“Another meatpacker/Somali love story”: JBS/Swift & Co. in Greeley, Colorado
comment by Jerry Gordon
Swift & Company has US headquarters and a meat packing plant in Greeley, Colorado. Swift was purchased by Brazilian meat packer JBS in a buyout deal for $1.5 billion in July, 2007. In late 2006, Swift was charged by the federal government with employing illegal immigrants. Sounds familiar to us, like Tyson Foods at its Shelbylville, Tennesee plant back in 2001. Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch reports on a burgeoning Somali population in Greeley courtesy of Swift & Co., and facilitated by our State Department’s Bureau of Population, refugee and Migration Program, the Office of refugee Resettlement of the US Department of Health and Human services and voluntary agency (VOLAG) contractors like Lutheran Family Services in this case. We can make a guess as to where some of these meat packers might have come from. Try Emporia, Kansas, where we posted stories last fall about problems there, and where the other major meat packer, Tyson Foods announced they were shutting down operations. because of ‘competitive cost problems’. The Channel7 ABC Denver report entitled: “Somalis (300) Resettle into New Life in Greeley” portrays four Muslim young men in the living room of an partment with the Somali flag in the back and a laptop computer. Allegedly one of them is helping others fill out apartment applications. Of course they could be exchanging email with downtrodden relatives back in Somalia or watching the Somali al Qaeda terrorist website al Shabab on the internet for ‘entertainment’.
Greeley as Corcoran points out has a reputation as being the locale in 1949 where young Egyptian exchange student, Sayyid Qutb was so offended by American dancing hand in hand and drinking a beer at a local square dance that he went home and wrote the textbook manual for bin Laden and others about destroying us in the great Islamist Jihad.
Time for our ACT members in Greeley to do some investigating with the folks at JBS/Swift & Company and Lutheran Family Services, the local refugee resettlement agency (VOLAG). All this coming to Greeley courtesy of American taxpayers.
What is the expression. What goes around comes around.
Ann Corcoran, Refugee Resettlement Watch, May 11, 2008
Here is a yet another article, this time from from Greeley, Co, about how great it is for a Swift meatpacking plant to have all these Somali refugee men handy, ready, and willing to work. Yesterday’s article is here. Today’s news account begins:
GREELEY, Colo. — The four Somalis moved into the apartment last August, six floors up in a downtown Greeley building. The living room is furnished with only a metal folding chair and small table covered in papers and a laptop computer. A Somali flag, a white star against light blue, is the only wall hanging, draped behind the table.
Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as a bit strange? Four Muslim men living in an apartment with not much else but a laptop computer and a Somali flag on the wall. Hum.
Back to the article which is nothing more than the boilerplate meatpacker story we see all over the country.
Doug Schult, who heads employee and labor relations at Swift, said refugees are coming from several east African countries. They are working at Swift plants across the nation, from Greeley to Kentucky.
Ibraham Mohamed is a Greeley caseworker for Lutheran Family Services, which provides refugee resettlement services. He estimates that about 300 east Africans are in Greeley, and that “every day, 20 or 30 people are coming to get started at Swift, maybe 15 (a day). It depends on how they get the job.”
I just checked our archives and sure enough I wrote about the opening of this refugee office for Ft. Morgan and Greeley back in July, read especially this post on July 13th with a link to Greeley’s historical role in the origin of modern day Islamic terrorism (yes Greeley!). Those 4 guys with the laptop and the Somali flag probably have had a private little chuckle about the irony of that.
This meatpacker/Muslim refugee marriage doesn’t come together by happenstance. The US State Department was probably working with Swift all along and helped them get the refugee workers out to Greeley, but they needed an office there to make sure the Swift workers had all of their other needs met compliments of the US taxpayer.
New readers, use our search function and find the many many posts we have written about meatpacking plants and refugees. Check especially Shelbyville, TN and Emporia, KS.
May 11th, 2008 at 8:51 • opinion • news • Refugee Resettlement Watch • JBS/Swift & Company • Somali emigre meatpackers • 0 Comments •
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