Angry campaigners are urging shoppers to boycott Tyson Foods and its products amid its new move to hire thousands of asylum seekers. The food company has shut down more of its poultry and meat plants across the U.S., including facilities in Iowa, Virginia, and Arkansas, which employed over 2,000 people.
Tyson Foods has recently hired dozens of immigrants, with the offer including immigration lawyers. The boycott is motivated by the fear that immigrants are replacing Americans for low-grade jobs. Statistics have also shown that there’s a significant decrease in the number of native-born Americans in the blue-collar workforce.
America First Legal and many campaigners are pushing for a boycott of Tyson Foods and its products. The boycott is due to the company’s recent closures of multiple poultry and meat processing plants in Iowa, Indiana, Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri.
The closures are because Tyson plans to hire thousands of asylum seekers in New York, a move that is extremely controversial among Americans.
The campaigners are accusing Tyson of using the closures to ditch American workers for cheaper migrant labor. America First Legal is a conservative action group launched by former Trump administration officials, and they’ve warned the company that favoring immigrants is illegal.
The group posted a statement online that reads, “It is ILLEGAL under federal law to discriminate against American citizens based on their citizenship in favor of non-citizens of any kind when it comes to employment.”
So far, Tyson Foods has yet to respond to the statement or speak on its decision to employ more migrants.
Earlier this week, Tyson announced the closure of its Pork Plant in Perry, Iowa. The shutdown has cost 1276 people their jobs in a town that houses just 8,000 people. According to local news sources, the majority of the workers at the Iowa plant were Latinos.
In May last year, Tyson Foods closed down two plants in Arkansas and Virginia, putting over 1600 people out of jobs. The month before, the company announced that it was working on cutting 10 percent of its corporate jobs and 15 percent of its executive roles.
