Illegal immigration does not play well in Kansas. Those who come to this country without the benefit of legal status and then work for subsistence wages draw the ire of most Kansans. I maintain their anger is misdirected.

If you want someone to blame, start with corporate interests in the meat-packing industry. And begin with what they did in the late 1960s when Kansas passed the Right to Work law. Free from union representation, the big boys in corporate America began shopping around for locations to build meat-packing plants. Western Kansas looked good because the homogenous communities seldom suffered from labor unrest and outside influences. Few minorities and even fewer social resources existed. But here's the rub.

Just who did those companies expect to hire? Oh sure, there were some white boys out there willing to work hard, but that didn’t last long. Realizing wages were low and benefits pitiful, those guys didn’t want to be bothered. In no time workers became scarce on the ground. But corporate interests anticipated that scenario. They had a plan.

You see, a century ago meat-packing representatives traveled to Eastern Europe, Italy and Russia hoping to entice men to Chicago and other Midwestern cities. Their efforts paid off and immigrants arrived in droves, going to work at meat-packing companies, and sending for wives, children and relatives to join them. However, once inside the meat-packing plants, immigrants soon learned the work expected of them was dangerous and dirty.

And their wages? Better than anything they could earn in Europe. But this was America where labor interests empowered workers to speak out. With stagnate wages strangling their ability to feed their families, the newly arrived immigrants turned to their first line of defense, the Catholic Church. Lay leaders and priests encouraged them to join unions, which they did, and meat packers and butchers soon became the best-paid union workers in Chicago.

Now fast forward seven decades to western Kansas. As the men of the plains began to push back and refuse to work for cheap wages and in dangerous conditions, meat-packing companies knew how to respond. Company officials headed to Mexico and southeast Asia, knowing full well that far different attitudes and much stricter immigration existed in the mid-Twentieth Century America. But the meat-packing companies wanted cheap labor.

And they got it. Arriving in Garden City, Liberal and Dodge City, the new immigrants didn’t take long to discover their jobs were done in dangerous and dirty conditions. And the wages? Yes, the money was better than Mexico or Thailand, but this was America. However it was a slice of America where the options were fewer than Chicago. Not a lot of Catholics and no unions.

The Polish in Chicago eventually melted into a suburban existence thanks to union-scale wages, but Latinos in Dodge City remained isolated thanks to subsistence salaries forcing them into substandard housing and decaying neighborhoods. The Italians in Kansas City went from butchers to meat company owners, and yet Thai workers in Garden City barely lived from pay check to pay check.

What accounts for the difference? Income and culture. Union representation forced the meat-packing industry to share the largess of its profits by paying workers decent wages and benefits. Moving from immigrant status to the middle class, union butchers and meat packers felt invested in their companies and communities. They assimilated.

But circumstances were not repeated in western Kansas. Encouraged by the promise of work, Latinos and Asians entered the country under the shadow of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to work for low wages and few benefits. Injuries or illness meant termination and disaster. Their illegal status, limited resources and latent racism kept them from demanding better wages and working conditions.

Now if that weren’t bad enough, their neighbors in western Kansas communities began to push back because of their presence among them. Oh sure, their towns enjoyed the benefits of corporate investments but in the meantime their communities had drastically changed. As educators endeavored to teach English to newly arrived immigrant children, public schools served as the front line of defense. County health departments struggled to provide medical care to women and children whose husbands’ employers failed to offer decent health care benefits. When culture barriers ignited misunderstandings and violence, law enforcement struggled to keep the peace.

So who bears the brunt of the reality created by the meat-packing companies? Undocumented workers and their families. Who gets off scot free? Corporate meat-packing companies, who take no responsibility for the social dishevel caused by their recruitment policies. If you hold all Kansas employers strictly responsible for the citizenship status of the people they hired, the stream of illegal aliens dries up.

As Kansans look around for a scapegoat in the immigration mess, look no further than the corporate executives in the meat-packing industry. Their greed drew illegals to Kansas and that’s got to stop.