Blog 21: Summary and Response to "The New Industrial Migrants"

          In the 1980s people started too immigrated to rural Colorado. During one eighteen month period, more than five thousand different people were employed at the Greeley beef plant, in a turnover average around 400 percent worker quit or was fired every three months. Today, many workers cannot speak or read English; many of them are Mexican immigrants. The staring payment is $9.28 per hours, but this is around one third what it was forty years ago. Now health insurance is offered for workers, vacation pay, after a year, but these workers will never get these benefits because they are fired before they can obtain them.

          In the article “the new industrial immigrants” by Eric Schlosser talks about the annual rates of turnover of immigrants in a meatpacking industries and all the advantages that these industries have accost(Acosta) of these immigrants. Health insurances are very expensive, so obviously for these industries hiring people before six months which are the time frame for these factories to make this valid for their workers. I think these industries are abusing these immigrants. Obviously they are immigrants which need money to survive and feed their families, but this is not a reason to use people like they did it.

          The IBP was a trailblazer was among the first to recognize that immigrants work for lower wages than American citizens. To maintain the flow IBP send recruiting team to poor communities to gather new workers. The proportion of illegal workers in some slaughterhouses is about one-quarter and in others can be higher. Spokesmen for IBP and the ConAgra Beef Company states that “We do not knowingly hire undocumented workers”. The nation’s meatpacking communities are being borne the large real cost of migrant industrial workforce.

          Schlosser also writes that illegal immigrants have been paid fewer wages than American to maintain big companies. I am from Chile since I can remember America is pictured as the place where your dreams will come true, but when I came here I realized that it isn’t true. You have to work very hard, and if you are illegal is much more complicated to success in this country and make your dreams true. In some works even though you may be better than someone else just because you are an immigrant and you do not speak English you are discriminate and paid less.