For many Somali refugees, meat processing offers hope — then takes it away

Though meatpacking plants have long relied on labor by immigrants, particularly Hispanics, major companies have moved to hire Somalis, who have the dual advantage for employers of being legal and relatively cheap. In one slice of a changing low-wage America, these are the new ideal workers.  Only a decade earlier, meatpacking jobs went almost exclusively to Hispanics. But now more Mexican immigrants are leaving the United States than coming to work, and the number of unauthorized immigrants is receding after decades of growth. As much as Hispanics had seized upon low-skill industries with their arrival, their gradual departure — fueled by tighter border enforcement and improved prospects back home — is opening up new opportunities at the bottom of the U.S. economy, particularly in industries like meatpacking that had also been stung by a wave of immigration raids. As a result, “Little Somalia” neighborhoods are sprouting up in dozens of towns across the Great Plains, and slaughterhouses are hiring Somali translators for the cutting floors and installing Muslim prayer rooms for employees. For Somalis, the slaughterhouses have emerged as the primary alternative to economic hardship. The poverty rate for Somalis living in the United States — at 57 percent, according to the 2010 Census — towers above those of all other ethnicities or nationalities. They tend to live in inner-city public housing and hold minimum-wage jobs. And their plight in the country — at a time when a record number of refugees globally are fleeing repression and war — shows the lasting disadvantages facing a group escaping a failed state.