Biden flooded the meatpacking labor market with desperate migrants – and workers paid for it with forty years of stolen wages.
Trump closed the pipeline.
Now the world's largest meatpacker is suddenly at the table – and what they're offering tells you everything about who was really running the country before January 2025.
How Biden's Open Border Crushed Meatpacking Wages for Forty Years
This story didn't start in Greeley last month.
In 1977, a meatpacking job paid $20 an hour in today's dollars – union wages, good benefits, middle-class work.
By 2001, that same job paid $10.50.
The meatpackers didn't get poorer. They got smarter about who they hired.
Starting in the 1980s, companies like IBP and Cargill closed their unionized plants in Chicago and Kansas City, reopened in rural Nebraska and North Carolina, and deliberately recruited immigrant workers who didn't know their rights, couldn't easily organize, and had no choice but to accept whatever they were offered.
Washington made it possible every step of the way.
Federal refugee resettlement programs delivered the workers.
Federal immigration policy kept the pipeline open.
And corporations kept wages low because they never had to compete for labor – a new wave of desperate, controllable workers was always one policy decision away.
By Biden's last year, workers at the Greeley plant had seen wage increases of just 7 percent since late 2021 – while their healthcare contributions shot up nearly 40 percent.
JBS, meanwhile, was reporting $415 million in quarterly profits.
Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies called it what it was: the government was "delivering an endless supply of cheap, controllable, desperate workers" while actively "disincentivizing companies from making investments in machinery that increase the productivity of workers."
https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/2039331311106600989?s=20
That's not a side effect. That's the business model.
Trump Closed the Border and Meatpacking Workers Got a Pension
Trump cut off the pipeline.
No new waves of migrants flooding the labor market. No more bottomless supply of workers too scared to demand a living wage.
The result was immediate.
In June 2025, JBS was forced to grant pay raises, sick leave, and a pension plan to 26,000 meatpacking workers across Iowa.
Thelma Cruz, who had worked at the JBS pork plant in Marshalltown for a decade, said when she heard about the pension: "My husband also works here, and when we retire, we will both get pension checks every month."
That's what a tight labor market does for American workers.
Now JBS is back at the table in Greeley – offering wage increases, a pension, and better benefits – after a three-week strike shut down one of the largest beef-processing facilities in the country.
It was the first major meatpacking strike in forty years.
It worked because Trump made it possible.
The Refugee Resettlement Racket That Kept Beef Prices Up and Wages Down
The progressive organizations that spent decades importing desperate workers to staff these plants – funded by your tax dollars – called it humanitarian work.
They called it refugee resettlement.
What it actually was is something Krikorian nailed in one sentence: they were "tools of capital."
Left-wing groups delivered migrants to meatpackers.
Those migrants were too scared to unionize, too unfamiliar with American labor law to push back, and too economically desperate to say no. The corporations got what they paid for.
https://twitter.com/NeilMunroDC/status/2041689740840141030?s=20
The workers – immigrant and American alike – got crushed.
"The left has ceded the pro-worker argument to Republicans, to Trump specifically," Krikorian said.
He's right. And the proof is in Greeley, Colorado right now.
Trump didn't restore meatpacking wages by giving a speech about worker dignity.
He did it by turning off the faucet of cheap, exploitable labor that Wall Street had been addicted to for forty years.
The Heritage Foundation confirmed the broader result: under Trump, real median weekly paychecks have reached their highest point since Biden took office – driven directly by the tightening labor market that immigration enforcement created.
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin said out loud that "the southern border was the source of people willing to do tough jobs for modest wages" and complained that Trump "rolled back the welcome mat too much."
Translation: Griffin liked it better when corporations had an endless supply of workers too desperate to negotiate.
Trump ended that arrangement.
American workers – in Marshalltown, in Greeley, and in every meatpacking town across this country – are already seeing it in their paychecks.
Sources:
- Neil Munro, "Trump's Migration Rules Force Wage Gains in Meatpacking," Breitbart, April 7, 2026.
- "Workers Halt Strike at Major US Meatpacking Plant, Resume Negotiations," Greeley Today, April 5, 2026.
- "American Workers Are Benefiting from Secure Borders and Immigration Enforcement," Federation for American Immigration Reform, July 2025.
- "Trump's Immigration Reset Is Lifting Wages and Forcing Real Economic Reform," The Heritage Foundation, 2025.
- Mark Krikorian, "Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement at Meatpacking Plants in Seven States," Center for Immigration Studies.
