A conservative-oriented investment fund is divesting from Tyson Foods over the company's plans to hire migrants and refugees that the fund believes will alienate customers due to the ongoing crisis at the southern border.
The American Conservative Values ETF, an actively managed exchange-traded fund created by Ridgeline Research LLC to cater to ideologically conservative investors, announced Monday that it divested its holdings of Tyson Foods and placed a "refuse to buy" rating on the food giant's stock. Ridgeline founder and CEO Bill Flaig told FOX Business, "We believe Tyson's management has blundered into a political minefield (and should have known better)."
"The risk of alienating a significant percentage of their customers outweighs any potential economic benefit. In a recent Pew Research poll, 80% of U.S. adults say the U.S. government is doing a bad job of handling the migrant influx. We have seen the negative impact of alienating customers recently with Bud Light and Target and by divesting we are protecting our shareholders," Flaig added.
In 2022, Tyson Foods joined the non-profit Tent Partnership for Refugees, which was started by Chobani yogurt founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya to create a program for the private sector to help refugees find employment. Tyson committed to hiring 2,500 refugees in the U.S. over the course of three years when it joined the partnership.
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A report by Bloomberg News indicated that Tyson indicated that Tyson officials met with migrants at Chobani's offices last month to hire 17 asylum seekers from Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia for jobs at its plant in Tennessee, and that it hired 70 more in early March.
The outlet reported that Tyson Foods' Garrett Dolan, who works in the multinational conglomerate's human resources department, said that migrants are "very, very loyal" and explained, "They've been uprooted and what they want is stability — what they want is a sense of belonging."
"We would like to employ another 42,000 if we could find them," Dolan added in reference to the roughly 42,000 immigrants in the company's workforce of 120,000. He explained that the meatpacking industry at large deals with turnover of about 40% of the workers in factory roles each year — which means Tyson needs to hire about 52,000 workers this year to fill jobs that pay about $16.50 an hour plus benefits.
The news comes as Tyson announced last week that it will close a pork plant in Perry, Iowa, in June that employs about 1,200 workers amid slowing demand for some products. Tyson Foods has disputed that its closure of the plant and other facilities is related to its hiring practices amid reports that sought to link the two matters.
To that, Flaig said, "That response reinforces that their management teams don't get it and how inadequate that response is to Americans concerned about the open border."
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The company released a statement to emphasize that it opposes illegal immigration and that Tyson's workers are required to be legally authorized to work in the country.
"In recent days, there has been a lot of misinformation in the media about our company, and we feel compelled to set the record straight. Tyson Foods is strongly opposed to illegal immigration, and we led the way in participating in the two major government programs to help employers combat unlawful employment, E-Verify and the Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers (IMAGE) program," the statement said.
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Reuters contributed to this report.
