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
Chapter 1: What controversy surrounds Tyson Foods' hiring practices?
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 U.S. 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 the 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 struggle to keep workers in a lot of these jobs.
These have an extraordinarily high turnover rate of about 40 percent. 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%.
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Chapter 2: How did Tyson Foods start hiring 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 will 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. We brought some pastries and we started to talk to him about how he ended up here. We are calling him Kamakaro, 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.
Kamakaro, 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.
It's not easy. It's not recommended for anyone.
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Chapter 3: What jobs does Tyson Foods offer to asylum seekers?
Could you imagine that one day you would end up in the U.S.? No.
Not even in my mind. That would happen to me.
But that is what happened. Over the past decade, Venezuela has had a mostly tanking economy, gone through a bunch of political upheaval. Camacaro 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. Camacaro 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. Camacaro, 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. They had too many clothes, so they would sell what they didn't need.
And from there, we would buy food and clothes.
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.
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