Two ugly truths behind the Glenn Valley meatpacking raid

The Trump Administration raided Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant in June and arrested 70 people working illegally under stolen identities. The story the owners want to tell (via the New York Times) goes like this: We followed the law; E-Verify doesn’t work; we pay market wages; and the meatpacking industry can’t survive without illegal labor.

There are two ugly truths behind that story:

• The U.S. Congress could close the identity theft loopholes, but hasn’t; and
• The meatpacking industry used mass immigration and illegal immigration to drive out American workers; drive down wages; and grind working conditions into the ground.

Glenn Valley Foods pays about $20 an hour, which is about average these days. But As George Fishman points out, that’s more than 40 percent less than meatpacking jobs paid in 1980.

Relying heavily on the work of Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Jerry Kammer, Fishman describes how the meatpacking industry made a series of changes that transformed the business from one that provided middle class jobs to Americans to the one we read about in the New York Times today: “dangerous,” “repetitive,” “demanding” jobs mostly filled by immigrants.

They couldn’t have done it without mass immigration and decades of Congressional indifference toward vulnerable workers.

A brief history

First, beginning in the 1960s, the meatpacking owners moved their plants away from big cities and their unions. Then they replaced skilled butchers with a more dangerous “disassembly line” system. Finally, they slashed wages. Congress made all of this stick by increasing immigration in 1965 (and again in 1990). With millions of new, eager workers streaming into the country, American workers had no leverage to protect their jobs or wages.

Today’s meatpacking industry more closely resembles what it was in 1905 when Upton Sinclair published his scathing critique of the industry in The Jungle than it does to industry that existed sixty years ago.

NumbersUSA’s founder Roy Beck provided a brief history of the meatpacking industry in his book The Case Against Immigration for W.W. Norton and Company:

“After decades of keeping the unions out, paying squat wages and running the most unsafe industry in America, the meatpackers in the late 1920s had to start retaining their immigrant workers and attracting their native-born American children because Congress reduced annual immigration to about a sixth of the previous Great Wave level.

“Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, working conditions improved. Due to low immigration and tight labor markets, unions grew stronger so that by the 1950s through the 1970s, meatpacking work was one of the safest and highest paid lower-skilled jobs in America. Until the renewal of mass immigration destroyed the jobs, meatpacking was paying its workers two and three times more than they are paid today in real wages.”

On the backs of Black Americans

Just as it has in many industries for over 200 years, mass immigration displaced Black Americans in the meatpacking jobs at a disproportional rate. According to a paper from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, there are “significant negative effects in occupations such as meatpacking and construction.”

That report was published one year after a 2009 raid on a North Carolina meatpacking plant that, like the Glenn Valley raid, made national news. That raid exposed how the owners used the immigrant labor supply to replace their Black workers who were more inclined toward the union.

Read: “‘ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?’” by George Fishman, 2025

Related:

“Immigration Raids at Smithfield: How an ICE Enforcement Action Boosted Union Organizing and the Employment of American Workers” by Jerry Kammer, 2009

“E-Verify and the Invasion of the Identity Snatchers” by George Fishman, 2025

“Excess labor is the only necessary condition for exploitation” by Jeremy Beck, 20245

A blind eye to identity theft

E-Verify has tools to detect identity theft, but it wasn’t designed to do so. Congress could crack down on identity theft. Why hasn’t it? Legislation could help:

• Require states to grant DHS access to their DMV driver’s license photos for use with E-Verify;
• Require the government to issue “no-match” letters when the person’s SSN reported is not accurate or does not match the earnings;
• Require the Commissioner of Social Security, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Secretary of the Treasury to jointly establish a program to share information that may lead to the identification of unauthorized aliens.

There are bills before this Congress right now that would start to implement these reforms to compliment E-Verify and make it mandatory nationwide.

• S. 1151, the Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act
• H.R. 251, Legal Workforce Act

As Fishman concludes, “We don’t have to continue to allow America’s immigration policy to butcher the wages and job opportunities of American meatpackers.”

No, we don’t. That’s just a choice that Congress makes by failing to take action.