Illegal immigration has been in the news lately as states pass stricter laws to police undocumented immigrants. In Georgia, the law requires that employers verify the legal status of their employees, using E-Verify. In Arizona, immigrants must carry their alien registration papers at all times, and anyone whom law enforcement suspects is in this country illegally can be stopped, questioned, and asked to show such papers. (One can imagine how this part of the illegal-immigrant laws can cause all kinds of problems: racial profiling, harassing people who can't produce papers because they are American citizens with, perhaps, only a driver's license on them when stopped, etc.) As these laws get passed in more and more states, the public's attitude toward those who work in our fields, our houses, and our meat-processing plants become more intolerant, too. Or maybe, the intolerance came first, and then the laws. But the two go hand-in-hand.
Illegal immigration is a difficult problem, but every time the federal government tries to reform immigration, voices speak up loudly to prevent any kind of amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been living within our borders, working hard, paying taxes on the goods they buy, and raising children in better circumstances than those they left behind.
A few articles that I have read recently have illustrated to me how our country depends upon the work of those who are here illegally and thus have influenced me to believe that we need laws that allow those who are working illegally to work legally. Employers take advantage of people who are scared that they will be deported or arrested and jailed. And those who say that illegal workers are taking away jobs that unemployed Americans could have in this terrible economy need to look at the kinds of jobs that illegal immigrants are doing--jobs that require little or no education. Does anyone really think that a recently layed-off manager of a retail store or a fifty-year-old tax accountant is going to take a job digging out pig brains?
An article in Mother Jones--"The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret," by Ted Genoways--describes how foreign workers, many of them undocumented, toil away in meat-processing factories, juicing pig brains for a thickener used in stir fry. Austin, Minnesota, is very proud of Hormel's location in their city of 24,718 residents. Novelist Tim O'Brien was born there. The contracting company that does the meat-processing for Hormel, Quality Pork Processors, Inc. (whose web site is also in Spanish) is also located in Austin, within the 15-foot privacy wall of the Hormel compound. Within those walls, people kill pigs, cut up pigs, turn pig head meat into sausage, and juice pig brains for that thickener which is exported to Asia. "More than 19,000 hogs" can be processed in a single day.
The work is not easy, and the effects can be life-threatening:
Since 1989, the line speed at QPP had been steadily increasing—from 750 heads per hour when the plant opened to 1,350 per hour in 2006, though the workforce barely increased. To speed production, the company installed a conveyor system and humming automatic knives throughout the plant, reducing skilled tasks to single motions. Workers say nearly everyone suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome or some repetitive stress injury, but by October 2007, there were signs of something else. Workers from QPP's kill floor were coming to Carole Bower, the plant's occupational health nurse, with increasingly familiar complaints: numbness and tingling in their extremities, chronic fatigue, searing skin pain. Bower started noticing workers so tender that they struggled with the stairs to the top-floor locker rooms, high above the roar of the factory line.
Workers at the "head" line, that is, those who dig the meat out of the pigs' heads and pull out the spinal cords, and juice the brains into a frothy mix that looks, according to some, like strawberry milkshake or Pepto Bismol, began exhibiting neurological damage. The article describes the terrible effects of that damage on some of the workers. Interestingly, Customs and Immigration started investigating the documentation of those workers who were ill, illustrating, once again, how we take advantage of undocumented workers. We want them to work in our factories, do the dirty work many Americans won't do (and work for which companies want to pay as little as possible), yet we don't want to pay when those workers are hurt in the process. The CEO of QPP negotiated settlements with "up to a dozen of employees who had filed workers' comp claims": "After attorneys' fees, each received $12,500, a half-year's pay." One man who had been permanently injured received $38, 600.
Two other articles about food production in this country also reminded me of how much we depend upon immigrants. This first one is actually a post by Mark Bittman, on his New York Times blog, about Immokalee, Florida, "the source of almost all the winter tomatoes grown in the United States": "Immokalee, America's Tomato Capital," posted 12 May 2011. The second is a follow-up post written by Jennifer Mascia: "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida", posted 15 June 2011. Bittman's post is a description of his tour of the town where:
tomato workers have gone from enduring slavery, beatings, wage theft (and sub-minimum wage pay) and 12-hour days in the blazing heat with no shade, to a victory that, that, while not quite complete, is possibly the most successful labor action in the United States in 20 years...In her post, Mascia provides more details of the town and the workers who make sure that tomatoes are available in the produce section of grocery stores. She describes the work that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has done to prevent slavery and to raise wages and living standards of the people who toil in the fields. Big chain stores fight to get lower prices to pass on to consumers--and the people who suffer are the workers in the field. For after paying for automotive machinery and diesel, where else do farmers have to turn to cut back on costs? Wages.
The production of tomatoes in Immokalee also can be an ecological disaster, as the soil is not rich enough in nutrients to grow crops: "Because of this, the land is bombarded with fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides" (Mascia, "Everything You ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida"). Also, the tomatoes are picked green and then gassed with ethylene to "ripen" them. Vine-ripened tomatoes, that is, tomatoes too ripe to be gathered and transported, are left on the vines to rot and are ploughed under with the plants after picking, which is done by hand.
Mark Bittman also has a post titled "The True Cost of Tomatoes" (posted 14 June 2011) with more information about the lives of tomato pickers, and Barry Estabrook has written a book detailing the production of tomatoes in Florida and the people who work to get them to the supermarket, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit. Here's an excerpt from his book: "Slavery in the Tomato Fields," published 8 June 2011, in The Atlantic. One can listen to an interview with Estabrook here: "The Tasteless Modern Tomato", posted by Justin Megahan, 21 June 2011, on the website of Creative Loafing, Tampa.
These articles remind me not only to care about the people who put the food on my table but also to be more aware of the food choices that I make. We owe a lot to immigrants in this country. Grappling the problem of illegal immigration requires some humility and mercy, along with justice.
[The photo at the top of the post is one of our own tomatoes, gathered from our first garden since moving in March to south Louisiana.]
Additional comment: Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama says he's willing to do anything short of shooting illegal immigrants to get rid of them. He says that:
they have no right to be here. They are clogging up our emergency rooms, and making our education system more expensive. If you go to the Madison County Jail, there are far too many illegal aliens there because they have victimized Americans...[He adds that they] need to quit taking jobs from American citizens.Maybe he will take their places in the tomato fields of Florida or the pig-brain-sucking head table of Hormel in Austin, Minnesota: "Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks Makes Strong Comments on Illegal Immigration Law," WHNT-19 News, Huntsville, Alabama, 29 June 2011.
More about the meat industry here:
Tom Philpott, "How the Meat Industry Turned Abuse into a Business Model," Mother Jones, 29 June 2011.
And on how House Republicans' refusal to fully fund the Department of Agriculture's appropriations bill for next year will hurt small farmers: Monica Potts, "GOP's Tiny Cuts Wound Small Farmers," Grist 23 June 2011.
See also: Monica Potts' "The Serfs of Arkansas," American Prospect, 9 March 2011.
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