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The Des Moines Register in April 2006 ran a series of articles about immigration. Several focused on the meatpackers who set the migration of Mexican migrants to Iowa in motion by paying for referrals of new workers. Recruiters went to the US-Mexican border and found newly arrived unauthorized migrants, put them on buses for Iowa with false documents, and were paid by the companies, who said they did not know that the workers were unauthorized.

In 2006, Hispanics are a majority of the workers in many plants; they are 75 percent of the workers in a Swift pork plant in Marshalltown. Many meatpackers participate in the government's voluntary Basic Pilot employee verification system, under which employers submit the social security and immigration data of newly hired workers to the federal government. However, "dis-assembly line" workers say that a majority of their co-workers used false documents to get hired. Some workers complain that, if they are injured, meatpackers closely scrutinize their documents and fire them for being unauthorized.

The largest kosher meat packing plant in the United States, AgriProcessors (Aaron's Best brand) in Postville, Iowa, was accused in May 2006 of treating its 800 mostly immigrant workers harshly. Stephen Bloom's 2000 book, "Postville," described the culture clash that resulted when a group of Lubavitch Hasidim moved into a farming town of 1,500. Today, about half of Postville's 2,500 residents are Hispanic.
Workers have a starting wage of $6.25 an hour, but an organizing attempt by the United Food and Commercial Workers failed in 2005. The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made a video of chicken slaughtering at the plant in 2005.

Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle," was published in 1906. Meat sales fell after the book was published. To restore confidence in meat, the US enacted the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which led to the Food and Drug Administration.

High meat prices in 2004-05 led cattle, chicken and pork producers to expand but falling exports in 2006 led to an "oversupply of protein" in the US. Some meatpackers are reducing slaughter, which in turn reduces employment.

About twice as many workers in rural America are employed in manufacturing as in farming. Newton, Iowa, a city of 15,000 35 miles southeast of Des Moines, has been home of the Maytag washing machine factory since 1893. Maytag was bought by Whirlpool in March 2006, and announced that the plant would close in 2007, eliminating 1,800 jobs.

North Carolina. The United Food and Commercial Workers accused Smithfield Packing Company of illegally skewing a 1997 election at its Tar Heel, North Carolina plant by intimidating and firing workers at the 5,500-worker pork processing facility, the world's largest, handling 32,000 hogs a day. The NLRB agreed with the UFCW in 2004, and issued a cease and desist order as well as ordering the reinstatement of four fired workers. Smithfield appealed, and in May 2006 the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the NLRB.

Workers at the Tar Heel North Carolina plant are two-thirds Hispanic and a quarter Black, and there is friction between these groups. The UFCW has tried a community approach, involving church and community leaders to build support for unionization. Smithfield said that 22,000 of its 51,000 workers were represented by unions in 2006; the UFCW said that 250,000 of its 1.3 million members are in the meat packing and food processing industry.

The Hispanic population of North Carolina has been increasing rapidly, and at 600,000 was about seven percent of the state's population in 2004.

Utah, the state with the highest percentage of GOP voters, is by some measures the most welcoming to illegal immigrants. Latinos accounted for nine percent of Utah's 2.2 million residents in 2000.

Schenectady, a city of 62,000 that was once America's Electric City and home to General Electric, has a mayor who in 2001 who aims to stabilize the population by recruiting immigrants in New York City http://www.guyaneseopportunities.com/). The mayor focused on some of the estimated 140,000 Guyanese in New York City, 12 hours away. Guyana is a former British colony on the northeast coast of South America, and most of the Guyanese immigrants in the US are English-speaking descendants of Indians imported as indentured servants. By 2006, about 10 percent of Schenectady's residents were Guyanese, and they are credited with buying old homes and refurbishing them.

Labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in May 2006 that 164,000 Hispanics were injured at work and 902 died http://www.bls.gov/iif/home.htm). Meatpacking has one of the highest worker injury rates- 13 of each 100 full-time workers had a reportable injury in 2004. Other industries with a high number of injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers were foundries and hog farms with 11 or more employees. In both industries, 17 of 100 full-time workers had reportable injuries in 2004.

DOL's Wage and Hour Division enforces minimum wage, overtime and similar laws, and orders employers to provide back pay to underpaid workers. Interfaith Worker Justice helped DOL to get Perdue Farms to agree to pay $10 million in back pay, but soon discovered that many of the workers would not get payments because they had returned to Mexico or moved to other states.

DOL in 2005 owed $32 million to 100,000 low-wage workers who could not be located, and Interfaith worked with DOL to create a database so that workers could see if they were owed money. DOL initially refused to provide worker names, but in May 2006 relented. DOL in FY04 distributed $196 million to 289,000 workers.

Steven Greenhouse, "Group Sues Labor Dept. to Get Names of Workers," New York Times, January 19, 2006.