In California's poultry plants, refugees fill the vacuum left after President Bush's immigration raid

Taiseer Al Souki spends most days on his feet at a Foster Farms poultry plant, hefting table-sized plastic brown boxes and feeding them into a machine that cleans them.

He plugs his ears to soften the deafening clang of heavy machinery as he cycles through the same motion for hours on end.

At night, after slumping to sleep in exhaustion, the 44-year-old Syrian refugee dreams that he’s at the plant, still hoisting box after box filled with chicken destined for dinner tables across America.

Al Souki does not complain. He fled war-torn Syria and worked backbreaking 12-hour shifts in his home country and Jordan before making his way to the United States. He is grateful for the $10.50 an hour he collects at the poultry plant.

“I like work. I need work,” he said in the smattering of English he has picked up. “Without work, not a man."

Al Souki needs the work—and employers in the meatpacking industry say they need workers like him. Refugees have increasingly become vital workers in an industry with high turnover. And the growing unrest and bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere have readily supplied them in places like the Central Valley.

The refugee and immigrant populations ”certainly have been a significant part, an integral part of our workforce for decades,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many refugees work in this occupation but roughly one-third of workers in the industry in 2010 were foreign-born, according to a peer-reviewed article in Choices, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Assn., a nonprofit that serves those who work in agricultural and broadly related fields of applied economics.

Mark Lauritsen, director of the food-processing division at the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, estimates that nationwide tens of thousands of refugees are part of the roughly 250,000 unionized meat and poultry plant workers.

In California, most of the meatpacking industry is located in the Central Valley. It’s become one of the biggest employers for refugee resettlement agencies and other nonprofits aiding the population in those areas.

Although the industry in the Golden State is smaller than in other parts of the country—particularly the Midwest—the foreign-born population has found its way to Foster Farms for decades now. Recently, an influx of refugees—mostly from the Middle East—started to arrive in Fresno and Turlock. They too are joining the poultry plant’s labor force.

In 2010, Foster Farms in Turlock began hiring refugees placed by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency, said Christine Lemonda, deputy director of the IRC's Northern California offices. Since then, the agency has placed more than 150 refugees at the poultry plant. In the last six months, 15 have been hired—an uptick—at Foster Farms, Lemonda said.

“It all started out with the very first refugee finding a job and opening the floodgate for his or her community,” said Jim Stokes, a site manager at IRC in Turlock. “They established their own pipeline and inroads and started working there.”

Immigrants have long been integral to the meatpacking industry, but refugees surfaced as a key labor force starting in 2006, according to experts who study the phenomenon.

That year the George W. Bush administration directed immigration enforcement agents to raid meat processing plants in six states. Operation Wagon Train—the largest single work-enforcement action in U.S. history—led to the arrest of an estimated 1,300 people working in the country illegally.

Though it did not stop the industry from completely cutting off the hiring of unauthorized workers, the raids had a chilling effect.

The growing unrest and bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere provided a refugee population from which to fill the labor vacuum, said Lavinia Limon, chief executive officer and president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization.

“What the meatpacking industry knows is that these are really good workers. They show up on time. They say ‘yes’ when they are told what to do. They do what is necessary for their survival,” Limon said.”It works really well for employers.”

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