| I lived in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri for 12 years, until 2009. Not only is this where the Tyson corporation is based, but it's also where one of the highest densities of chicken farms are located. We lived in a house in an extremely rural area. I made good money doing high tech work at the nearby WalMart Stores, Inc., home office. Most of our neighbors, for miles in every direction, were pretty poor. Many of them lived in broken down trailers on properties handed down generation after generation. Unemployment was very high. A kindly, law abiding man who went to our church ran one of the many chicken farms, and had for decades. The only people he could find to work on his chicken farms were Latinos, many or most of them were probably illegal. They did provide proper documentation, so he wasn't breaking the law by employing them. I asked him how he ran his farm before the Latinos started arriving 15 or so years earlier. He said that in that time, it wasn't hard to find young people who were happy to do the hard, unpleasant work associated with a chicken farm. He said he hadn't raised his wages past minimum wage since the very beginning. In fact, he said, the Latinos worked a lot harder than the native locals had. > Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley. While not adding much of anything to this conversation, and being needlessly snarky, I understand the fundamental sentiment here. I live in 'Sillycon Valley'. In many ways, it is quite silly here, and a lot of folks have a rather insular mindset, one that I personally try hard to keep clear of. |