I Graduated from College, Walked Into Hormel, and Was Told There Were No Jobs. 45 Undocumented Workers Didn’t Show Up the Next Monday.

By Tyler Bass | Bass for Congress | Vote August 11th — Republican Primary

I want to tell you a personal story. Not a policy story. Not a campaign talking point. A real story from a real moment in my life that changed the way I see this country and what it owes its own people.

It is 2010. I just graduated from college. I played college football. I worked my way through school — not on an internship, not in some cushy corporate pipeline that guaranteed a job before I walked across the stage — but actually worked. Paid bills. Stayed afloat. Did what needed to be done.

A lot of my teammates and classmates had it differently. Several of them landed internships at Hormel and other large companies while the rest of us were working summer jobs just to keep the lights on. They knew going into their senior year that a job was waiting for them. They had the connections, the timing, the luck of being in the right place. I wasn’t bitter about it — that’s how the world works sometimes — but I filed it away. I understood that the corporate world had already made certain decisions before the rest of us even had a chance to compete.

When I graduated, I went everywhere. I was not afraid of hard work. I had done factory work throughout college — I knew what it was to stand on a line, to do repetitive physical labor, to show up tired and push through it anyway. A factory floor was not intimidating to me. I saw it as a starting point. I had a degree. I had a work ethic. I had ambition. I figured I could get my foot in the door and work my way up. That’s what we’re told the system is supposed to reward.

I filled out a few hundred applications on Monster.com — the Indeed of its era, for those of you old enough to remember — and I also went out physically, driving from location to location, walking in, shaking hands, dropping off resumes. That’s how I was raised. Show up. Look someone in the eye. Let them see that you’re real.

One of the places I went was Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota.

The Smile, the “No,” and the Resume That Disappeared

I walked into the HR department at Hormel and asked if they were hiring.

The person behind the desk smiled at me. Kindly. Professionally. And told me no.

They took my resume. I thanked them, walked out, got in my car, and drove to the next stop.

I didn’t think much of it at the time — it was one of dozens of identical conversations I was having every week. Apply, wait, hear nothing, move on. That was the rhythm of job searching in 2010 for a new graduate without connections in a state where the economy was still digging out from the 2008 financial crisis. You kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.

But here is where the story takes a turn that I have never forgotten.

The Traffic Stop. The Warning. The 45 Empty Workstations.

A month or two after I walked into that HR office, an undocumented worker from the Hormel plant was pulled over by local police during a routine traffic stop. The kind of stop that happens hundreds of times a day across Minnesota — a tail light, a lane change, a registration check.

In the course of that stop, it came out that the man was in the country illegally. And in what I can only describe as an almost unbelievably brazen moment, law enforcement — whether as a test or as a gesture of warning, I’ll let you decide — essentially told this man to let his coworkers know that there was going to be a raid at the Hormel plant the following Monday.

Monday came.

Forty-five workers didn’t show up.

Forty-five. Not one. Not a handful. Forty-five people who had been working in that plant, on that floor, in those jobs — vanished over the weekend rather than face deportation.

No raid ever happened, of course. This was 2010, and as the Mower County Sheriff’s Office confirmed publicly around the same time, local authorities had been told flat out by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement that ICE simply would not conduct workplace raids. Not in Austin. Not at Hormel. Not at Quality Pork Processors next door. Period.

The sheriff herself said publicly that she had sat down with ICE and been told directly: “We won’t do a raid. Period.” She called it “very frustrating” that local law enforcement was powerless to act even when undocumented workers were, in her words, “frequently discovered” at those facilities.

So here is what I knew at that moment, as a 22-year-old college graduate who had just been smiled at and told there were no jobs at Hormel:

There were jobs. There had been jobs the whole time. At least 45 of them. Probably more.

I just wasn’t the kind of applicant those jobs were being held for.

What This Means — Not Just for Me, But for Every American Who Got That Same Smile

I want to be very careful here about how I tell this part of the story, because it is easy to let the anger of it overshadow the actual point.

The actual point is not about me.

I figured it out. I built my own path. I moved to the Twin Cities in 2013, started a company as a personal trainer, grew it, pivoted into contracting, built more companies, created jobs, and made something out of nothing. That’s my story and I’m proud of it.

But the story of those 45 empty workstations is not my story. It belongs to everyone who never figured it out. To the stay-at-home mom in Mower County who applied to Hormel and heard the same “no” I heard, and who is on welfare today not because she chose not to work but because the job she was qualified for was being held by someone the company preferred to hire because they cost less and complained less and couldn’t call a lawyer if something went wrong.

It belongs to the dad with four kids who drove to that same HR office, dropped off the same resume, and walked back to his truck with nothing — not because he wasn’t capable, not because he wouldn’t have shown up every day and worked his tail off, but because the company had already made its decision before he walked through the door.

It belongs to the single parent buying baby formula on WIC because the manufacturing income that used to support a modest family lifestyle in small-town Minnesota has been systematically undercut by decades of corporate decisions to prefer workers who can’t speak up over workers who can.

That is the real cost. Not just the paycheck. The entire downstream cascade of what happens to families and communities when big corporations decide that their profit margins matter more than the people who live in the towns where their plants sit.

How Big Corporations Turned a Good-Paying Industry Into an Exploitation Engine

Here is something most people don’t know, and that the corporations involved would very much prefer you didn’t think about too carefully.

Meatpacking used to be a good job.

Not a glamorous job. Not a clean job. A hard, physical, demanding job that required you to show up and work. But it paid well. In the industry’s union era, meatpacking wages were strong enough to support a middle-class family. Workers had benefits, safety protections, grievance processes. They could buy a house. Send their kids to school. Retire with dignity.

Then something changed. Beginning in the 1960s, meatpackers began shutting down their older unionized urban plants and relocating to rural areas — right to work states, smaller towns, places where labor organizing was harder and community leverage was lower. They broke the unions. And as journalist Eric Schlosser documented extensively, once the unions were gone and wages started falling, something predictable happened: American workers started leaving the industry.

Not because Americans are lazy. Not because Americans won’t do difficult work. Because Americans, unlike workers with no legal status and no ability to complain, will not do dangerous, physically grueling work for poverty wages in unsafe conditions when they have any other option. That is not a character flaw — that is rational behavior.

So the corporations went looking for workers who had no other option. And they found them — in undocumented migrants who had crossed the border in debt to the people who helped them cross, who were afraid of deportation, who couldn’t organize, who couldn’t sue, who couldn’t walk off the job without having nowhere to go. Workers whose vulnerability was not an unfortunate side effect of the hiring strategy but its entire purpose.

As one account put it plainly: the immigration system, which makes immigrants’ lives precarious, functions exactly as planned — because workers who live in fear are easier to underpay, mistreat, and silence.

And when those workers periodically got swept up in raids or deportations, the industry simply found the next vulnerable group. Undocumented Mexicans became documented refugees from Somalia, Myanmar, Sudan, and South Sudan — people with legal work authorization but limited English, limited options, and limited ability to push back. As one researcher documented, companies like JBS forged direct connections with refugee resettlement agencies specifically to ensure a “steady supply” of workers who were legal enough to avoid federal liability but vulnerable enough to accept whatever conditions were offered.

The game never changed. Only the players did.

Meanwhile, in Austin, Minnesota — and in hundreds of towns like it across the Midwest — the Americans who used to hold those jobs watched their options disappear. The plants that once employed their parents at union wages now employed people who had arrived from across the world, managed by a corporate structure that had deliberately designed a workforce incapable of demanding anything better.

That is what I walked into in 2010. And it is still happening today.

The Math That Corporations Don’t Want You to Do

Let me give you one more number to hold onto.

When ICE conducted Operation Wagon Train in December 2006 — the largest single workplace immigration enforcement action in American history, arresting 1,300 workers at six Swift meatpacking plants including one in Minnesota — something interesting happened at those plants afterward.

They had to raise wages by about 8 percent just to stay open.

Eight percent. Immediately. Not after years of negotiation. Not after a union drive. The moment the artificially suppressed labor pool was disrupted, even temporarily, the market corrected. Because there were American workers willing to do those jobs — they just needed the company to compete for them with real wages instead of exploiting people who had no choice.

The corporations knew this. They had always known it. The use of undocumented and vulnerable labor was never about filling jobs Americans wouldn’t do. It was about filling jobs Americans wouldn’t do for what the company wanted to pay. It was, at its core, a wage suppression strategy dressed up as a labor shortage.

And every American who walked into a meatpacking plant HR office, dropped off a resume, heard “we’re not hiring,” and drove home — they paid the price for that strategy with years of their lives.

The Accountability We Deserve

I am running for Congress because I believe that corporations have operated for too long without accountability for the labor decisions they’ve made at the expense of American workers. And I am running as a Republican because I believe the solution is not more government programs for the Americans who got pushed out — it is making it impossible for corporations to push them out in the first place.

Here is what I will fight for as your representative in CD3:

American workers first. Full stop. Every job in this country should be filled by an American citizen or legal permanent resident before any other option is considered. Not as a preference. Not as a guideline. As a requirement with real teeth. When I walked into Hormel in 2010, I should have been at the top of that list. So should every other Minnesotan who walked through that same door.

Zero tolerance for undocumented hiring. There is no gray area here. Companies that knowingly employ undocumented workers are committing an illegal act that directly harms American workers. The law already says this. What has been missing is the will to enforce it consistently and at scale. I will push for enforcement that matches the scale of the problem — not occasional high-profile raids that generate news coverage and change nothing, but systematic, ongoing accountability for employers who choose cheap and exploitable labor over American workers.

H-1B as a last resort, not a first choice. As I’ve written before, the H-1B visa program has been systematically abused to displace American workers in skilled industries the same way undocumented labor has been used to displace them in manufacturing and food processing. The principle is identical even if the method differs. Skilled American workers — the engineering graduates, the software developers, the biomedical professionals coming out of Minnesota’s universities every year — deserve to be genuinely first in line for American jobs before a single H-1B petition is filed.

Corporate accountability for wage suppression. When a company hires a workforce it can underpay and exploit because those workers can’t legally push back, it is artificially suppressing wages for every American worker in that industry. That harm is real. It is measurable. And the corporations that have done it for decades should face consequences that match the scale of the damage they have caused.

Spreading the wealth to the people who earned it. Meatpacking companies posted record profits during the COVID years even as their workers — many of them getting sick and dying on lines that kept running because the companies lobbied to stay open — made poverty wages. That is not the deal American workers signed up for. Pay us what the work is worth. Not what you can get away with paying people who are afraid to ask for more.

A Word to the Young Person Filling Out Applications Right Now

I want to close this by talking directly to whoever is out there today in the position I was in fifteen years ago.

You graduated. You worked hard. You did everything you were supposed to do. You sent out the applications. You walked in the door. You smiled and shook the hand and left the resume. And you heard no.

Maybe you don’t know why. Maybe you assumed it was you — that you weren’t qualified enough, experienced enough, connected enough. Maybe you blamed yourself for something that was never your fault.

It wasn’t you.

It was a system that was deliberately designed to preference workers who couldn’t demand more over citizens who could. It was corporations that made calculated decisions, over decades, to hollow out the American middle class in pursuit of margins that made their shareholders richer while the towns around their plants got poorer. It was politicians in both parties who looked the other way because the corporations writing the checks asked them to.

You deserved that job. The stay-at-home mom who applied deserved that job. The dad with four kids deserved that job. Every American who walked through that door and heard “no” while 45 empty workstations waited for people who would never show up on a Monday morning — every single one of them deserved better.

I’m running for Congress because I intend to make sure the next generation gets it.

Vote Bass for Congress — August 11th Republican Primary.

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