Excerpt:

The degree that Agriprocessors exploited immigrants working in their meatpacking plant in Postville is just sickening. Even worse, is that hardworking people got arrested and the plant’s upper management and owners have yet to be charged with anything.

From Common Dreams…

The list of allegations against the Postville, Iowa, slaughterhouse, recently raided by federal officials for its use of illegal immigrant workers, reads like a story collectively written by Upton Sinclair, Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, is at the center of page after page of sickening accusations. These are contained in an affidavit for a search warrant filed by a federal agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

* Undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico were paid as little as $5 per hour — below minimum wage.
* A supervisor made a side business of selling the workers used vehicles, sometimes threatening them with loss of their job if they didn’t purchase one.
* A supervisor duct-taped the eyes of an employee, who was then hit with a meat hook. The employee declined to report the incident for fear of being fired.

Then there are the safety issues that have dogged the operation. The Des Moines Register reviewed the latest available worker-injury reports. It found that in 2004 there were 120 injuries, such as workers suffering chemical burns and broken ribs. In 2005, there were 103 injuries, which included hearing losses.

Also in 2005 there were three amputations by Agriprocessors machinery. The paper reported on Carlos
Torrez, a father of four, who was working a 60-hour week when a mechanical saw used to cut up chicken parts took off a finger.

For these multiple amputations, the company was fined $7,500 by state regulators.

Safety equipment was another way to extort money from workers. According to the Register, a memo from the company’s vice president included an ”equipment price list.” Workers were charged $30 for pants and $30 for jackets if they wanted to protect themselves from the caustic chemicals they handled.

Women workers were particularly at risk. A Catholic nun reported that females were told that sexual favors were the barter for a promotion or shift change.

Company officials routinely refused to allow safety inspectors on the property without a court order.

Then, on May 12, an immigration raid occurred and more than a third of Agriprocessors’ workforce were detained as suspected illegal aliens. There are now some 270 workers, most from rural Guatemala, in federal prison on charges of using false identity documents.

Federal agents have also arrested two low-level supervisors, including one who is alleged to have charged workers $200 for new documents so they could continue working at the plant.

This is a start, but the arrests need to continue up the chain to the plant’s top managers and owners. These overseers have been running a modern-day plantation or workhouse — or whatever one might call today’s hell-on-earth equivalent.

For more information on the immigration raid in Postville check out Essential Estrogen.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Crooks and Liars keeps tracks of how many times McCain flips flops on the immigration issue…

For those keeping score at home, McCain does not support “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Yes, he does.

No, he doesn’t.

Yes, he does.

No, he doesn’t.

Yes, he does.

No, he doesn’t.

Nearly all of these, by the way, come from the last six months.

Truth be told, in terms of my issue priorities, immigration reform is relatively low. But I know for Republicans, it’s among the most important issues, if not the most important domestic policy issue. And yet, here’s the Republican nominee, running on a platform of consistency, shifting with the wind and changing his position from day to day.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Good for Rep. Bruce Braley for asking how much the immigration raids cost taxpayers. It gives Americans a chance to see the big picture when it comes to immigration instead of just immigrants being hauled away in handcuffs.

Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, has asked officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to estimate the cost of the recent immigration raid at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville.

“It is essential that there is as much transparency in this process as possible,” Braley wrote in a Tuesday letter to ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers.

Immigration authorities raided Agriprocessors on May 12 and detained 389 people. Of those, 306 have been charged, most with some sort of document fraud or identity theft.

Braley, the representative for the congressional district that covers northeast Iowa, wants to know how much the raid’s planning, execution, processing, detention and deportation will cost taxpayers.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Search warrants for the immigration raid that took place on Monday in Postville outline a long list of illegal hiring practices by Agriprocess at their Postville plant. The search warrants have testimony from a former supervisor and a person, who went to the plant undercover, that was looking for employment.

From KCRG…

This anonymous person says the plant’s human resources manager was hiring numerous illegal workers from Mexico, Guatemala and Eastern Europe. This person estimates that 80 percent of the workers under his or her guidance were illegal.

The supervisor also alleges finding a meth lab in the plant, even workers carrying weapons. All of this, not to mention several workers having the same Social Security number.

Those detained Monday morning probably didn’t know that several former and current co-workers were a big part of this search warrant. Read through it, you’ll find one of these workers — listed only as Source #7 — keeps popping up. Immigration agents wired this person with an electronic audio monitoring device as he or she applied for work at the meat processing plant.

Source #7’s audio revealed a human resources employee saying it was okay to work there without a social security number. Others told Source #7 how you could work there without papers completely and just receive cash. A supervisor at the plant even told Source #7 to fix his or her Social Security number to be able to work.

You can read the search warrants here.

• Affidavit for Search Warrant - Part 1
• Affidavit for Search Warrant - Part 2
• Affidavit for Search Warrant - Part 3

This is just another example of our illegal employer problem.

And an update on the immigration raid in Marshalltown in December 2006 at the Swift Meatpacking Plant. There still has been no charges brought against the company for illegally hiring hundreds of undocumented workers.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

My heart sank when I heard about the immigration raids that happened this afternoon in Postville, a small NE Iowa town. More than 300 people have been arrested so far and are being detained at the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, which was leased by Homeland Security at the beginning of the month. Aides to Congressman Bruce Braley (IA-01) have said they’ve been told around 600-700 people are expected to be arrested.

Living in Marshalltown, where immigration raids took place back in December 2006, I have seen the effects of immigration raids firsthand. I feel for the children and families of those detained and the community of Postville.

The raid today in Postville will likely devastate the local economy. Marshalltown has a population 10 times larger than Postville. In the Marshalltown raid, nearly 100 people were arrested, while many more people are expected to arrested in Postville.

The effects in the small community won’t just be financially. The emotional damage from having fathers, mothers, grandpas, grandmas, and cousins being detained miles from home at a site designed to hold cattle will last generations.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

It seems that many illegal immigrants pay too much in taxes…

Illegal immigrants are paying taxes to Uncle Sam, experts agree. Just how much they pay is hard to determine because the federal government doesn’t fully tally it.

But the latest figures available indicate it will amount to billions of dollars in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes this year.

One rough estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes alone at around $9 billion per year.

Paycheck withholding collects much of the federal tax from illegal workers, just as it does for legal workers.

The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t track a worker’s immigration status, yet many illegal immigrants fearful of deportation won’t risk the government attention that will come from filing a return, even if they might qualify for a refund. Economist William Ford of Middle Tennessee State University says there are no firm figures on how many such taxpayers there are.

“The real question is how many of them pay more than they owe. There are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people in that situation,” Ford said.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

A forgotten aspect of NAFTA is its affect on immigration. This story from the NY Times back in 2003 takes a look at this…

The more than $10 billion that American taxpayers give corn farmers every year in agricultural subsidies has helped destroy the livelihoods of millions of small Mexican farmers, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.

Prepared in advance of critical trade talks next month, the report by Oxfam International argues that the subsidies given American corn farmers allow them to sell their grain at prices far below what it costs to produce. That has led to cheap American corn flooding the Mexican market and pushing the poorest Mexican farmers out of business, the report said.

‘’There is a direct link between government agricultural policies in the U.S. and rural misery in Mexico,'’ according to the report entitled, ‘’Dumping Without Borders: How U.S. agricultural policies are destroying the livelihoods of Mexican corn farmers.'’

Mexico, the birthplace of corn, opened its borders to American corn exports after signing the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Within a year, corn imports from the United States doubled and today nearly one-third of the corn used in Mexico is imported from the United States. The United States is the biggest exporter of corn in the world and the biggest exporter of corn to Mexico.

The report said the price of Mexican corn has fallen more than 70 percent since Nafta took effect, severely reducing the incomes of the 15 million Mexicans who depend on corn for their livelihood.

Many of the Mexican families in Marshalltown were farmers in one rural area in Mexico. Farming is no longer a viable option to make a living and they are left without many options except to move their families and they chose to come to the United States.

The United States can do as many raids and build as many border fences as we want, but we will not come up with a solution to the immigration issue unless the problem with dumping corn in Mexico is solved.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

One year ago, the Swift plant in Marshalltown was raided by immigration agents. The events that day and those that followed have sent shock waves throughout Marshalltown, the state, and the country.

The most heart wrenching story that I have heard is of the young baby, who was still nursing, that was left in the care of a local church after the mother was detained.

Unfortunately, the debate on immigration has become an even hotter and more divisive issue, and the chances for a common sense solution that gets to the heart of the issue becomes less likely. The one thing the immigration raids did accomplish was the decline in trust among people on both sides of the debate. If a successful solution is attainable, trust is the one thing you need.

Here are some post that were written shortly after the raids…

Looking at Immigration
The Day After the Immigration Raids
Immigration: Stop the Hate and Let’s Have a Real Discussion
Substantial Identity Theft?
The Reason Behind Immigration
Some Final Thoughts on the Immigration Raids
Our Illegal Employer Problem

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

A new study shows that illegal immigrants don’t cause the problems we see in the health care system.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

The cost of providing healthcare and other government services to illegal immigrants looms large in the national debate over immigration.

In Los Angeles County, much of the focus of that debate has been on hospital emergency rooms. Ten have closed in the last five years, citing losses from treating the uninsured, and those that remain open are notorious for backlogs.

By federal law, hospitals must treat every emergency, regardless of a person’s insurance — or immigration — status. Illegal immigrants, who often work at jobs that don’t offer health insurance, are commonly seen as driving both the closures and the crowding.

But the study found that while illegal immigrants are indeed less likely to be insured, they are also less likely to visit a doctor, clinic or emergency room.

“The current policy discourse that undocumented immigrants are a burden on the public because they overuse public resources is not borne out with data, for either primary care or emergency department care,” said Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “In fact, they seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Mike Huckabee was asked to respond to other candidates saying he was soft on immigration.

“We penalize law-breakers. We don’t penalize their children for something they can’t help.

“If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he’s on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn’t have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school — and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you’ve got to educate a child if he’s of child age — what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can’t come in the schoolhouse door’?

“No, you don’t do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don’t then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That’s not what this country does. We’re a better country than that.”

I absolutely agree with Huckabee on this. You can micromanage immigration and pass laws restricting what immigrants do, but if you don’t solve the problem you will always have a problem. Let’s focus on solving the problem of immigration instead of trying to criminalize everything immigrants do.

Unlike Huckabee, I believe you fix the problem, not at the border, but with employers. As Obama at the debate in Las Vegas said, “they’re not coming here to go to the In-N-Out Burger.” They come here for work and we solve the problem if we crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers.

Related Posts: