African Americans take back work that illegal immigrants have taken from them. Throughout raids on seven food processing plants in Mississippi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swept up 680 illegal immigrants in August. The companies were forced to employ Americans to do the job without the cheap labor.
(The Failing New York Times explains)
By the end of the 1960s, black workers predominated on the lines.
It was an important win for African-Americans looking for an alternative to housework in wealthy white homes, or for those who had seen fieldwork dry up in an increasingly mechanized agricultural sector.
“The chicken plant,” Dr. Stuesse [an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina] quoted a civil rights veteran saying, “replaced the cotton field.”
But as American chicken consumption boomed in the 1980s, manufacturers went in search of “cheaper and more exploitable workers,” Dr. Stuesse wrote, chiefly Latin American immigrants.
At the time, the Koch plant in Morton was owned by a local company, B.C. Rogers Poultry, which organized efforts to recruit Hispanics from the Texas border as early as 1977. Soon, the company was operating a sizable effort it called “The Hispanic Project,” bringing in thousands of workers and housing them in trailers.
And we were told Americans just wouldn’t do the jobs illegal aliens are doing. 243 of the 680 illegal immigrants rounded up in August were working at the Koch Food processing facility in Morton, Mississippi. That’s a lot of jobs for a small town with a population around 3,600 people.