Center grant helps reporter reveal harrowing conditions facing immigrant workers in West Virginia’s poultry industry

“Pilgrim’s People,” my recent series examining immigrant health in the rural West Virginia town of Moorefield, got its start during the 2022 November midterm election. 

My editors at Mountain State Spotlight, a nonprofit newsroom in West Virginia, had me traveling across the state asking residents what they saw as the important issues in their lives. Before I left, my editor mentioned that there was an industrial chicken plant owned by Pilgrim’s Pride on my route. 

My interest was piqued. While I didn’t know much about the chicken industry at the time, I knew companies like Pilgrim’s relied heavily on immigrant labor. In graduate school, when I was reporting stories about the health of North Carolina refugee communities, a number of people I spoke with said their resettlement agencies paired them with jobs at local chicken plants. They also said the conditions inside could be backbreaking.

On that November day, I got to Moorefield as the sun was setting. My hotel was in a town that would take another hour drive through two-lane mountain highways. But I wanted to talk to Pilgrim’s production employees. So, I stood across the street from the plant parking lot and waited for people to finish their shift.  

Like in North Carolina, many of the Moorefield poultry workers I spoke with were immigrants. One woman from Ethiopia said now that she was in the U.S., she didn’t want to let anything stop her from being successful. She viewed the U.S. as an opportunity to live the life she wanted. 

When I returned home, Moorefield, its chicken plant and the immigrant workers stuck with me. I read through a 2019 reporting series by the journalist Anna Patrick, which documented Moorefield’s adaptation to a growing refugee community. The series was great, but I kept wondering what the experience of living in rural West Virginia was like for the newcomers themselves. Were they being brought into a situation where they could be healthy and happy? 

I knew properly reporting in this community would require time and resources. Moorefield is a nearly four-hour drive from my home in Charleston, and it seemed likely that my newsroom and I would need to hire interpreters who spoke the languages of the immigrant communities. That led me to apply for USC’s 2023 Impact Fund for Reporting on Health Equity and Health Systems in August 2023. 

Once I got the grant, I started on the project. When I took my first trip to Moorefield specifically for this project, local Spanish-speaking pastors told me that many of the refugee communities had been moving away since 2019. Now many of the immigrant workers were asylum seekers from countries like Haiti and Venezuela. 

And the people I spoke with described major problems facing all of Moorefield’s immigrant communities. They said while working for Pilgrim’s Pride or a company contracting with the chicken company, newcomer workers were often discriminated against by supervisors and forced to do some of the most dangerous jobs. Outside the plant, people struggled to find adequate interpretation services, transportation and affordable housing. 

The shifting immigrant demographics from the 2010s to the present was surprising, but people like Angela Stuesse, a UNC Chapel Hill anthropology professor and labor rights advocate, helped me contextualize these changes. In different parts of the U.S., poultry plants frequently cycle through different groups of immigrant workers. “It’s about ensuring that the most profitable, exploitable workforce is made available,” Stuesse told me.

The USC grant helped pay for my trips to Moorefield throughout last winter, and on some these trips I was joined by an interpreter and a photographer. The more trips we made, the more immigrants we spoke who struggled with problems inside and outside of the chicken plant.

And we found data to back it up. An analysis of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s severe injury data revealed that over the past nine years, employees at the factory had more amputations and in-patient hospitalizations than workers at any other active West Virginia workplace the federal agency monitors. Local ambulance records also showed that in 2022 and 2023, emergency services were requested to the plant once every five days. The injuries described in these records included someone fracturing their skull, someone getting their leg crushed between two machines, and someone’s arm nearly getting ripped off of their body. 

Pilgrim’s Pride’s local and corporate offices never responded to my calls, emails and letters related to this story. The company website says it maintains a strong safety culture, and it denied exploiting immigrant workers in a recent lawsuit. 

Once we gathered all this information, we focused on the best way to present it to the communities most impacted. It was critical to me that the people who were kind, vulnerable and courageous enough to share their stories were able to read what we wrote about them. That’s where USC’s community engagement grant proved to be invaluable. With the funds, my newsroom and I were able to hire professionals to translate both stories into Spanish and Haitian Creole. We also translated the story about the dangers inside the factory in Burmese. 

In early June, Mountain State Spotlight shared our reporting with the world. We worked with a variety of other newsrooms to republish our stories. They appeared in two local newspapers — the Moorefield Examiner and the Cumberland Times-News. Additionally, one of both of our stories were republished in outlets like 100 Days in Appalachia, Investigate Midwest along with some national newsrooms like El Tiempo Latino, The Haitian Times and The Myanmar Gazette. 

This reporting project struck a deep chord with me both personally and professionally. As the grandchild of four people who escaped their homelands to safer countries, I’m constantly worried about how global violence can leave immigrants in the U.S. vulnerable. And as a West Virginia public health journalist, I’ve seen numerous instances where large companies have prioritized profits over the wellbeing of their neighbors, customers and employees.

Mountain State Spotlight and I couldn’t have brought these stories to light without the USC impact grant, which allowed us to report not just about Moorefield’s immigrant communities but also with them.