632: Our Town - Part One

Ira Glass

Today's whole show came out of this thing that we heard that politicians said. And we wondered-- is that true? Like, was he right? And the answer set us on this eight-month journey, where at some point, like the best journeys, I think, we forgot what the original reason was that we set out. And we just started to learn all kinds of things that we had never imagined back at the beginning.

Where we ended up was Albertville, Alabama, a mountain town in the northern part of the state, a town that went through a huge change in population very quickly. Back in 1990, Albertville was 98% white. Then it got a flood of outsiders, mostly from Mexico, documented and undocumented immigrants. So many people that after just 20 years the all-white town was more than 1/4 Latino. Basically, Albertville was around 15,000 people. It got another 6,000. Most of them came to work in the poultry processing plants in town.

And one nice thing about Albertville-- if you want to understand what really happened there during the town's big change-- it's small enough that you can just show up. Like, everybody's still kind of right there. Like, if you walk into one of the poultry plants and ask, who was the first Latino worker to show up here? They actually know. One of my coworkers, Miki Meek, did just that.

Ira Glass

We did locate this mythical Latino chicken plant Neil Armstrong, Gregorio. And he is kind of shy, wouldn't make eye contact, mumbled. And after we made three visits to his house, he finally got rid of us by fobbing us off on his uncle.

Ira Glass

His uncle, Fernando Martinez, is the opposite of shy-- extroverted, super-friendly, an amateur guitarist and singer with a gigantic mustache and shaggy hair that make him look like the 1970s country rock star, Freddy Fender. Fernando and Gregorio came to the chicken plants in Albertville right when this all began, sometime around 1991, neither can remember exactly. And one of the people Fernando met was Pat. Now in her 60s and eligible for retirement, she's still working, still tough, always on the move.

Ira Glass

She's been at her plant for 44 years and has held just about every job there. Pulled out guts and lungs. Ran the box machine. Sawed chickens into nine-piece meals for KFC. She befriended Fernando and Gregorio.

Ira Glass

Basically, Fernando just sat down at Pat's lunch table one day, and they started talking tentatively. Here's Fernando speaking through an interpreter. It's easier for him than being interviewed in English.

Ira Glass

But then in a few years at this plant, things would get pretty tense and suspicious between the Mexican workers and the local workers, and things would get pretty ugly in town too. But back then at the very beginning, newcomers were a novelty, not a threat. It wasn't hard to get along.

Ira Glass

OK, so we went to Albertville because of something that a politician said, and the politician was Jeff Sessions, longtime Alabama senator, currently President Trump's Attorney General. It's Sessions' views on immigration that have become administration policy. The administration has proposed cutting the number of immigrants who come into this country each year in half.

And it especially targets the kind of workers who arrived in Albertville-- low-wage, unskilled workers who don't speak English. That's something Sessions has been pushing for for over a decade, and it's not a coincidence that those are the workers most targeted. A longtime ally of his in Washington on the immigration issue, Roy Beck, the founder of a group called NumbersUSA, has known Sessions since the '90s, says--

Ira Glass

We wanted to see what Sessions saw, and we went looking for a poultry town that got a ton of immigrants. And in Alabama, the poster town for that is Albertville. Jeff Sessions has visited Albertville. He's spoken there. Met up with the mayor and residents about the immigrants who arrived. And whatever it is that Sessions saw in those Alabama chicken plants, it sent him down the road to some very strong positions. He declined our request for an interview, but here he is on the floor of the Senate in 2007.

Ira Glass

This is him in 2014.

Ira Glass

The former state senator, Scott Beason, who helped write Alabama's landmark 2011 self-deportation bill, once said, quote, "if you don't believe illegal immigration will destroy a community, go and check out parts of Alabama around Albertville." So was Albertville destroyed? Are Beason and Jeff Sessions right? To figure out the answer, we've interviewed more than 100 people, workers and managers at the poultry plants, politicians, law enforcement, documented and undocumented immigrants, kids of immigrants who grew up in town, older white residents who hated the changes.

We also had an economist look at what happened to wages and to jobs. Another economist estimated what it cost the town to pay for schools and public services for the newcomers. This is an issue where one side says that immigrants are an awful threat, stealing jobs, committing crimes, costing taxpayers. And the other side says that they're the exact opposite, the very source of our strength as a country, boosting the economy, adding diversity.

And here at our show we thought for once, rather than hash over those familiar arguments, let's just go to a place where immigration has happened and talk in a factual way about what the hell actually occurs when lots of low-wage, low-skill workers arrive from another country. Like, what's that actually do to everyone's lives? What we learned, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, and I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

So on today's show, we're going to talk about the effect that the newcomers had on jobs. So all the action's going to be inside the chicken plants. Next, we're going to take up what happened in town-- politics, schools, taxes, crime, all that.

My co-host for both shows is going to be my coworker, Miki Meek. She and I have been traveling down to Albertville with our colleague, Lilly Sullivan, many trips over the last eight months. Miki's the one who spent a lot of time talking to poultry workers. And Miki, the changes were a shock to longtime workers, right?

Miki Meek

So yeah, because the chicken plants were pretty much built for them. This happened right after World War II, when the state of Alabama realized it needed a new economic strategy. Cotton and corn weren't bringing in much for small farmers anymore. They wanted to keep people in jobs. So they decided to get the state into poultry production.

They wanted to stick a plant up north to kill and process chickens, and they let different towns compete for it. Albertville won and built the first plant near the middle of town, right next door to the high school. Many more plants joined later. And now poultry companies are the biggest employers in town. Poultry is also the biggest agribusiness in Alabama, almost 10% of the state's economy, a billion chickens every year.

Pat, who you heard earlier, she and her father were exactly the workers who these plants were built for. Growing up, she worked in the cotton fields with her dad. Then he got a job in a plant, and she followed him in soon after. She started as a giblet wrapper.

Miki Meek

Everybody knew the chicken plant was good pay, benefits, retirement, a decent job if you didn't finish high school. And that's mostly who took the jobs. Pat dropped out after ninth grade, got married, and had two kids. She took a job at the plant because--

Ira Glass

One unusual thing about these poultry plants-- by the late 1980s, there were long term workers at the plants, for sure. But turnover was so high in the plants it's like you could always show up and just expect to get a job. You fall on tough times, you need to pick up money for a family emergency, you knew the plant was there.

The plants were like a public utility in that way. The head of HR at one of the plants, Tom Howell, said that when he started at Wayne Farms back in 1990-- this is before tons of Mexican workers showed up-- it was common to hire the same person five or six times in the same year.

Ira Glass

People joked that you could quit one plant in the morning and get hired by another plant in the afternoon. And the first real change to that came in the mid-1990s. By then, there was a rapid and steady stream of Mexican workers arriving, hundreds of them, mostly men, mostly here without their families.

Miki Meek

One of Pat's good friends is an especially helpful witness to what happened in their plant. This is a woman everybody calls Miss Martha-- wavy brown and gray hair and glasses. She's been there since the '70s and works at the supply window, which means she talks to just about everyone. They all have to go to her window to pick up gloves and aprons.

Miki Meek

She says she likes to play 20 Questions at the window. I made her tell me some of the questions.

Miki Meek

She says when the Latino workers showed up, they and the local workers were kind of just thrown together in this fast-paced industrial workplace and had to improvise without being able to speak the same language. And it could be kind of nerve-wracking. Martha would train people on the saw line.

Miki Meek

But while they were working side by side there was this feeling of like, where'd these people come from? Why were they here all of a sudden and so many of them?

Miki Meek

There were a lot of things that just look really sketchy. People would get fired and come back to work. And when they came back, they had a different name. Pat remembers watching one woman fill out a form they had if you wanted to get your birthday off. The woman was young, maybe early 30s.

Miki Meek

That's Martha again, and she's talking about quinceaneras, which you celebrate when you turn 15.

Miki Meek

It seemed like the Mexicans were getting away with something. They were cheating the system. They were not here legally, and the company was helping them do it. Maybe the Mexicans weren't paying the same taxes. Lots of workers believe that, though, it wasn't true. The companies were required to take them out automatically.

Regardless, longtime workers started to believe the same thing that Jeff Sessions came to believe, that these new immigrants were taking jobs that didn't belong to them. A quiet resentment set in among the white workers at the plants. Everyone says you'd walk in and you could feel it. We'll hear the company's side of all this in the second half of the show.

They have a totally different story to tell. But the icing on the cake for the workers was that the company seemed to like what was happening. In fact, maybe they were even behind it. There's this thing I heard over and over from almost every local I talked to. Again, here's Pat and Martha.

Miki Meek

I never could find a picture of it. Some locals said it was more than one billboard. Some said it was in Texas. One woman said she saw it in Tijuana. But always, the sign named exactly one town in the whole country-- Albertville, Alabama.

Miki Meek

So was there a sign at the border? I talked to a bunch of the men who came to Albertville in that first wave of Mexican workers about whether that's what brought them to town.

Miki Meek

They literally never heard of this. They worked side by side with the local workers for 20 years and had no idea that this was the story going around about them. This is a story that every local we talked to had heard of. So, no, they were not in the US because of a sign at the border.

In fact, what the American workers didn't know about these guys is that lots of these men who arrived in the early '90s had been in this country for years. They were not newly arrived immigrants stealing American jobs. They'd been here working and got amnesty when Ronald Reagan signed his big immigration reform in 1986. It legalized almost 3,000,000 people.

Some were seasonal workers in the tomato fields close to Albertville. Some were on farms in Oregon, California, Florida, Michigan. Some did construction work. They made their way to town, and the chicken plant seemed like a good deal. This was work that would happen regardless of rain or snow, no off months, a reliable paycheck. And even better, they could finally stay in one place, which meant they could also finally bring their families from Mexico.

This worker, we'll call Carlos, is pretty typical of that first wave. He'd been in the US since the '70s, got amnesty under Reagan, had five kids and a wife in Guanajuato that he only got to see once a year. He says he tried to stay connected to them by sometimes putting on his best clothes and going out with a camera.

Miki Meek

He was the foreman of an apple orchard in Michigan, a good job. But in Albertville, his wife could work with him at the chicken plant, double their income. They could send their kids to a much better school than back home.

And so after the first wave of men moved to town, word spread about these jobs, and the population started to shift from people who were in the country legally to lots of workers and family members who were not, who moved here directly from Mexico, arriving into town in packed cars and vans. Carlos says he brought his family legally but also told lots of people back home.

Ira Glass

They needed the work, because Mexico was in economic crisis. The currency crashed in 1994. NAFTA knocked lots of Mexicans out of work and hit small farmers hard, and a surge of people came to the United States. The number of undocumented people here more than tripled from 3.5 million in 1990 to over 11 million in 2010.

And large numbers were arriving in the southeast US for the first time. Carlos guessed that maybe 3,000 came to Albertville from his hometown at Guanajuato. Lots of people told us they liked how small Albertville was. That it wasn't a big city. It was pretty. It felt safe. It reminded them of home.

So when American workers in the Albertville plants looked around and wondered why in the world all these newcomers were suddenly showing up in their little town, this was the thing they didn't realize-- that an historic migration was under way, mostly from Mexico. The newcomers ended up in poultry plants all across the South-- Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas.

Because coincidentally, the poultry business was going through its own massive changes. It was desperate for employees. The poultry business was booming in the early '90s like it never had before. The industry had figured out how to make chickens grow to full size more cheaply in a much shorter period of time. And they were rebranding chicken from the special meal that you'd have once a week to total ubiquity, a healthy, convenient alternative to red meat.

[MUSIC - "CHICKEN TONIGHT"]

This Ragu commercial haunts the dreams of a generation of TV watchers. There's also the less healthy fast food version of chicken. Tyson started production of the McNugget for McDonald's, and soon chicken was everywhere.

Ira Glass

That's Little Richard for Taco Bell. Homer Simpson advertised Church's Chicken.

Ira Glass

The price dropped dramatically. People went from eating about 28 pounds of chicken a year in 1960 to almost 90 pounds per person per year today. Albertville's plants added the lines that took whole chickens and cut them up into the options you now see in the grocery store-- wings, tenders, boneless and skinless thighs and breasts. Their international market exploded, shipping dark meats, organs, and feet to Russia and China.

And that's the engine that was pulling in all these new workers to Albertville. The plant that's now Tyson Foods nearly quadrupled, from 250 workers to more than 900. Wayne Farms added around another 200 jobs. If there hadn't been a flood of new foreign workers to take those jobs, the companies might have had to pay more to attract employees to the plants. But that was not a choice they ever had to make.

Miki Meek

For the people who came with no papers, all the stuff that seemed so underhanded and devious to their American coworkers, it was surprisingly easy to pull off. This guy Oscar arrived in Albertville from Guanajuato in 1995, right before he turned 16, to join his father in the chicken plants. Legal age to work in a plant was 18, but that wasn't an obstacle.

Miki Meek

The guy in the ID was probably 25, 26. His name was Jose Lopez. And from then on, that's the name that Oscar went by.

Miki Meek

It was really striking talking to them-- how the arrival of these Latino workers blew the minds of the local workers, turned their world upside down. But the Mexican workers didn't have any of that. They didn't have a lot of emotions about their white coworkers, didn't spend a lot of time thinking or worrying about them.

If the white workers didn't like them, whatever. They'd been through worse. Again, here's Fernando-- the guy who called Pat, Patricia.

Miki Meek

This guy named Claudio said he started trying to learn English, because he sensed his American coworkers were talking about him.

Miki Meek

He says his daughter was in elementary school. Quick warning, this story has a curse word we've unbeeped here on the podcast. Anyway, one day, one of his American coworkers got mad at the way he was hanging live birds on the conveyor belt.

Miki Meek

Again, here's Fernando.

Miki Meek

He says he could get away with talking back because he had papers. There's no official estimate of how much of Albertville's Latino population was undocumented back then or is undocumented now. But people who know the community best-- who work as advocates and deal with tons of families-- say it's more than half undocumented. And maybe a lot more than half. The first waves were from Mexico. And then later, people from Guatemala and elsewhere.

Ira Glass

Lots of local workers said it wasn't long before management seemed to prefer the new Latino workers-- thought they were better workers. They picked up double shifts, didn't want to call attention to themselves or cause any problems. They didn't want to do anything that could make them lose their jobs-- didn't complain, didn't make a big deal about injuries. This is true even for the documented workers.

The government calls meat and poultry processing one of the most hazardous industries in the country. People get cut from working with sharp knives and scissors, they develop carpal tunnel syndrome from all the repetitive motion on the line. Carlos said that when he and his wife would get swollen hands from working on the line, he'd press on his fingers and blood and yellow puss would come out, chicken bones would get stuck under his fingernails, but he would just keep working.

Ira Glass

Carlos agrees with the local workers-- that the companies prefer Latinos. He'd see it play out at his plant.

Miki Meek

He was one of a handful of black workers at his plant. When Latino workers came in, he says it was the first time he felt unified with his white coworkers-- both saw themselves as the American workers. Again, here's Pat.

Ira Glass

Coming up, the government steps in on the side of the local workers. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, what actually happens when immigrants arrive in large numbers? We're telling the story of Albertville, Alabama, which went from being a nearly all-white, Southern town to a town that's now lots of immigrants-- more than half of them undocumented, best as we can tell. My co-host for the hour is Miki Meek.

And at this point in our story, the longtime workers in the chicken plants have this feeling that there's right, and there's wrong, and people are breaking the law-- obviously, here illegally. And everybody's acting like this is just fine, and normal, and what the hell? And the companies seem to be not just fine with this but probably encouraging it. And some plants, evidence came in 1995, of just how much the companies knew and how far they'd go to keep undocumented workers in the plants.

That year, the government decided to take aggressive action against the wave of undocumented Mexican workers that were moving into poultry plants, carpet factories, and hotel jobs all across the South. They launched a series of raids, called Operation SouthPAW. PAW was short for Protecting American Workers.

Ira Glass

The goal was to create job openings for American workers by arresting lots of people at work sites. A big show of force with over 100 INS and Border Patrol agents. They rode into Albertville with empty buses to haul people off to deportation. At the Gold Kist plant outside of town, workers cheered when they arrived. But at Hudson Foods, management had worked out a system to deal with the raids.

Miki Meek

I talked to Mark Ginzo. He worked at Hudson Foods as a bilingual chaplain. This is something you see at some chicken plants around the south-- chaplains to minister to the workers. Mark remembers they were raided a few times. And they'd know in advance if immigration was coming, because agents had to get a warrant first.

Miki Meek

This company, Hudson Foods, doesn't exist anymore. It was bought out. So we couldn't ask them to comment. But the INS agent who led the raid in Albertville, Bart Szafnicki, told me it was common for companies and all sorts of industries to hide workers. Sometimes it got ridiculous. He remembers a manager insisting he didn't have any undocumented workers, and then a guy fell through the ceiling and landed on his desk.

Bart pointed out, there's never been a serious crack down on employers. These raids were short lived. The fines were low. The chances of getting caught were small. Bart found it frustrating. Congress never had the political will to go after the companies that hire undocumented workers. There are congressmen who talk tough on immigration, but when INS went after work sites in their districts, they told them to back off.

Politically, it's always been easier to scapegoat the people who crossed the border than to go after employers. Martha and Pat's plant never got raided for whatever reason. But Martha told me some of their American coworkers took things into their own hands.

Miki Meek

Wayne Gable-- a maintenance worker now retired. He wasn't shy talking about this.

Miki Meek

HR people who worked around Albertville at Tyson Foods, Wayne Farms, and Gold Kist, back in the mid '90s, told us that, sure, they suspected people were working under false papers. But they say, what could they do? Once an applicant presented documents proving they could work, the law limited them from probing and digging beyond that. Bruce Williams worked in HR at Wayne Farms back in the '90s.

Ira Glass

This is true. It goes back to President Reagan's 1986 Amnesty Law. That's the first time it became a crime in this country to knowingly hire somebody who should not be here. The key word in the law is knowingly. If a company knowingly hired somebody they shouldn't, that's when they got in trouble. But the law also said that if somebody's documents look legitimate, if they, quote, "appear to be genuine on their face, the employer must accept them and cannot question them or ask for more documentation." These are the rules that we still live under today.

And when the law was first passed, HR departments and companies all over the country were unprepared. They had no idea how to evaluate all the different forms of ID people were presenting-- birth certificates, and school records, and Native American tribal documents, and foreign passports with special work authorization stamps. They couldn't tell whether they seemed genuine on their face.

So in 1995, Congress, in a very practical, bipartisan way that we almost never see any more, decided that it had to fix the problem and come up with a simple way for employers to tell who is legal to work in the United States and who isn't, to figure out who they could hire.

Ira Glass

Senator Dianne Feinstein warned, at the time, they had to solve this crisis now-- of immigrants coming in illegally and getting these jobs.

Ira Glass

Obviously, they didn't solve it. And here we are today. A bipartisan commission called the Jordan Commission considered a bunch of solutions. One of the things they ended up proposing was a national computerized system to check people's IDs, and make sure they were valid, and their social security numbers are real. This is the system we've come to know as E-Verify.

The commission wanted it to be mandatory everywhere, but an almost laughably wide ranging coalition rose up against it. This was the ACLU, plus the NRA, plus church groups, plus business interests, plus La Raza. They all saw it as Big Brother government intrusion. So a voluntary program moved forward. A few of the poultry plants in Albertville voluntarily signed up for the pilot program of E-Verify in the late '90s. Tom Howell, at Wayne Farms, says they were the first.

Miki Meek

Workers confirmed this. Inviting your boss to your quinceanera was not a good idea. But like Tom said, E-Verify couldn't detect when someone presented valid papers that actually had been issued to someone else. And so lots of people slipped through.

A study commissioned by the government in 2009 found that over half of undocumented workers with fake papers-- people E-Verify should have caught-- got a clean bill of health. What this means is that E-Verify worked out in a very convenient way for employers. They could simultaneously keep a huge illegal workforce while saying they were doing everything possible to root out that workforce. Pat says if she learned about someone who had a fake ID, sometimes she went to her supervisor and was told--

Miki Meek

So by the early 2000s, you have all these undocumented workers not getting caught by E-Verify working in the Albertville plants, which raises the central question you come to when we talk about immigration-- did Americans end up out of work because of it? As Jeff Sessions puts it--

Miki Meek

Or as Martha says-- and by the way, she's a Democrat. Voted for Clinton.

Ira Glass

So did these immigrants result in Americans out of work? To answer that, we turn to a labor economist who's made this kind of question his life's work, Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis.

Ira Glass

Peri did a study for us comparing the area around Albertville and counties in Alabama that had similar job markets but did not get a lot of immigrants. And it looked at the Americans most likely to lose their jobs to those immigrants, the ones competing against them for those poultry jobs. These are people who did not finish high school.

Ira Glass

In other words, so many people moved to Albertville-- remember, it's over 6,000 people who moved in. And they had to rent places to live and buy groceries and gas and other stuff in this little town. And the labor fueled the expansion of the poultry plants and all the businesses associated with poultry.

So even if fewer American workers were in the plants themselves, it created tons of work around town. And the numbers show the Americans found work elsewhere.

What's interesting is that all of that was invisible to the local workers in the plants. They didn't see the economy of the whole town. They didn't see the jobs being created everywhere. They saw what was right in front of them in the plant, which was immigrants getting hired there.

They weren't wrong about that. By the early 2000s, just 10 years after Latino workers first arrived in the plants, they dominated the workforce there. Whites were in the minority. Again, here's Martha.

Miki Meek

Martha believes it's no accident that the workforce flipped like this. She believes the companies had a strong incentive to hire Latino workers rather than the locals. And the incentive was a big one. They didn't join the union, most of them anyway.

The two big Albertville plants, Tyson Foods and Wayne Farms, are union shops. Which is unusual for poultry and unusual in Alabama, which is a right-to-work state. Which means workers can opt out of the union and not pay dues.

Pat's a lifelong union member. Martha's chief steward at her plant. For years, the union had fought for better conditions and higher pay. And Pat and Martha's biggest frustration with her Latino coworkers is that they couldn't convince them to join.

Miki Meek

Latino workers we talked to confirmed this. They didn't want to pay the extra money. They get the same salary and benefits regardless of whether they paid dues and joined the union. So why bother? The union president during the '90s, Joe Ellis, agrees with Martha that the companies were deliberately hiring Latino workers as a strategy to weaken the union.

Miki Meek

The union sent us records for 1991 that show membership at one of the plants, Wayne Farms, at 94.5%. Wayne Farms disputes this number, says membership has never been that high.

Today, the union says they're in the mid-40s at both union plants in town. The unions lost their 30-minute paid breaks. Raises are minimal.

Ira Glass

The companies-- Wayne Farms and Tyson Foods-- were adamant that they were not hiring Latino workers as a strategy to weaken the union. They said they didn't do anything to specially recruit Latino workers. And by the way, as long as we're on the subject, they said they did not put up a sign or signs on the border with Mexico.

They said what happened was simple. The population of people applying for jobs changed. And they hired whoever applied and was qualified.

Remember, these are plants with incredibly high turnover, always scrambling to hire people. And during the '90s, they got all their workers through the state employment office. It was the state employment office sending over the people to fill the jobs. And Latino applicants are who they sent. Bruce Williams was in HR during the '90s and 2000s at Wayne Farms.

Ira Glass

Even if the Albertville plants never actively sought out or recruited Latino workers, it's important to note that it's been documented that poultry companies elsewhere did by sending scouts to Texas and Florida and running ads in Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations. Tyson Foods was indicted in 2001 by federal prosecutors for recruiting workers from outside the United States, from Mexico and Central America, and helping them get fake documents. The government lost that case when it failed to prove that this was a company-sanctioned practice, not just some rogue employees at a few of the plants.

Miki Meek

To be clear, the fact that so few local workers are in the plants today, Pat and Martha don't entirely blame the companies for that. Today, Pat no longer believes there was a sign on the border. They say it was a mixture of things.

Their peers started to retire out. And their kids don't work at the plant. More kids in town are graduating high school and have other options for work. And they said some locals just didn't want to come to work at a place that's mostly Latino.

But at the same time, they're convinced that there were periods where the companies did preferentially hire Latino workers, stretches where it really felt like locals couldn't get a job. They'd hear about locals putting in applications but taking a long time to get hired or not getting hired at all. And meanwhile, lots of Latino workers were coming through.

And fact is it really was harder for local workers to get a job than it had been in the past. Pat and Martha and other locals were right about that. Latino workers would line up at 2:00 in the morning for job applications. And by the time local workers showed up, the jobs would be taken.

And the companies got pickier. Plants added a three-strikes policy, and they tried to stick to it. That if you quit three times, they weren't going to hire you again. The old mirror-test days were over.

You could sum up the last quarter-century at the Albertville chicken plants this way. Chicken boomed, foreigners arrived, and wages didn't grow-- at least for Pat and Martha-- even though poultry companies made huge profits during the boom. Again, here's Pat.

Ira Glass

She makes around $25,000 a year. If her wages had simply kept up with inflation, and she made the same thing as she did back when she started on August the 13th, 1973, she'd now be making $48,000 a year-- basically double. Also, back then, she says she didn't have to pay for her insurance. But now she does. And those costs go up every contract.

But how much of the stagnation in her wages is because of immigrants? The economist we talked to, Giovanni Peri, pointed out to us that it's not just Pat and her coworkers in Alabama who've taken this horrible hit to their wages.

Ira Glass

This is all across America. And not just people without a high school education. It's about half the country whose wages have stayed flat or dropped when you account for inflation. The people without a high school degree like Pat have taken the worst of it. There's been a massive transfer of income to managers and shareholders and people at the top of the economic ladder thanks to automation, a low minimum wage, foreign trade with places like China, the decline of unions.

Nationally, the meatpacking unions have been losing power since the '60s. A few years back, a sociologist named Jackie Gabriel researched which came first in the meatpacking industry-- wage stagnation or immigrants. She found that it went like this. Back in the '60s, the meat industry restructured in ways that weakened the unions.

That led to pay cuts. And those pay cuts made the jobs way less attractive to American workers. And that paved the way for immigrants to come in and take those jobs. In other words, it wasn't immigrants that led to wage stagnation but the other way around.

But that still leaves a question. And that is, did the massive arrival of immigrants in the '90s and 2000s all over the country make it worse? After all, in Albertville, it was thousands of people. Did that push down Pat and Martha's wages?

Well, Giovanni Peri ran the numbers for us. Again, he compared Albertville to counties in Alabama with similar job markets that did not get lots of immigrants. And he found that after 20 years of immigrants pouring into the area around Albertville, the wages of people without a high school education did have a bigger drop than the counties without all those immigrants. Their wages were 7% lower, which works out to--

Ira Glass

$23 a week. That adds up to $1,200 per year, per worker. So it's real money.

When I showed this result to other economists, they said this was not surprising at all. This is usually what studies find. Though in most studies, the change is smaller than this. Most studies of people across the ideological spectrum find that when immigrants like this arrive, the effect on wages is not massive. In fact, it's pretty modest-- just a few percentage points or nothing at all.

But the people affected are the ones without a high school diploma. These studies show that everybody else in the economy, everyone who's graduated high school or more, either they see no change-- that's what happened in Albertville-- or they see a tiny improvement. The wages go up just a couple percentage points.

And the one group whose wages suffer, Americans without a high school diploma, that group is not much of the country. It's been shrinking for decades. It's just 10% of adults today.

This is why so many economists are always saying that immigration is good for the economy. Because overall, the economy gets a boost. And only 10% of wage earners take a hit. Which, of course, sounds great unless you're in that 10%, like Pat, who didn't graduate high school.

Miki Meek

We ran Peri's numbers by her-- his finding that her wages dropped $23 a week-- more than places in Alabama that didn't get all those immigrants. Giovanni Peri cautioned us that $23 a week is the very most the immigrants might have knocked down Pat's wages. There's a big margin of error in this study. So the number might be a lot less, which I told her.

Miki Meek

After all these years, it's hard not to notice that there's a symmetry in the lives of the old-time workers like Pat and the immigrants who arrived to work alongside them. Both groups never finished high school. Both groups used the chicken plants as a way to pull their families out of working in the fields. Both are incredibly proud that this is what let them buy a house, cars, send their kids to school, make sure they finished and didn't end up at the plants like them.

And they've both seen their real wages drop over the last 20 years. Carlos has been in the US since the late '70s and sounds very similar to Pat when he talks about this.

Ira Glass

And this brings us back to Jeff Sessions, senator and attorney general, who was the reason that we went to Albertville in the first place. When Sessions explains what he's trying to achieve by limiting immigration, he always talks about working people. He barely sounds like a Republican. Says our system's too biased towards corporations and capital formation and people at the top.

Ira Glass

Thing is, even if Sessions had managed to block immigrants from ever coming to Albertville in the first place, or if the administration that he serves figures out how to do that now, the main things in America driving down wages weren't immigrants at all.

[MUSIC - "WORKIN' WOMAN BLUES" BY VALERIE JUNE]

Next week on our show, we go into town to see what 6,000 newcomers cost taxpayers, and what it was like to have all these immigrants who'd never driven cars before suddenly on the roads not understanding what a stop sign is, and why a Latino business owner told his friend to run for mayor on the platform of kicking out all the immigrants.

Ira Glass

Our program today was reported and produced by Miki Meek with additional reporting from Lilly Sullivan, and Diane Wu, and me. Our interpreter was Gabriela Munoz. Fact-checking by Christopher Swetala and Michelle Harris. Original music by Marcus Thorne Bagala.

People who put our show together today include Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Neil Drumming, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Jonathan Menjivar, BA Parker, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Lyra Smith, Julie Snyder, and Matt Tierney.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, where this week you can nerd out on Giovanni Peri research on Albertville-- with charts-- thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, for some reason, he has always referred to his employees as chickens and described his own job as--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories about Albertville and This American Life.

[MUSIC - "WORKIN' WOMAN BLUES" BY VALERIE JUNE]