Planet Money - The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Last year, Tyson Foods shuttered a meat processing plant in Perry, Iowa. The company said it made the decision because the plant was old and inefficient. But the closure was devastating for the residents of Perry. The plant had employed some 1200 workers in a town with a population of only 8000.At the same time, Tyson was also busy hiring workers elsewhere. It was working with a non-profit group that helps connect companies with asylum seekers and refugees looking for work. Tyson ultimately hired hundreds of new workers through this partnership.Was this just a coincidence? Or were these two stories actually one story - a story about one of the country's biggest meat processors forcing out American workers and replacing them with migrants? On today's show we take a look at the controversy surrounding Tyson's hiring moves and how things look from the perspective of the workers themselves.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Donald Trump is back in the White House and making a lot of moves very quickly. Keep track of everything going on in Washington with the NPR Politics Podcast. Every day we break down the latest news and explain why it matters to you. The NPR Politics Podcast. Listen every day. This is Planet Money from NPR. So, do you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, I'm Simone Foxman. I'm an equality reporter for Bloomberg News.

So like, what does that mean? What are you covering? All the like, completely uncontroversial topics. So, inequality with respect to race, gender, religion, immigration at times. So last March, Simone Foxman published an article on that last topic, immigration. And that story ended up exploding for a pretty unusual reason. She started working on the story in February. It was about Tyson Foods, the enormous company that makes chicken nuggets and ground beef

and pork chops. They were in New York City to hire some of the migrants who had come to the US in the last few years. What kind of job was Tyson hiring for? Really low-skilled jobs. And that's the vast majority of Tyson's workforce. Tyson employs about 120,000 people. Of them, about 100,000 are in these very low-skilled jobs.

Jobs like washing meat, placing the cuts in trays, all of those things. You don't need a ton of expertise in order to do them, but you need a lot of people. And they really struggled to keep workers in a lot of these jobs. These have an extraordinarily high turnover rate of about 40%. So from Tyson's perspective, they're constantly trying to fill these jobs. The CEO of Tyson said that it had been even harder over the past few years with such a tight labor market. Unemployment has been historically low, sitting right around 4%.

Now, this was all taking place at this moment when New York was receiving a huge influx of migrants. About 175,000 people had arrived. A lot of them were looking for work. So to fill some of their open jobs, Tyson was working with a nonprofit called Tent Partnership for Refugees. They're like a matchmaker between large companies and recent immigrants and refugees. We first heard about this program from both Tyson and Tent, and they were very excited

to hire refugees, asylum seekers. Tyson put out a press release that said, quote, we are proud to play our part in promoting a society that is welcoming and supportive of people from all backgrounds. So in February of last year, Simone goes to an office in Lower Manhattan. She's there to report on this meeting between a group of migrants from Mexico and Colombia and Venezuela

and representatives from Tyson, the meat company. It was morning. It was extremely cold. But I will say, you know, it didn't look like anything super special. Right, right. If you were, if you'd walked by the building, you would have no clue what was going on there that day. Absolutely. Yeah. Inside there were translators and interviewers, some people from Tyson. The potential employees were asked questions, given applications to fill in. Absolutely, yeah. Inside, there were translators and interviewers, some people from Tyson.

The potential employees were asked questions, given applications to fill in, and then, on the spot, they were offered jobs at a chicken plant in Humboldt, Tennessee. You know, I think there were 17 people hired, and ultimately the event sort of continued for the following couple of days, and that included 70 more people the next week. Tysen did a few rounds of hiring in New York. Their stated goal was that they would hire 2,500 asylum seekers and refugees this way, some of whom would be added to the workforce at their plant in Tennessee, which was already a mix of American-born workers and recent immigrants.

Simone, she watches all of this happen, does some more reporting, and then along with a colleague, she writes up a pretty standard article. The headline reads, Tyson is hiring New York immigrants for jobs no one else wants. This is where things start to go a little sideways because unbeknownst to Simone, another reporter, this one at the Wall Street Journal, was also working on an article about Tyson. So, I can only speak to what's factual here. Our story was published. At the same time, there was another story published completely unrelated to the story. That Wall Street Journal article was not about adding workers, but about subtracting them. Tyson was closing a plant in Perry, Iowa, and laying off almost all of the roughly 1200 workers. Now, if you look at these two articles side by side, you might wonder, was this just a coincidence?

Or were these two stories actually one story? A story about one of the country's biggest meat processors forcing out American workers and replacing them with migrant workers. Hello, I'm Amanda Oranjic. Hello, I'm Amanda Oranjic. And I'm Carlos Garcia. The country is in the middle of a reckoning over immigration.

In particular, about the millions of people who came across the southern border in the past few years. This has been the largest influx of immigrants this country has ever seen, and it's raised questions about the impact of immigrant workers on American jobs. Today on the show we tell you the story of a controversy about these two Tyson plants, one staffing up with recent immigrants, the other shuttering and laying off hundreds of workers. And how that controversy looks to the people most affected by it. Workers at the two plants.

Are we overlooking the challenges facing men without college degrees? Richard Reeves thinks so. There are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads. Reeves heads the American Institute for Boys and Men. Have we updated our view about the role of men as quickly as we've changed the economy around them? And the answer is no. That's from a recent Planet Money bonus episode, a look at the economic and cultural struggles

of working class men. To hear it and get sponsor free listening, sign up for NPR Plus. Just go to plus.npr.org. James Baldwin was an activist, an orator, a style icon. But on NPR's Book of the Day, we'll dissect the thing he was most known for, his writing. That last clause kind of reads like a horror story, right? There's something deeply, deeply ominous about the way that that opening paragraph closes. Celebrate Black History Month with us as we examine some of his best works on NPR's Book of the Day podcast. In March 2024, a couple of days after these two articles ran, one in Bloomberg, one in The Wall Street Journal, there was a segment on Fox News Channel about them that drew parallels between the two stories

about the Tyson plants. Perry, Iowa is about to change drastically and not for the better. This is a clip of Jesse Waters from Fox. This week, Tyson Foods announced that it will be permanently closing its pork factory in Perry, killing around 1200 jobs in a town of just 8,000 people. In Perry, Iowa, the company was laying people off. At the same time, in New York City, Tyson was busy hiring. Tyson Foods has its eyes on a different class of workers.

The company is now offering new jobs to asylum seekers. The show then turns to an interview with then Ohio Senator and now Vice President, J.D. Vance, who says that what Tyson is doing with these two factories is just one example of what he sees as a much larger problem. Every time an American is replaced with an illegal immigrant, it means that an American family loses a good family supporting wage. It means that American companies are literally replacing our own citizens with people who work for slave wages. That is not capitalism or a market

economy, Jesse. That is the decimation of the American middle class via illegal immigration and it's happening all over the country. This take went viral on social media. There was talk of a boycott of Tyson, a conservative investment firm divested from the company. And an advocacy group set up by Stephen Miller, the Trump campaign's main advisor on immigration, filed a number of complaints. We reached out to Tyson to ask them about this controversy and they did not agree to an interview. But one of the things that they insisted on was that they only hire immigrants who have work permits and who can legally work in the U.S.

While Tyson didn't want to talk about hiring refugees and asylum seekers in New York, one of their new workers was willing to speak with us. So a few months ago, we visited that worker and his wife at their apartment in Tennessee. Hola, Carlos. Amanda. We brought some pastries and we started to talk to him about how he ended up here. We are calling him Kamikaro, which is a family name. He asked that we do not use his first name because he didn't want to risk losing his job by talking about all of this with reporters.

Kamikaro, he's got this kind of hip haircut, and he's wearing a black I Heart NYC hoodie. We clearly woke them up. And he seemed a little tired at first. We are sitting together in an apartment that he shares with his wife and a couple other family members. There's not much here yet. A small table, a few chairs, big TV, some video games. Kamakaro told us he's from a pretty big city in Venezuela

and that he was in New York for a few months. When he was hired to work in Tennessee, he didn't really know what to expect. He pictured fields. Campos. Campos. Campos, graneros, vacas. Fields, fields, barns, cows, war fields, that kind of thing.

But no, this is a small town. Topica, yeah. He pictured something more like Topica. Topica. He said he'd never been to Topeka, but he'd love to go. Said he studied the U.S. before coming here and read that Topeka was highly recommended. Sure. Now, when Kamakaro was living in Venezuela, back in the day, he worked for the Hugo Chavez

government. And there was a lot of animosity between Venezuela and the U.S. back then. So when we asked if he ever expected to live and work in the U.S., he was like, no way. But that is what happened. Over the past decade, Venezuela has had a mostly tanking economy, gone through a bunch of political upheaval. Kamakaro says he started to fear for his life, got to a point where he decided he needed to get out.

To get to the U.S., he made the trek through the Darien Gap, the notoriously dangerous 60 miles of rainforest between Colombia and Panama. He then got stuck in Mexico for a couple of months. Kamikaro finally crossed the border to the U.S. in October 2023. He applied for asylum and was given a work permit while he waits for his case to be heard. Now, you may remember around this time that the governor of Texas was offering free bus rides out of Texas to cities all around the country, basically saying, migrants, you're welcome to take a bus out of here.

Kamikaro, he obviously took a ride to New York, and when he arrived, he got a bed in one of the giant tents the city had set up for migrants. He ended up moving around a few times, going from shelter to shelter. He'd spend some of his time going to churches and soup kitchens, and he was given a lot of donations of clothing. We had a lot of clothes.

They had too many clothes, so they would sell what they didn't need. And with that money, he would buy food. He says he was doing what he could to get by. That is, of course, until he heard about the job with Tyson. How did you know about Tyson's work? Through a travel companion who came with Tyson. He heard about it from a friend, went to an office building in Manhattan. He says there was an application, drug test. They checked his work permit. And that day, Kamakaro was one of the people who got a job offer to move to Tennessee to cut up chickens. He'd be paid $16.50 an hour, which is the standard starting rate at that plant.

And it is also more than twice the minimum wage in Tennessee. Plus, he was being given a $4,000 signing bonus. Tyson would also pay for his move and put him up in a motel for two months. He told his wife, I just signed. Come on, let's go, no turning back. They hadn't really put down roots in New York. It was easy for them to pick up and move. They got on the long bus ride from New York to Tennessee. Any of that fun? I mean, I imagine that it wasn't fun, like that trip. No, for her, yes. For me, no.

She liked it. I didn't like it. His wife, she got the window seat on the bus. She got to see Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon, famous for them from many an American action film. They get to Tennessee and are staying in the motel that Tyson set them up with. Finally, Kamikaro has his first day at work. His first day was cold. He didn't know to bundle up. He was just in a t-shirt and thought he might die of the cold.

And the work he ended up doing there was so repetitive. He makes this gesture of hanging up live chickens by their feet, attaching them to what is called a shackle conveyor, over and over and over again. That is the sound of his knuckles cracking. He says the pain goes to your elbows, your shoulders, your hands, that it got to a point where his hands hurt all the time.

Kamakaro had been worried that some of his American co-workers might be anti-immigrant, but he says it has been the opposite. He's made some friends at work despite the language barriers. People even try to speak Spanish with them. But yes, we communicate. Although they have learned from us, they don't learn good things. They learn pure nonsense. Sure, they appear to only have learned swear words, but still. After a few months, Cavacaro felt like he was settled in.

He says it was a wildly good situation for him, especially given that less than a year earlier he was living in a tent shelter in New York with thousands of others. He considers this a blessing. He says, think of all the migrants in New York right now. A lot of them don't have jobs. He says he's one of the privileged ones. He got a job. Now to be clear, this job is really dangerous. Aside from the repetitive work, there are lots of dangerous chemicals being used. There's machinery everywhere. Over the past decade, hundreds of workers have been injured on the job at Tyson plants around the country. And there have been a number of deaths as well. Now we heard this and we were like,

what kind of protections do workers have at the plant? Has anyone mentioned a union like organizing at work or anything like this? No, nobody's mentioned like any unions. No one has mentioned anything like that. If there were unions, he wouldn't want to be a part of it. Yeah, it's like it's better to just work and not have problems with anybody. Not have problems with anybody. Because his situation is too precarious.

Kamikaro, he is coming from a totally different economic reality than his American coworkers. And he's not just supporting himself and his wife, he's also sending money back to Venezuela for his kids, his mother and sister. So he says he isn't going to complain about anything to his bosses. He's not going to join a union and he's not going to quit. The benefits of this job outweigh the negatives, the pain in his hands and the danger. For him, this is reliable, well-paid work. Which might help explain why Tyson went to such great lengths to hire someone like Kamikaro. But was Tyson privileging immigrant workers over American workers? We will try to answer

that after the break. And get the inside story from someone who worked at the Shuttered Plant in Perry. When she teaches her students how to write a song, musician Scarlett Keys says they need to ask themselves certain questions. What is the thing that keeps you up at night? What's the thing you can't stop thinking about? As songwriters, we are repurposing human tropes and a new viewpoint with new words, with new music. The people and technology behind the soundtracks

of our lives. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately. 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been A Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast on NPR. Here on Shortwave, we believe that science is for everyone and that every question it. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast on NPR.

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1997. Okay, and what, like tell me a little bit about it. Was it like a good job to get? Were you excited? I don't know if I was excited. I had three kids that I needed to take care of and I heard they paid better than most places in town. Jody's first job at the plant was doing membrane skinning, which was basically using a machine to slice the fat and shiny part off of the meat.

Pretty quickly after getting there, she decided to join the union. I figured I needed some help because I've always been mouthy. Jodi thought maybe a union would help protect her from getting fired when she talked back or swore. I really do want to know what your favorite curses are, but you don't have to tell me. The F word I love it. That's one that got me in trouble all the time. Anyway about halfway through her time working at the plant she went from being a full-time line worker to a full-time union employee. Her salary was paid for by the union. But even though she held this role she didn't have any warning when they announced

that the plant was closing last year. She says everyone was called down to the cafeteria, and at first it just seemed like they were going to have a big meeting. Well, when we first got there, we were all laughing and joking and, you know, we're like family there. So then the managers passed around a stack of papers announcing the closing. And then when they handed that out out you could see people tear up and Get mad and they're asking what do we do now? It was just like everybody was so sad and upset

How were you? No, to be honest, I was pissed That's only nice this way I could put it Because I didn't feel like they needed a close down our plan To be honest, I was pissed. That's the only nice way I could put it. Because I didn't feel like they needed to close down our plant. Jody says the layoffs were brutal. So many people worked at this plant. It was the town's biggest employer.

They didn't know where they were going to go to find jobs. At the time of the closing, Tyson said this plant was built back in the early 1960s. It's old and inefficient. They just didn't need to keep it open any longer. Oh, the last day was just so heartbreaking. I stayed till the last person walked out of the plant. It was just a lot of tears. People want to keep their IDs for souvenirs.

You know, all these people, they liked working there. A lot of them had been there for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. In a tiny town like Perry, Iowa, the biggest employer closing its plant has had a lot of impact. The town has seen a big jump in unemployment claims. Several businesses have shut down while others are struggling. Plus, there has been a hit to local tax revenues. Because Jody worked for the union, she helped negotiate a plant closing agreement—basically

severance for the workers. They got $1,700 plus vacations and holidays paid out. Now the controversy over this made it sound like Tyson was giving opportunities to migrant workers while laying off American workers in Perry. That it was a kind of swap, and that the Perry workers didn't get the same opportunity to go work in Tennessee. So we wanted to know was that true? Did Tyson offer to pay people to move elsewhere, relocate to work at a different plant? Yes to Waterloo and Tennessee. Oh they did offer to let them move to Tennessee.

Correct. I don't recall the number, but it wasn't everybody. It was just a certain amount. Tyson disputes this. They say anyone who worked at that plant could get a job at a different location. But either way, at least some of the Perry workers could have moved to work at the plant in Tennessee. But Jody says most people didn't want to go. They told her that the pay was going to be worse. And a lot of the people who worked at the plant have kids in school. They're settled. They like Perry.

They don't want to pick up and move hours and hours away. I mean, it's a great town. Friendly people. I think it's a nice little town. Tyson told a reporter that 200 of the roughly 1200 people laid off relocated to take jobs at other Tyson facilities. And this might be another thing that made the migrant workers attractive to Tyson.

They hadn't put down super deep roots, so they were willing to up and move to Tennessee, to a plant where they needed workers. There was another implication of this controversy that we wanted to ask Jody about. I think one of the things about the two stories coming together is that the impression one is given of the plant in Perry is that it's like just a bunch of American workers and it's not a diverse place. Whereas this new plant in Tennessee is recruiting all these people who aren't Americans, you know, they're asylum seekers or migrants.

Oh, no, we had, let's see, we had Hispanics from all over, Africans. At one time we had Bosnians, we had Burmese, I think it's Salvadorian, you know, people from all over. Perry, Iowa also has a lot of recent immigrants living there, people who moved to Perry to work at the plant. Jody says when they would make printouts about the union, they had to use interpreters. They'd print everything out in a dozen languages. The reality is that a lot of the people taking low paying jobs in this country are somewhere in the space between being immigrants

and becoming Americans. Some people are not legally authorized to work in the U.S. Some people have temporary work permits. Some have green cards and are on a path to citizenship. And some are immigrants who have recently become American citizens. Tyson, for their part, has never made a secret of the fact that they hire from this range of people. They say that 35% of their workforce are immigrants. There was this third implication of the controversy that we wanted to get Jody's take on. And that was the idea that the workers in Perry should resent the newly hired workers in Tennessee. How did you feel about Tyson hiring people who aren't American citizens?

They're here to support their family. How can I be mad at somebody if they're here to better their lives? I wouldn't want somebody preventing me from taking care of my kids. When Fox News ran that segment about her plant, she said she didn't see it. But people sent her links to the video, they came up to her in stores to talk to her about it. It was hard to avoid. I know people are upset that they think that immigrants are taking people's jobs. But if you want to work at a Tyson, apply.

Jodi lost her job when the Tyson plant closed. But she got another job with her union representing a different group of workers about an hour away from Perry. A few months after we went to Tennessee to speak with Kamikaro, the man from Venezuela who is working at the Tyson plant, we decided to check back in with him. Good afternoon. How are you? Good.

Kamikaro says things at the plant got kind of chaotic for him. For a while there his friends had been telling him, we're worried about what will happen when President Trump takes office. Who knows? Maybe they'd lose their work permits or they'd be deported or maybe Tyson would lay them off. Then in January, one of those worries came true for Kamikaro. Tyson told him that his contract was suspended. He did not have a job there anymore.

He says they didn't give me an explanation. They said, we'll call you. You can apply again in six months. They just told me what they told me. After Kamakaro was laid off by Tyson, he got two jobs to make ends meet. Now we don't know if Kamakaro losing his job had anything to do with Trump's presidency. It might've just been that they didn't need as many workers right then. Yeah, Tyson is one of the largest meat packing companies in the country. They have over 220 facilities and they are constantly opening and closing plants. Over the last decade, Tyson opened or expanded 17

facilities. A bacon plant, a distribution center, an incubation center, but they also closed 18 of their large facilities. Churning through workers, hiring groups of workers in one place, laying off another group of workers somewhere else, seems to be baked into how the company does business. We asked Tyson why exactly they laid off Kamikaro, but they wouldn't say. Today's episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler with help from Emma Peasley and was edited by Keith Roemer with help from Jess Jang. It was engineered by Sina LeFredeaux and fact-checked by Ciara Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Thanks to Just Capital for their help with research and

to Alice Driver, Ricardo Pitzwiley, Stacey Preston, Rachel Wacker, and all of the people we spoke with while we were in Tennessee. I'm Carlos Garcia. And I'm Amanda Oranchik. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. I'm Carlos Garcia. And I'm Amanda Oranchik. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Bella DiPaolo is glad if you're happily married, but she is perfectly happy being single. I would love to have someone who took care of my car or someone who cleaned up the dishes after dinner, but then I'd want them to leave.

From yourself to your dog to your spouse are significant others. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Technologist Paul Garcia is using AI to create photos of people's most precious memories. How her mother was dressed, the haircut that she remembered. We generated tens of images and then she saw two images that was like, that was it. Ideas about the future of memory.

That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. What's good y'all? This is Gene Dembe. I'm one of the co-hosts of NPR's Code Switch. This month we got a special three-part series for you. We're diving into America's favorite sport. This month we got a special three-part series for you. We're diving into America's favorite sport, that's football of course. From peewees to the pros, we're exploring what the game tells us about race, labor, and power in the United States.