This article is based on a subject first developed for the Blogosphere by Joe Budzinski of NoVa Townhall Blog.

United States immigration policy should be based on provable facts, not political myths. The case of the Crider chicken processing plant in southern Georgia is an iconic example.

Myth: Illegal immigrants take jobs that are vital to our economy.
Myth: Illegal immigrants provide cheap labor.
Myth: Illegal immigrants take jobs that United States citizens will not do.

Fact: While the work performed may be vital to our economy, the current job descriptions may not be. As long as “cheap” labor is available, there will be no motivation to find more efficient, or more automated ways of accomplishing the tasks.

Fact: Illegal labor is not cheap. It is subsidized by the hard-working American taxpayers in the form of free health care for illegals, overburdened social services, food stamps, second-language programs in the public schools, low income housing grants, and increased public safety and crime control costs.

Fact: The jobs will be performed by legal employees when the pay is increased enough to provide for a decent standard of living. That increase is likely less than the difference now made up by the taxpayers. What is more, legal citizens who are currently unemployed, and perhaps therefore homeless, will have access to those jobs.

The Crider Corporation is a global supplier of fresh and processed poultry products. The history of the company reads like a classic American success story of hard work and deserved rewards.

Making ends meet in 1944 was tough, but Ahtee Crider, his wife Emma Lou, and their young son Billy did the best they could. Spending long hours trucking produce from the south of Georgia to the shores of the East Coast, Ahtee dreamed….Mile after mile, he thought about his ideas for marketing poultry….He enlisted local farmers to grow poultry for him while Emma Lou skillfully dressed the chickens for market….

…Crider Poultry thrived, and the young couple began to establish themselves in the marketplace… To keep up with the fast-growing demand for poultry in the United States, Crider Poultry constructed an automated system for dressing chickens, and then built a large block facility. The new operation became the standard for cost-efficient and productive poultry processing, leading the booming poultry industry in the South.

After several years at the University of Georgia, Billy came home to help grow and restructure the company. He’s been at its helm ever since and is now assisted by his son Bill Crider III – the third generation of Crider involved in the family business.

Now you will note in the following news reports that the coverage of recent events in the small Georgia town of Stillmore, where the Crider Corporation is located, is slanted by the liberal media. Italics are provided to highlight spurious elements and gratuitous opinion. Tear-jerkers that have been inserted to appeal to bleeding-heart liberals are also highlighted.

During this past summer, Crider plant managers were warned that their work force might include a large number of illegal aliens.

Crider President David Purtle said … agents began inspecting the company’s employment records in May. They found 700 suspected illegal immigrants, and supervisors handed out letters over the summer ordering them to prove they came to the U.S. legally or be fired. Only about 100 kept their jobs.

At the beginning of September, Federal authorities came to town.

The 2000 Census put Stillmore’s population at 730, but [the mayor] said uncounted immigrants probably made it more than 1,000 ….The arrests started at the plant Sept. 1. Over the Labor Day weekend, agents with guns and bulletproof vests converged on workers’ homes after getting the addresses from Crider’s files….

Federal agents also swarmed into a trailer park operated by David Robinson. Illegal immigrants were handcuffed and taken away. Almost none have returned. Robinson bought an American flag and posted it by the pond out front – upside down, in protest….

More than 120 illegal immigrants have been loaded onto buses bound for immigration courts in Atlanta, 189 miles away. Hundreds more fled Emanuel County….

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Marc Raimondi would not discuss details of the raids. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that these people were here illegally,” Raimondi said….

From the Macon Telegraph comes this report.

Messy aftermath of immigration raids outrages small Ga. town
Fri, Sep. 15, 2006

STILLMORE, Ga. – Trailer parks lie abandoned. The poultry plant is scrambling to replace more than half its workforce. Business has dried up at stores where Mexican laborers once lined up to buy food, beer and cigarettes just weeks ago.

This Georgia community of about 1,000 people has become little more than a ghost town since Sept. 1, when federal agents began rounding up illegal immigrants.

The sweep has had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy.

…. Residents say many scattered into the woods, camping out for days. They worry some are still hiding without food.

At least one child, born a U.S. citizen, was left behind by his Mexican parents: 2-year-old Victor Perez-Lopez. The toddler’s mother, Rosa Lopez, left her son with Julie Rodas when the raids began and fled the state. The boy’s father was deported to Mexico.

“When his momma brought this baby here and left him, tears rolled down her face and mine too,” Rodas said. “She said, ‘Julie, will you please take care of my son because I have no money, no way of paying rent?’”

[....]

The raids came during a fall election season in which immigration is a top issue.

Last month, the federal government reported that Georgia had the fastest-growing illegal immigrant population in the country. The number more than doubled from an estimated 220,000 in 2000 to 470,000 last year. This year, state lawmakers passed some of the nation’s toughest measures targeting illegal immigrants, and Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue last week vowed a statewide crackdown on document fraud.

Other than the Crider plant, there isn’t much in Stillmore. Four small stores, a coin laundry and a Baptist church share downtown with City Hall, the fire department and a post office. “We’re poor but proud,” Mayor Marilyn Slater said, as if that is the town motto.

Not anymore, with so many homes abandoned and the streets practically empty.

“This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up,” Slater said….

Since the mid-1990s, Stillmore has grown dependent on the paychecks of Mexican workers who originally came for seasonal farm labor, picking the area’s famous Vidalia onions. Many then took year-round jobs at the Crider plant, with a workforce of about 900 ….

The poultry plant has limped along with half its normal workforce ….

Now we come to the good part.

Crider increased its starting wages by $1 an hour to help recruit new workers.

Stacie Bell, 23, started work canning chicken at Crider a week ago. She said the pay, $7.75 an hour, led her to leave her $5.60-an-hour job as a Wal-Mart cashier in nearby Statesboro. Still, Bell said she felt bad about the raids.

“If they knew eventually that they were going to have to do that, they should have never let them come over here,” she said….

Of course, the illegal immigrants should never have been allowed to come here in the first place. Our government should have vigorously enforced its federal laws. But the illegal immigrants were the ones who knowingly and intentionally broke our laws. They didn’t come to build our country but to rip it off.

For every bit of productivity they added to the local economy, they undoubtedly used human services aid drawn from the tax contributions of richer states via “redistribution of wealth.” They were not adding to the Georgia economy. They were simply serving as a medium for taxpayer largesse to be redirected from prosperous states to Georgia.

The remarks attributed to this young girl by the news report underscore the faulty reasoning that the MSM has fostered in the public discourse. They have twisted the narrative to place the blame on the United States, when it belongs squarely on the heads of the lawbreakers. To allow these aliens/criminals to claim victimhood in not rational.

Now we see the situation being resolved into the economic structure it should have had in the first place. From an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Homeless, felons help fill poultry jobs
By MARY LOU PICKEL  |  11/26/06

Stillmore — Felons on probation and homeless men have filled some of the poultry jobs left by illegal Mexican laborers deported in raids two months ago.

About 40 convicted felons from the Macon Diversion Center are bused in each day to work at the Crider Poultry plant in Stillmore — the focus of the raids.

Additionally, 16 men from the Garden City Rescue Mission in Augusta have come to work in the plant. Several from the mission have become shift leaders, said Lavond Reynolds, director of men’s housing for the mission.

“Compared to the attrition rate [at the plant] in general, these guys have really stuck so far,” Reynolds said. The mission might send another 15 soon….

Crider has turned to an outside company to hire about 100 workers to clean the plant each night. The company raised starting wages by about 40 cents and now offers attendance bonuses to new hires. Before, it took a year to be eligible for the extra pay. (Starting base pay is $6 an hour; most workers earn more through bonuses and overtime.) The company is spending more on hiring and training…

For instance, Crider advanced money to house the homeless men from the mission in trailers and to turn on their utilities. The company also pays to bus state probationers from Macon each day and is busing workers from surrounding communities….

At least one local businessman said his business has gone up since the raids. The churn of new folks applying and working at Crider has brought new customers to Mighty Mike’s Hot Stop gas station and convenience store in town.

“They come in here and shop,” said manager Willie Gordon. “Our inside sales have gone up $3,000 per week since the raids.”

It’s been a mixture of new clientele. But Gordon, who is African-American, attributes a good part of the increase to more black workers coming into town. Gordon notes: “You gotta be legal now.”

So now, instead of illegal aliens draining the economy of our country to support the failed government of Mexico, what do we have?

• legal citizens in the prison population have a chance for rehabilitation
• legal citizens who were unemployed and homeless now have a place to live and a job
• a cleaning company, which hopefully employs legal citizens, has a new contract, and can offer 100 more workers employment
• work opportunities for legal citizens are expanding to surrounding communities, and transportation is provided
• black workers who ARE a legal part of our population now have access to these jobs, AND ARE FILLING THEM

The MSM reporting is too filled with hyperbole, opinion preented as fact, pejorative phrases, internal inconsistencies, and innuendo to be construed as news journalism. It is liberal propaganda. Let’s parse it.

According to the mayor’s report, Stillmore has a native population of 730 with an additional 270 illegals living in trailers and rentals. How does the cut-back to the original population result in little more than a ghost town? If the legal citizens are still there, the entire original population, how do we get to so many homes abandoned and the streets practically empty? Especially since this maudlin reporter has gone out of the way to describe how poor and pathetic the town was to begin with?

If the mayor’s estimate of the population of 1000 before the raids was believable, where did the reported 900 chicken plant workers come from? Is it possible (gasp!) that the mayor was fudging the figures? Is it possible he did not want to admit how many criminal federal law-breakers were really in town?

Of the 700 suspected workers, the report states that only 100 kept their jobs when the plant managers asked for proof of legal status beginning LAST MAY. Then the report would have us believe that the workforce was decimated by the federal raids in SEPTEMBER. You can’t have it both ways. Which version is true?

Probably the change in workforce largely occurred beginning in May and during the summer, although the numbers are likely exagerated. But the reporter wants to infer that the federal government, controlled by Republicans at the time of the raids, was motivated by political pandering rather than law enforcement in support of national security. “The raids came during a fall election season in which immigration is a top issue.” So a second set of alleged facts springs into being.

Now let’s take a look at the way the language is colored to create a sympathetic attitude toward the illegals.

• Federal agents went to their trailers and rented rooms to check their identification. The reporter uses the verbs converged and swarmed to create a frightening effect for the reader, a feeling of being trapped and overwhelmed.
• The federal government provided transportation, and probably meals, to bring the illegals to Atlanta for processing. The illegals boarded buses. But the reporter uses a passive verb form, saying that they have been loaded onto the buses. This conjures the impression, not proven, that they were treated like cargo rather than humans. In fact, the transportation provided by our government was likely much safer and more courteous that what they elected when they were first smuggled into this country, when they would have been treated like expendable cargo.
• Hundreds more illegals (though how we get “hundreds” from the mayor’s estimate of 270+ is curious) left the state of Georgia for Kentucky, as soon as Georgia decided not to be victimized by freeloaders any longer. They migrated to a more lenient subsidized free lunch. The reporter says they fled in an attempt to evoke pity for their supposed terror.
• The report describes the results of the raid as a messy aftermath. That is a qualitative judgement given without any supporting data. Reason tells us that if all these illegals who “lined up to buy beer and cigarettes” are gone, the town will be less messy, without the litter of burned cigarette stubs and crumbled beer cans tossed along the road.
• The puff piece says “outrages small Ga. town.” More hyperbole. A town is a municipal definition on paper. It has no human persona to be outraged. Perhaps a handful of citizens, carefully sorted out by a reporter who wanted to prove a preconceived notion, were outraged. But not necessarily others. Certainly not the storekeeper who saw his business grow $3,000 per week since the raids.
• And while we are on the subject of this storekeeper, let’s examine the phrase that business has dried up. The illegal Hispanic business diminished, while the legal black business increased. That is a demographic shift, appropriate to the makeup of our legal citizenry, not a loss of business.
• Instead of describing the Crider company as limping along it would be more accurate to say that this resourceful American company is doing some appropriate restructuring.

And let’s consider the Lopez-Perez family. The name suggests two criminal illegals, knowingly breaking our laws, who produced a child that they could not afford to support, intending to freeload their offspring onto the American taxpayers. The dual name also suggests that they were not even married to each other. When caught in their crimes, they abandoned their child (and thereby did manage to obligate the taxpayers for the support of their child). What kind of parents are these? Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? For the kid, maybe, but they have shown absolutely no sense of personal responsibility.

And the reporter introduces selectively excerpted gratuitous speculation on the part of residents. They worry some are still hiding without food. Is this unsupported imagination appropriate for a NEWS article? It would be different if the reporter had actually found a family of illegals, still camping in the surrounding woods and starving, and interviewed them. But this so-called journalist did not work that hard. It was much easier to write what amounts to fiction, than to do the work of a news-gatherer.

The disservice done to civic perceptions about an important issue by this type of reporting is egregious. Even worse is what it tells us about the sorry state of American journalism, and what reporters think about the reasoning ability of their readers. We need to hold our papers and broadcast news outlets to a higher standard, and to speak out more about their inadequacies.

Most of all, we need to debate the issue of national immigration policy based on real data, and not on misleading perceptions from sloppy fiction created by stringers who should be ashamed to call themselves reporters.