If these people are being sent back to Mexico, it begs one to ask the obvious question,  how did all of these people know about the jobs at IBP in the first place? A good place to start might not be Waterloo but a little to the west in another IBP town, Storm Lake. Most minorities at Storm Lake entered the community without documentation and within the last four years the number of Latinos has grown to possibly over 3,000. But how did all of these people find out about job opportunities that were available to them in small Midwest towns? There appears to be a couple of different answers to this question. Many Hispanic and Laotian families who have close ties to people back home encourage them to come into Iowa and get a job at a place like IBP. IBP is responsible for a lot of minority recruitment. Most people of Hispanic origin were directly recruited by IBP to come and work in the United States. University of Northern Iowa Professor Mark Grey believes one of the reasons workers are recruited is to make up for IBP's huge turnover rate. Grey cited that if you walk into any IBP plant at any time 25% of the workers employed there have been there for less than a month. They rely heavily on foreign labor because most want to come to the States for a couple of years, make money, and go home, thus IBP has to recruit more help to make up for the turnover rates. One might be compelled to wonder why the turnover rate is so high at IBP plants. The answer could be a very simple one. Meatpacking has always been one of the most dangerous industries. When coupled with the fact that IBP generally pays low wages and most plants nationwide are without union representation, higher turnover rates are the result.

    With IBP's recruitment tactics, is it plausible to believe that IBP had no idea that the workers who were seized from their plant were illegal when they hired them? When the news of undocumented workers at IBP first ran in late July, Vice President of Human Resources at the Waterloo plant, Ken Kimbro, stated that IBP wanted nothing to do with people who were in the country illegally. However, information was found that indicated at least some workers there knew about the status of some undocumented aliens. Augustine Gonzalez, an U.S. citizen and former interpreter for IBP, claimed some managers and supervisors knew that illegal immigrants were working at IBP yet they continued to employ them. Gonzalez came forward with his information because he was upset to see them work with government officials to get undocumented aliens deported. Gonzalez went on to say that he translated for IBP Employment Manager Allan Losh to tell Hispanics, "Why don't you buy yourself a birth certificate and then get an Iowa ID and then you've got a job." IBP called the accusations "blatant lies" and were willing to go forward with their story that they had no idea of any undocumented workers at the time of their hiring.

    Whether IBP knew about the workers or not may never be known for sure. One thing is certain, IBP worked with the INS to single out undocumented aliens for deportation; workers they had helped to bring into the country in the first place with their recruitment tactics. In October 1997, IBP took some steps to solve its problem with undocumented workers. IBP announced that it would start to verify the Social Security numbers of new employees using a government database. Checks on Social Security, which were not allowed before, became possible with the passage of a federal law, which allows companies access to a Social Security database.