How Immigration Changed The Meatpacking Industry

In the 1980s the meatpacking industry mechanized production, boosting output and slashing wages. Meat processors already faced a labor shortage as the U.S. rural population shrank and fewer Americans wanted the repetitive, dangerous jobs, the industry says. Packers turned to Mexico and the rest of Latin America for workers.

"It's like they've got a sign on the border, 'Come to Marshalltown,' " said Mike Foreman, 66, who worked at the meatpacking plant until 2000, when a back injury forced him to retire.

"The company paid them less than they paid us," he said last week at the city's senior citizens center. "The way I look at it, they're taking food out of our mouths."

Some of those who came were in the country illegally. The first recruits piling into Marshalltown were single men, mostly from Mexico. Eventually they followed a common immigrant pattern, settling down and encouraging people from back home to follow them. They got married, raised families, and some built the town's 40 Latino-related small businesses.

You can read the rest @
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160131_Iowa_town_embodies_immigrant_divide.html

A while back I read the book Methland by Nick Reding which documents the drug culture of Oelwein, Iowa and how it ties into larger issues of rural flight and small town economic decline.

Mr. Reding's father was a top executive in a major agribusiness company. He claimed that US corporations indeed were advertising in Mexico for workers willing to come to the US, legally or illegally, to work in their meatpacking plants. If you read Methland, you may get the impression that US corporations literally created our immigration crisis, for the express purpose of busting unions and shedding their well paid US workforce.

Get it through your head - corporations hate We The People.

Corporations allegedly are created in the public interest, but they have changed into something which preys on the public. They have minds and legally created "bodies", but they certainly have no hearts or souls.

Corporations created TPP, TTIP, TISA, and the other "trade deals" which will destroy our nation state. Much worse is yet to come. Thank you, Hillary. Thank you, Obama ad-Dajjal.