Want to stop the Mexican hordes from invading? Go vegetarian and stop
financing their invasion. Every time you purchase meat you are giving
your money to the corporate elites (Tyson, Con-Agra, Cargill, et.al.)
who are bringing them here. Corporations who don't give a damn about
you, your family or the nation. The only thing they do give a damn
about is $$$$$$$$$$. If they don't make a profits they close down
plants, no plants, no jobs, no invaders.

But you can't do that can you stupid. Because it would require a bit
of sacrifice on your part..."what give up my burgers and sausage and
chicken...I can't do that boo hoo!"

You are getting what you deserve you hypocritical weaklings.

Meatpacking Remakes Rural U.S. Towns
Sunday August 19, 4:45 am ET
By Roxana Hegeman, Associated Press Writer
Changes in Meatpacking Industry Remake Rural U.S. Towns in New
Immigration Frontier

DODGE CITY, Kan. (AP) -- This is the home of Wyatt Earp and Bat
Masterson, of Boot Hill and the Long Branch Saloon, of cattle drives,
buffalo hunters and the romance of the American West. But that's the
Dodge City of yesteryear.

Today, downtown has Mexican restaurants and stores more reminiscent of
shops south of the border than Main Street Kansas. The city of 25,176
even has a new nickname: "Little Mexico."

Signs advertising "Envios a Mexico" -- retail outlets where workers
send hard-earned wages back home to Mexico and other countries -- hang
outside many Dodge City stores. Houses occasionally fly Mexican flags,
whipped hard by the prairie winds.

Dodge City ... Cactus, Texas ... Fort Morgan, Colo. ... Postville,
Iowa: For more than a hundred years, this region provided a bucolic
idyll and a ready example of American life and values. Today, iconic
farm towns struggle with a new economic model, one that requires a
workforce that is poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic.

It's not easy. The immigrants who have flooded these communities are
stretching schools and law enforcement. Still, at a time when other
rural towns are slowly dying, Dodge City and meatpacking towns like it
boast thriving economies.

"If these people can get past the gauntlet of the border, we welcome
them here with open arms," said Ford County Sheriff Dean Bush, Dodge
City's modern-day counterpart to Wyatt Earp.

But many of his fellow citizens seem lost. Randy Ford and his wife,
Betty, have lived in Dodge City for 35 years. They no longer attend
the city's Independence Day events. They can't understand what the
singers -- Spanish crooners singing Latin favorites -- are saying.

"We don't go anymore because we don't want to be Mexican," he said.
"We want to be American."

In Washington, the debate over immigration sometimes seems to be a
clash of extremes. But here, in the wide-open spaces where one-
dimensional economies stoke small towns, there is plenty of room for
ambivalence.

HOW IT GOT THIS WAY

Just as the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad here in 1872 brought
white settlers to populate the dusty towns and farms of a fledging
country, the relocation and consolidation of the meatpacking industry
has transformed these icons of the American West. The result: diverse,
multicultural communities that challenge breadbasket notions of wheat
fields, white fences and even whiter demographics.

The transformation of the nation's meatpacking industry began in 1960
when plants began moving out of cities in favor of their livestock
sources in right-to-work states like Kansas. The first big
slaughterhouse came to Emporia in the 1960s, followed by plants near
Garden City and in Dodge City in the 1980s.

For Dodge City -- famed as the "Queen of the Cowtowns" during its
cowboy heyday -- the advent of the slaughter plants seemed a natural
fit. Locals have long recognized that the odor of manure here is the
smell of money.

"They are a major hub of business and economic activity and a huge
employer," said Ted Schroeder, agricultural economist at Kansas State
University. "You can't go into those communities without sensing the
presence and importance of those large economic facilities. Everything
around there is either working with, complementing or part of that
industry."

Eventually, mom-and-pop meatpackers were swallowed up by giants like
Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., Swift & Co. and
National Beef Packing Co.

Their massive slaughter plants today routinely sit on the outskirts of
rural towns. Huge feedlots stretching at times beyond the horizon now
dot the wind-swept prairie where buffalo once grazed.

When the wind blows just so, the stench can be overpowering.

WEIRD ECONOMICS

Arturo Ponce is a U.S. citizen now -- coordinator of the HIV/AIDS
prevention program run by the United Methodist Mexican-American
Ministries. But it wasn't so long ago that he lived in a dilapidated
trailer, just down the street from the Cargill plant in Dodge City.

This, he recently told his 14-year-old son, was where your parents got
their start in Kansas. Here, he said, we crowded with 13 other people,
four families, into three bedrooms.

"The beef industry is hard work," he said. He would come home to the
trailer after each shift drenched in sweat from trying to keep up with
the production line. He and his brother-in-law each lost 25 pounds
those first three months on the job.

Now, almost 20 years later, the same trailer remains crammed with
meatpacking workers coming to and from their shifts.

"It is a cycle that continues to repeat itself," Ponce said. "It is
the same story."

The same story: Decent wages are a magnet for poor immigrants. And the
wages paid by the meatpackers are decent, though far from extravagant.

The poverty rate in Dodge City plunged from 28 percent in 1980 to 14
percent in 2000. The poverty rate also was halved in Guymon, Okla.,
where there are an estimated 600,000 head of cattle on farms within 25
miles of the Seaboard Foods plant.

But no one is living high on the hog, or cow. Dodge City's per capita
income of $15,538 in 2000 may be an improvement, but it still remains
far below the $21,587 national average.

In Cactus, the average per capita income has increased, but only to
$8,340. Many who work at the Swift plant in Cactus live in former
military barracks or in dilapidated rental trailer homes where yards
contain little more than dirt, weeds and rocks.

"A lot of people are working, but working at jobs that don't pay
well," said Don Stull, a University of Kansas anthropology professor
and industry expert.

It's a hard life. In Cactus, the population is more than 90 percent
Latino. There are no doctors or banks. Most plant workers deal only in
cash, making them easy targets for theft. As much as 70 percent of
offenses in town relate to alcohol use, especially on weekend nights
when cars cruise up and down the main drag for hours.

Dodge City grapples with drug trafficking as narcotics flow in across
the Mexican border through the Hispanic community. Gangs are a
problem, too. But there is some equanimity in a town infamous for its
lawless Wild West history.

"Dodge City has always been a pretty wild Western town," said Bush,
the sheriff, "and there are days when it still lives up to its name."

GOING TO SCHOOL

Alfredo Villegas was clearly frustrated as he struggled to read an
English-language book in a small newcomer class in the Dodge City high
school. Villegas, 15, has been in the U.S. for five months and his
father works at Cargill.

"I don't know what I want to be," he said, in Spanish. "I may not even
graduate."

Just as he struggles with his new language, the public schools are
struggling with the new students who have come with families drawn to
work in the meatpacking plants. Educators have found themselves
grappling with language barriers, academic gaps and poverty.

School districts once troubled with aging and tax-resistant local
populations and dwindling school enrollments suddenly had to deal with
the crowded classrooms that came with young migrant families;
Villegas' modern, sprawling school was built five years ago as
enrollments boomed.

Dodge City school officials count 23 different languages spoken by
immigrant families, though the town is overwhelmingly Latino.

About 44 percent of students in Dodge City have limited English
proficiency, prompting the district to establish a "newcomer program"
for immigrant students geared heavily toward language acquisition, and
includes help from Spanish-speaking assistants.

Just a decade ago, about 70 percent of Dodge City students were
English-speaking whites. Today, that statistic has flipped: about 70
percent of the 5,800 students who now attend Dodge City school are
Hispanic, with non-Hispanic whites now comprising nearly 25 percent.

There has been some success. An analysis of high school graduation
rates at meatpacking towns nationwide shows improvement between 1980
and 2000: up 9 percent in Dodge City; up 5 percent in Cactus; up 6
percent in Crete, Neb.

Still, graduation rates were below state averages. For example, the
graduation rate of slightly over 17 percent in Cactus, Texas, was
still well below the state average of nearly 76 percent or the
national average of more than 80 percent.

In Postville, Iowa, visitors to Cora B. Darling elementary and middle
school are greeted with a world map adorned with red-and-gold foil
stars pasted on Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Israel, Peru, Costa Rica,
Mexico and other nations. Each designates the home country to some of
the school's 370 students.

"The biggest population coming in right now are from Guatemala,"
Postville principal Charlotte Tammel said. "The challenge for us is
finding teachers who speak all these languages."

Earlier this year, Dodge City teacher Debby Chipman gathered a small
group of her second and third graders for an English lesson. Three of
them speak Spanish, one boy speaks Vietnamese, the other boy speaks
only Quiche, a Guatemalan dialect.

Even as the schools spread American culture to newcomers, the
immigrants reciprocate, infusing their schools with their own
cultures.

Everyone on the high school soccer roster in Liberal, Kan. -- players,
coaches, trainers and managers -- is Hispanic, and during soccer
season in the fall, the ambiance around a Liberal game takes aim at
the American stereotype of sweater-clad soccer moms in SUVs.

Though Friday night football still matters in the heartland, soccer
clearly has a home here. Shouts of "Aqui, aqui!" blend easily with
"Here, here!"

CULTURE CLASHES

On the high plains of northern Colorado, the latest wave of settlers
to hit Morgan County has some worried that the character of its
largest city -- Fort Morgan, with its neat lawns decorated with gnomes
or holiday ornaments -- would be altered beyond recognition.

Cargill operates a slaughterhouse here, employing about 20 percent of
the town's population and processing 4,300 head of cattle per day.
Morgan County saw its Hispanic population double in the 1990s --
jumping to 8,473 by the 2000 U.S. Census.

More than a century before the meatpackers consolidated and Cargill
Inc. set up shop in Morgan County, Germans who had settled the Volga
region of Russia arrived here after Czar Alexander II took away their
autonomy and made them subject to the military draft.

"It's been a German town for a long time, every morning at 5 o'clock,
5 or 6 o'clock, it's like a cuckoo clock, German ladies out sweeping
their sidewalks," said longtime resident Perry Roberts. "And now
they're (immigrants) not mowing their lawn, and so they're trying to
pass laws to get people to keep up their lawns and not park their car
on them."

In 2004, community leaders and businesses began work to establish a
group called OneMorgan County to help newcomers learn about health
care services, community resources and law enforcement -- and to ease
fears among longtime residents.

Postville, Iowa, had long been a meatpacking town, but the old HyGrade
slaughterhouse had been shuttered for seven years when New York
butcher and entrepreneur Aaron Rubashkin bought it in 1987.

The city has been in transition ever since.

A stream of Hasidic Jews soon followed, providing the executive staff
to run the operation and the rabbis needed to slaughter animals in
accordance with strict kosher rules.

The first wave of workers required to augment the locals on the
payroll were eastern Europeans, immigrants from Bosnia, Poland, Russia
and former Soviet Republics who had initially spent time in bigger
East Coast cities before moving to Iowa.

But in the last decade, Hispanics have become the majority. The result
is that a town that barely covers two square miles is home to people
from 24 nationalities speaking 17 languages. In 1990, Postville's
population was 1,472; now, it is estimated at more than 2,500, nearly
33 percent foreign-born.

Last year, councilman Jeff Reinhardt caused a stir by taking aim at
two of the city's ethnic groups in a letter to the local newspaper.
Without naming any group, his targets were clear.

"One group wants to isolate itself ... and wanting a different day for
the Sabbath," he wrote. Another "sends money back to foreign countries
and brings a lack of respect for our laws and culture, which
contributes to unwed mothers, trash in the streets, unpaid bills,
drugs, forgery and other crimes."

That's bigotry, cried local religious leaders -- but understandable,
they said, in a time of wholesale change.

HERE TO STAY

Shift change at the National Beef complex in Dodge City, and Martin
Rosas and his crew are passing out flyers at the entrance, recruiting
colleagues to join a union. A plant security officer sits in a nearby
vehicle, with a camera.

Rosas, secretary-treasurer of the United Food and Commercial Workers
local, seeks a better deal for workers at the nonunion National Beef.
"We can no longer witness this kind of treatment for our people," he
said.

Rosas, 36, is himself a Mexican immigrant, and now a naturalized
citizen. He has watched Dodge City grow more accepting of its Hispanic
newcomers.

"We feel more welcome -- we feel at home now," he said.

And more willing to assert themselves.

In Cactus, Hispanics dominate politics. The town's population became
predominantly Hispanic by the 1990s, and by the end of that decade,
Hispanics began to be elected to the city council.

Now, all but one member is Hispanic.

"Without this plant I don't know what would happen," said Mayor Luis
Aguilar, who slipped into the country illegally from Mexico 30 years
ago, later became a U.S. citizen, and now owns the town's only grocery
store, numerous rental properties and a 575-acre ranch.

Some immigrants come to the American prairie for the jobs, but end up
staying for something else. Jose Flores, who calls himself a "Mexican
hillbilly," never felt at home in Los Angeles. He was drawn to a
meatpacking job in Dodge City because he wanted to raise his growing
family in a small town.

When he arrived in 1987, the only Mexican-owned business in town was a
secondhand store. Today the town brims with thriving Mexican shops;
Flores owns a restaurant in nearby Spearville and a real estate office
in Dodge City.

But Flores is most proud of his children. They've either gone on to
their own successful careers or are in schools and colleges preparing
for them.

"The packing house brought us here," Flores said. "But our families
have surpassed that."

Associated Press reporters P. Solomon Banda in Fort Morgan, Betsy
Blaney in Cactus, Steve Brisendine in Liberal and Todd Dvorak in
Postville contributed to this report.