Tyson Foods Receives Major Backlash For Filling Plants With Asylum Seekers

Tyson Foods recently announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to work at their factories in America, instead of hiring American workers. This is what corporate America has been wanting for decades because these workers are cheap and replaceable. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Tyson Foods recently announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to work at their factories in America instead of hiring American workers. This is what corporate America has been waiting for for decades. These workers are cheap, they're replaceable. If you cause 'em harm, cut off an arm, send them back to Guatemala. That's their attitude. I've got Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. I hate to say this so many times, we have been doing this story about what Tyson has been up to and what corporate America has been up to with the migration issue. Every time we do it, they say, ah, that's, you know, everybody wants to believe, yeah, we're letting everybody cross the border, what, 3 million, I don't even know what the number is anymore, across the border, because we're trying to be kind. We're trying to be compassionate. It's all about the Chamber of Commerce and associated industry getting cheap labor into America so we don't have to go overseas anymore. We can bring 'em over here. Right?

Yeah. We don't have to go make a new sweatshop in Saipan when we can make sweatshops right here in the United States. That's the whole thing. And Tyson, when they got popped for this, because they did have a spokesperson to come out and said, oh yeah, we're gonna hire 40,000 migrants that are coming in because we care. We want to help these people. And then Tyson, after facing calls for backlash or for boycott, said, no, we, no. That, we never did that. That's not true. Oh, by the way, we're also gonna be closing, what is it, a factory in Iowa, Arkansas, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri. They're just saying, we're just gonna shut everything down instead.

Because they were caught.

Yeah.

Okay. So in other words, it got out that what we've been saying all along is this migration issue is not about compassion. It's not about these bring us your huddled masses. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It has to do with the fact that corporate America saw a way to make a lot of money. Cheap, cheap labor. You don't have to pay 'em but a fraction of what you pay American workers. If they're harmed on the work, if they lose arm, great. Ship 'em back to Guatemala. You don't have to pay all that extra money for taking care of them. It's really an ugly story. Tyson simply got caught, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And when they denied it, no, you can deny it, but tell us this, if that's not what's going on here, why did you just shut down five plants? Because you can't keep 'em operating. Right?

Yeah. And they specifically said, one of the groups of migrants they're targeting are the asylum seekers, which those people are far more vulnerable. Obviously, they don't want to be sent back to their countries. So if they can come in here and show like, hey, look, I've got a job. I'm working this job, I'm contributing, I should be given asylum. Tyson can abuse those people even worse and say, listen, you're facing two things. Either you're gonna do what we say, you're not gonna raise any alarms about what we're paying you, which is pennies on the dollar. You're not going to say anything about the safety issues that may be happening because if you do, you're going right back to that country where you're likely to die. So you open your mouth, you're outta here.

Stories, they literally show up at their houses at night, put 'em in a car, drive 'em away, and they're gone. They're disappeared back to their own country. And the chances of them coming back are almost non-existent. Look, we've done so many stories on the corruption of Tyson Foods all the way back to the water contamination.