Our Immigrant Neighbors

Dear Editor,

Recently Glenn Valley Foods, a meat packing plant in Omaha Nebraska was raided by dozens of ICE agents using a battering ram to enter the plant and detai undocumented workers. In the aftermath the company lost approximately 50% of its workforce either through workers being placed in detention or others staying away for fear of being rounded up by ICE. This is one small example of what we are doing throughout the country with our new anti-immigrant policy, but it underlines the hypocrisy of our actions.

During the 1980s and 1990s the meatpacking industry became more concentrated with a concomitant relaxing of worker safety and general work conditions. Between 1980 and 1990 workplace injuries increased by 40% leading to much higher turnover, which then led to an increased dependence on immigrant labor. In 2019 President Trump eliminated the cap on line speeds for pork and poultry thus increasing the danger to workers in those fields.  By 2020 somewhat over half the workers in the meatpacking industry, including poultry and pork production, were immigrants with a large proportion undocumented. As with other sectors of the US economy we chose to turn a blind eye to the number of people crossing the border without legal status and allowing them to work here, even as our politicians knowingly used them as a wedge issue to gain support. In 2020 as food supply chains were breaking down with the onset of the COVID pandemic President Trump issued an executive order keeping meat packing and poultry plants open, and declaring the workers in those industries essential. At the behest of the industry OSHA relaxed the protocols and inspections meant to protect workers from the COVID virus, and the president signed another executive order shielding the industry from legal liability for failing to protect its workers. As an industry, meatpacking had the highest rate of Covid infections and death, about 86,000 positive cases and 423 deaths. (At the same time we were putting tens of thousands of our workers at risk President Trump secretly sent state of the art Covid test kits, not yet available to most Americans, to Vladimir Putin).

Now, these same essential front-line workers, hailed as heroes a mere five years ago are being hunted down and thrown into cages to be deported, often to countries they've never set foot in. Here in rural Wisconsin we have not yet had the ICE raids inflicted on our neighbors, friends and family members as in other states, but it is important to remember that about 70% of the work done on dairy farms is carried out by immigrant labor.  I don't think most people in our community want to see the immigrants on our farms, restaurants, construction sites and factories treated this way and yet here we are. I hope we will begin to recognize that elections have consequences when we go to vote in 2026.

Lew Lama

Wyoming Township/ 

Spring Green, WI