Slaughterhouse blues

The Dallas Morning News has been running this week an excellent series about Cactus, Texas, a wretched little town in the Panhandle. The town is about 75 percent illegal immigrant, and the only reason to move there is to work in the large meat processing facility. Crime is rampant -- robbery, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, among other things -- and the rule of law is a nice idea there. If we rounded up and shipped out all the illegals, the town would die in an instant. It is very, very difficult to imagine Americans who would be willing to move to this ugly town in the middle of nowhere to work in a bone-crushingly hard job for the kinds of wages that illegals are willing to accept. It's hard to imagine Americans being willing to put up with the abuse of workers that the illegals have to endure -- check out today's story for details -- because as illegals, they are in no position to complain.

A Baptist pastor in Cactus who works among the migrants says that these people are worked like "animals." I believe it. I am down on industry for the way it breaks the law to get cheap labor, and then exploits these human beings. If the slaughterhouses paid the kinds of wages necessary to entice American workers to do this kind of nasty, backbreaking labor, they'd have to jack up the price of meat. And that's something the American people will not tolerate. Therefore, we are complicit in the lawbreaking and exploitation. As a University of Kansas anthropology professor who studied the situation in slaughterhouses told my newspaper today, "The general public, as long as their food is cheap, as long as it's safe, as long as the workers aren't really that much like them, they can look the other way."