pretty much the only way to nab that kind of union job was to have a father, an uncle or a brother already there. The pay, he recalled, was $16 an hour, with benefits — enough to own a home, a couple of cars, a camper and a boat, while your wife stayed home with the children.

“It was the best-paying job you could get, 100 percent, if you were unskilled,” said Mr. Smith, now 66, who followed his father through the plant gates.

After nearly four decades at the plant, most of them as a forklift driver, Mr. Smith is retiring this month.

The union is long gone, and so are most of the white faces of men who once labored in the broiling heat of the killing floor and the icy chill of the production lines. What hasn’t changed much is Mr. Smith’s hourly wage, which is still about $16 an hour, the same as when he started 37 years ago. Had his wages kept up with inflation, he would be earning about $47 an hour.

Continue reading here to see what meatpackers have done to Storm Lake.
One more thing, you will see if you read it all is that the NYT is out to get Rep. Steve King (no surprise!).

So what can you do?

Readers ask me all the time, what can they do to help get the message out.  I’ll try to write a comprehensive (as comprehensive as I can) post in the coming days about what you can do, but here is what one reader did because every little bit helps! (I’ll make a new category and call it ‘What you can do’ for ideas like this!)

She actually took the time to comment to the NYT. 
The comments are closed now, but please have a look and see what readers of the NYT said, here.  The NYT probably did not appreciate the tone of many of them! (When you open that previous link, the comments should pop-up in the right hand side bar, they do on mine.)
Here is our reader:

D Flinchum
Blacksburg, VA

It should be clear from this article that the influx of cheap foreign labor is for the benefit of the company owners. Pay low wages w/no benefits, but because low wages don’t often pay for a 1st-world life, shift the cost to the community at large by gov social services and higher costs for housing, lower quality schools, and ER health care.

The refugee program has become a recruiting system for Big Meat. It is made out to be some great humanitarian system and anybody who opposes it is called a heartless bigot. This is nothing more than gas-lighting – trying to make people who see the truth believe something that they can see isn’t so by calling them names. It’s just like a philandering husband trying to gas-light his wife into thinking that she is crazy for suggesting he is out partying with Marcia in Marketing instead of working late when he comes home half drunk with lipstick on his shirt.

It is also important to note that most of these new workers and their children qualify for affirmative action. It is likely that these new workers’ children who do go on to college will be able to take advantage of programs not available to the white working class kids who might also be interested in advancing into the professions.

As one man in the article said, it’s hard to have ill feelings for someone just trying for a better life, but the company owners already have a good life and it is they who should be held accountable.

Thus we have Trump in the WH.

See our tag ‘Meatpackers’ for many more stories about BIG MEAT changing America. Don’t miss this one about meatpackers worried about the Trump ‘proposed’ slowdown.
*** US federally-funded refugee resettlement contractors are paid by the head (by you!) to bring migrant laborers to your American towns and cities:

 

Garden City, Kansas to become new poster-city for the joys of BIG MEAT-generated multiculturalism

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve been reading RRW for a bunch of years, you probably heard about the propaganda film featuring Shelbyville, TN that a left-wing-funded media outfit did back in 2007. The film was a whitewashed look at the turmoil created in the town when Tyson Foods ‘welcomed’ refugee (mostly Somali labor) to Shelbyville.
In the Shelbyville flick a local newspaper reporter who wrote a series of stories about the disruption the Somalis had brought to town was the villain in the film that was ultimately shown around the world about how great it was that the locals finally accepted their African brothers.  (Here is one of many posts I wrote about the Shelbyville propaganda film.)
Now, check this out, a new propaganda film (actually two of them) are being filmed this summer in Garden City, Kansas. (That Shelbyville film is too old now, they need something new for the Trump-era.)

Somali workers attend new employee orientation at the Tyson beef meat packing plant outside of Garden City, Kansas. http://100percentfedup.com/how-tyson-foods-is-spreading-islam-in-u-s-forcing-taxpayers-to-pick-up-housing-healthcare-costs-for-refugees-and-destroying-local-towns/

They have villains too!  You will see them discussed in the opening paragraphs here at The Garden City Telegram (read about them yourselves).
Just like the Shelbyville film, the Garden City film(s) will be used to shame other towns in to accepting a flood of third world diversity.
What a coincidence…..
Here (below) are a few snips from this latest news.  Guess what? It is Tyson Foods that brought the ready supply of cheap refugee labor to Garden City too!  What are the odds that this film company will bring up the issue of low wage (cheap!) immigrant labor? Zip! Zero! Nada!
I was going to visit Garden City last summer on my 6000-mile trip to see some of America’s meatpacking towns that have been changed by BIG MEAT, but my local contact (not happy with what has happened to G-C) had a family emergency, so I went to Nebraska instead.
Maybe I should resuscitate my idea about a book that shows how major global corporations, like the meat and poultry industry, are changing America for one reason—Low wage workers means PROFITS for them!
And, then along come these Leftwing film makers to shut up any citizen opposition and help BIG MEAT get its laborers for decades to come!  Makes me wonder if Tyson Foods is helping pay for the project!  Hmmmm!
The Garden City Telegram:

When Lawrence-based documentary filmmakers Tess Banion and Bob Hurst heard this news [about villains in western Kansas—ed], they decided their next project was going to take place in Garden City.

[….]

Their documentary will be a feature length film, so 90 to 100 minutes, and will try to illustrate how Garden City’s diverse culture works by diving deep into immigrants’ stories. [These leftwingers love their “stories,” we need  to get better at telling ours!—ed]

“This is not going to be a journalistic piece,” Hurst said. “It’s more of a portrait. I think it’s more personal and more in depth about the lives of particular individuals who have come to Garden City and have been there for a long time, or new arrivals and what they have gone through personally and what their stories are.”

[….]

Hurst said their goal for their new film is for viewers to reflect on the lives of others, and find that every resident of Garden City is working toward the same goals. [Fascinating admission that they are trying to bend minds—ed]

[….]

To help understand the mindset of long-term Garden City residents, Hurst and Banion have enlisted the help of Nancy Harness, former mayor and longtime resident of Garden City. Harness said she is excited to be a part of the film and hopes that the documentary can serve to be an ambassador for the town.

“I think that the community is unique in how we dealt with the diversity of cultures, and it’s nice to have that be recognized by people from outside the community,” Harness said. “ I think part of my job here is to be an ambassador for Garden City and western Kansas. It’s an intriguing place and interesting community. To be part of the crew to introduce that community to a larger audience is cool.”

Harness said she hopes that residents who are hesitant of immigrants watch the film and reflect on why Garden City has welcomed immigrants in the past.

BIG MEAT changed Garden City!

“Part of what happened was that in 1980, we opened the world’s largest beef packing plant,” she said. “They needed 3,000 folks to just keep the plant running. Well, where are those workers going to come from? When the community decided that’s how they wanted to move forward economically, we basically said as a community we will open our doors to new people because that’s the only way this will work. I hope that this film gives the life-long locals who might be hesitant to this immigrant change a moment to stop and think about how the only reason Garden works is that everybody feels some ownership to it.”

Obviously that is not true—that everybody feels some ownership of the meat industry’s need for cheap labor and its role in changing the demographics of American heartland towns.
And, btw, in case you are wondering, the meat industry once paid wages that were very attractive to AMERICAN workers. It is only when they discovered first the illegal aliens willing to work for less, and then ultimately the refugee laborers whose low wages you subsidize with your welfare support, were they able to keep wages low.
Continue reading here.
Here is a lengthy story from the Wichita Eagle in 2010 with more background on Garden City and Tyson Foods.
One of my favorite stories about Garden City (and Harness role) was this one from 2010 where we learned that Somalis in Garden City wanted their own (separate) publicly funded cemetery. No association with infidels even in death!
Another controversy long-time readers might remember is the one about Emporia, Kansas and how the arrival of the Somali labor force there for, yes, another Tyson Foods plant, roiled the town so much so that Tyson closed the plant!
Don’t miss this post: Trump refugee number reduction could hurt BIG MEAT (at Bloomberg no less!).
Here is one of about 20 posts I wrote on the controversy in Emporia.  Unfortunately most of the links are now dead, so it’s a good thing I did snip articles throughout the period back in 2008.  Some of those Emporia Somalis moved to Garden City.

It is really too bad that there aren’t documentary film makers with some cash to tell the other side of the ‘diversity is beautiful’ story to balance the Garden City films in the works.

Is it time for a modern day version of The Jungle?

If your city has low income housing (or a greedy meatpacker nearby!) you could get refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/e44ac-prmnewsitedevelopment_28nov2016.pdf

During the final years of the Obama Administration, the US Department of State created a little booklet for communities to use to help plan for their town to be a new resettlement site.
This morning, reader Joanne sent this news from Colorado: Ft. Collins hasn’t enough low income housing so refugees are not being placed there in any numbers.
I’ll give you the news and then send you to places where you can learn more about the refugee program.  (Commenter Nancy, in a followup e-mail, asked to be further educated!).  Apologies to long-time readers who find the repetition boring!

FORT COLLINS COLORADOAN – While national rhetoric on immigration, presidential executive orders and international factors slow in the number of refugees settling in the U.S., a lack of affordable housing has all but halted refugee resettlement in Fort Collins, experts say.

Just 13 refugees have resettled in Fort Collins since 2002, and none have moved to the city since 2012, according to newly compiled data from a USA TODAY Network investigation. Eleven of those refugees came from Iraq, and the remaining two came from Chad and Sudan.

“Housing drives where refugees live,” said Kit Taintor, Colorado’s State Refugee Coordinator.

This is a photo I took on my fact-finding mission in the heartland this past summer. Meat giant JBS (formerly Swift & Co) is a Brazilian-owned company that encourages Somali refugee labor, and as such it is changing the demographic make-up of Greeley, Colorado.

Cities the size of Fort Collins can serve as a boon for resettlement options, she said. But Fort Collins’ lack of affordable housing coupled with student competition for rentals in the university town has significantly limited resettlement options, making matters “really challenging.”

Greeley refugee flow is no great surprise! Taintor is not completely correct, meatpackers drive where refugees live too! (See ‘Big Meat braces for refugee shortage,’ here.)

The Coloradoan continues….

Despite the low number of refugees settling in Fort Collins, a radically different story continues to unfold in a Northern Colorado city just 30 miles away.

Since 2002, 1,110 refugees fleeing war, genocide and other ills in their home countries resettled in Greeley, a figure that has inched upward annually since 2009. Data show 270 refugees were settled in Greeley last year, and nearly all of them came from Burma and Somalia.

More here.  Not a word about the labor draw created there by a BRAZILIAN-OWNED COMPANY! Think about it, they get a ready-supply of cheap labor and you pay for the refugee family’s welfare, housing support, medical care and education for the kids—what a  business model!

Refugee resettlement is not first and foremost about humanitarianism! It is about money! And, that is why you do not see any move toward reform from the Republican leadership in Congress!

Your short tutorial begins here:

Read the Department of State’s ‘New Site Development Guide,’ click here.
The DOS mentions that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees selects most of our refugees.  Here is a flow chart from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement confirming that registration with the UNHCR is a first step.  But, please note that they are messing with the definition of a refugee when they say “war” makes one a refugee.  ‘Persecution’ makes one a refugee so just running from war and crime should not make one a legitimate refugee entitled to permanent resettlement.
The Open Borders Left wants every person on the move for any reason (including climate!) anywhere in the world to be considered a refugee! The Dems in the US want the reliable left-leaning  voters!

 

 
 
Now see some pages from the ‘New Site Guide:‘
These are the Nine Federal Resettlement Contractors (also known as “national volags”—ha! Voluntary Agencies that monopolize the program).
 

 
 
What does your town need to be a resettlement site:
 

Welfare, jobs, affordable housing, and citizen activists (Interfaith groups!) to smooth the way and silence the opposition!

 
By the way, under Obama, the DOS was identifying over 40 new sites.  We sure would like to know if the Trump DOS is still developing those sites!
You can find out if your town or city is already one of the hundreds of sites by clicking here.  If the Trump Administration slows the flow significantly (50,000-60,000 is NOT significant in my view!), then new sites need not be developed!
You can find your state refugee coordinator by clicking here.
My ‘Ten Things Your Town Needs to Know’ is here.

What do you do? The bottomline is this!

Either Trump and Congress rein-in the program (not seeing any serious effort yet) or you must fight at your local level to stop programs like those to expand low-income housing,  demand transparency in the resettlement process, expose corporations and politicians bringing in cheap labor, get a ‘welcoming’ mayor and council members unelected, oppose sanctuary city status, and oppose the work of so-called “interfaith” groups pushing diversity in your town. In other words—community organize!  I know—a tall order!
For new readers, this post is filed in our category ‘Where to find information’ which archives 541 previous posts! Happy reading!