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Victims in the heartland: how immigration policy affects us all. (A Special Report On Immigration And Work).

Article Excerpt
Shelbyville, Tenn., is an archetypal American working-class community of 16,000 people. Located 53 miles south of Nashville, it has one high school, one movie theater, six pawnbrokers and no parking meters. Its greatest claim to fame is the Tennessee Walking Horse, a smooth-gaited breed developed and tirelessly promoted locally. But far more visible are the 18-wheel tractor-trailers--each loaded with roughly 5,000 chickens in open metal crates--that rumble through town day and night. They're headed for the cavernous Tyson Foods plant on Shelbyville's west side, next to the Duck River. Tyson Foods Inc., based in Springdale, Ark., is the world's largest processor of chicken, beef and pork, with sales last year of $23.4 billion. With 1,100 employees at its Shelbyville plant, Tyson is also that city's largest employer.

In the mid-1990s, two Shelbyville police officers, Bill Logue and Don Barber, were puzzled by a series of curious incidents. An uncanny number of Hispanic motorists that they stopped for routine traffic violations were presenting obviously bogus driver's licenses or other fake IDs. The officers also were seeing a rash of freshly crumpled cars abandoned on Shelbyville streets. "There were a lot of car crashes with the driver leaving the scene, and there was no insurance on the vehicles," Logue told me when I visited Shelbyville recently.

Logue and Barber's inquiry into the false-ID cases pointed to Amador Anchondo-Rascon, a local Mexican American grocer and former Tyson employee, as a provider of illegal workers to Tyson. To widen the investigation, Logue and Barber sought help from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

When INS undercover agents posing as transporters of illegal aliens approached Anchondo-Rascon, he immediately enlisted them to work with him in supplying undocumented workers to Tyson. Anchondo-Rascon, who later pleaded guilty to various immigration-related offenses and served two years in prison, worked closely with the "transporters" for two-and-a-half years. Operation Everest, as the INS called the sting, resulted in the discovery of 154 illegal aliens being employed at five of Tyson's poultry plants in Oklahoma, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee.

The deliveries were at the core of a 36-count federal indictment that prosecutors obtained against Tyson in December...