Posted on Sat, Sep. 13, 2008
Meatpacking town of Milan, Mo., worries about immigration raids like recent one in Iowa
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star

MILAN, Mo. | It takes a lot of sturdy, even desperate, people to turn 10,000 hogs a day into mountains of pork chops and tenderloins.

At its best, the work is grueling. Even in a modern processing plant like the Farmland Foods Inc. facility here, workers must persevere through robotically repetitive tasks with impossibly sharp knives or bear heavy lifting that could buckle a linebacker.

So even though the plant’s wages are generous for rural Missouri — starting at $11.25 an hour with a chance to get beyond $25 an hour — it has taken a wave of largely Latino immigrants to fill the jobs.

That’s transformed Sullivan County from nearly all-white to nearly half-brown. After a difficult transition, schools are now geared to embrace Spanish-speaking kids, and rely on their numbers for state financing. Housing vacancies have given way to men crowding eight to a one-bedroom apartment while demand from Hispanic families has prevented home prices from falling. Taxes from the plant and its workers keep local government afloat.

“I hate to think what we’d do without them,â€