For more than a decade, Glenn Valley [reported] new sales records
for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest.
But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent.
Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was
in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had
stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at
a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
As an American, this does nothing to improve my life. Not even if we massively expand federal human-trafficking and strip every possible corporation of their workforce.
rayiner · 51m ago
Yes it does. The point of immigration law is to limit the total number of foreign people coming into the country, to maintain it within the nation's capacity for americanizing immigrants and the economy's capacity to employ them. If you want to have immigration, it should be low enough so you're turning Indians or Guatemalans into Americans faster than they're turning America into India or Guatemala.[1]
Ultimately, the fairest thing to do is to actually enforce the immigration laws by targeting companies that hire illegal-alien labor. That will reduce the incentive of people to immigrate illegally, and reduce the need for future deportations.
[1] https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth.").
hellisothers · 15m ago
I grew up in the Midwest and moved to the west coast for college, my opinions on all the things you listed differ wildly from a lot of my family. Is that good or bad? Are they more or less American than I am? What even would it mean to “fully assimilate”, why is that a goal?
WarOnPrivacy · 36m ago
> Yes it does. [paragraphs of stuff that don't reflect a need to raid factories in order to seize legal workers]
No. It does not. Raiding factories of legal workers does not improve my life.
Creating a state of persistent fear for legal residents - this also does not improve my life. It does however degrade the lives of legal residents and citizens I know and care about.
rayiner · 35m ago
> Raiding factories of legal workers does not improve my life.
They're illegal workers who broke the law not only by immigrating illegally, but by using stolen identification to get past the federal employment verification system:
"In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications."
And if the article is correct in suggesting that illegal workers are getting past the eVerify system, that suggests that identity theft and identity fraud is a much bigger part of the issue than anyone realized previously.
WarOnPrivacy · 33s ago
> They're illegal workers who broke the law not only by immigrating illegally, but by using stolen identification to get past the federal employment verification system.
So some boundaries to establish perspective. Since the mandate of seizing and exporting 3000 people/day, we've had a series of disingenuous and patently false statements from the relevant USG agencies. Further, the acts committed in this pursuit have exhibited extreme bad will by this administration and commonly disregard constitutional boundaries.
If this isn't a baseline you accept as factual and useful to the discussion, there's little point in continuing beyond this point. If you do not see these violations as harmful to the integrity to rule of law and to the trustworthiness of US Gov's authority, there is little point in continuing this conversation. If you feel current US Gov justifications are trustworthy by default, we are likely at an irreconcilable point.
That said, we know US Gov's verification system validated these workers. US Gov justifies seizing these workers based on fraudulent identities - after saying they are valid. The trustworthiness of the latter claim isn't well established given the agencies' recent history.
Given it's most recently earned reputation, it is especially likely that the claims of false identity are at least partially false and probably trend higher. If you do not see this as a reasonable supposition, I believe we are done here.
carlosjobim · 54m ago
The human traffickers are those who use foreigners as cheaper labor. Not figuratively, but literally. These companies deserve just as much sympathy as the plantation owners of the past, or the farmers using orphans for serfs in the recent past.
WarOnPrivacy · 46m ago
> The human traffickers are those who use foreigners as cheaper labor. Not figuratively, but literally.
The challenge is that non-consensual seizing, harboring, transfer and receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, and then intentionally exporting them to locations that pointlessly increase the harm being done - this is objectively worse than what you describe.
However we don't have a term that properly reflects the horror of US Gov's trafficking. Until then, we are using what we have.
No comments yet
antonymoose · 57m ago
Hire legal American workers at a prevailing wage?
JohnTHaller · 16m ago
If you read the article, you'll see they verified all employees through the US government's E-Verify system as recommended and paid $20/hr.
WarOnPrivacy · 52m ago
> Hire legal American workers at a prevailing wage?
This company hired legal workers and they were trafficked away.
If these are the wrong legal workers, who are the correct legal workers? Who are the ones that should to not be seized and trafficked?
itsdrewmiller · 12m ago
If you read the article it is pretty clear that they hired a lot of people who lied about their identities and were not in fact legal workers.
Ultimately, the fairest thing to do is to actually enforce the immigration laws by targeting companies that hire illegal-alien labor. That will reduce the incentive of people to immigrate illegally, and reduce the need for future deportations.
[1] https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth.").
No. It does not. Raiding factories of legal workers does not improve my life.
Creating a state of persistent fear for legal residents - this also does not improve my life. It does however degrade the lives of legal residents and citizens I know and care about.
They're illegal workers who broke the law not only by immigrating illegally, but by using stolen identification to get past the federal employment verification system:
"In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications."
And if the article is correct in suggesting that illegal workers are getting past the eVerify system, that suggests that identity theft and identity fraud is a much bigger part of the issue than anyone realized previously.
So some boundaries to establish perspective. Since the mandate of seizing and exporting 3000 people/day, we've had a series of disingenuous and patently false statements from the relevant USG agencies. Further, the acts committed in this pursuit have exhibited extreme bad will by this administration and commonly disregard constitutional boundaries.
If this isn't a baseline you accept as factual and useful to the discussion, there's little point in continuing beyond this point. If you do not see these violations as harmful to the integrity to rule of law and to the trustworthiness of US Gov's authority, there is little point in continuing this conversation. If you feel current US Gov justifications are trustworthy by default, we are likely at an irreconcilable point.
That said, we know US Gov's verification system validated these workers. US Gov justifies seizing these workers based on fraudulent identities - after saying they are valid. The trustworthiness of the latter claim isn't well established given the agencies' recent history.
Given it's most recently earned reputation, it is especially likely that the claims of false identity are at least partially false and probably trend higher. If you do not see this as a reasonable supposition, I believe we are done here.
The challenge is that non-consensual seizing, harboring, transfer and receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, and then intentionally exporting them to locations that pointlessly increase the harm being done - this is objectively worse than what you describe.
However we don't have a term that properly reflects the horror of US Gov's trafficking. Until then, we are using what we have.
No comments yet
This company hired legal workers and they were trafficked away.
If these are the wrong legal workers, who are the correct legal workers? Who are the ones that should to not be seized and trafficked?