Carlos Garcia

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

We first heard about this program from both Tyson and Tent, and they were very excited to hire refugees, asylum seekers.

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

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All the, like, completely uncontroversial topics. So inequality with respect to race, gender, religion, immigration at times. So last March, Simone Foxman published an article on that last topic, immigration.

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

152.076

It was morning. It was extremely cold. But I will say, you know, it didn't look like anything super special. Right, right. If you'd walked by the building, you would have no clue what was going on there that day. Absolutely, yeah.

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

177.543

You know, I think there were 17 people hired, and ultimately the event sort of continued for the following couple of days, and it included 70 more people the next week.

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

229.601

So I can only speak to what's factual here. Our story was published. At the same time, there was another story published completely unrelated to the story.

Planet Money

The controversy over Tyson Foods' hiring of asylum seekers

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Really low-skilled jobs. And that's the vast majority of Tyson's workforce. Tyson employs about 120,000 people. Of them, about 100,000 are in these very low-skilled jobs. Jobs like washing meat, placing the cuts in the trays, all of those things. You don't need a ton of expertise in order to do them, but you need a lot of people. And they really struggle to keep workers in a lot of these jobs.