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Chobani Is Turning Refugees Into Functioning American’s
- Its founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, is a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent.
- There are calls to boycott Chobani. Ulukaya and the company have been taunted with racist epithets on Twitter and Facebook.
- Ulukaya arrived in upstate New York in the 1990s to attend school. By 2002 he was making and selling feta cheese inspired by a family recipe.
By many measures, Chobani embodies the classic American immigrant success story.
Its founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, is a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent. He bought a defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York, added a facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, and now employs about 2,000 people making Greek yogurt.
But in this election season, the extreme right has a problem with Chobani: In its view, too many of those employees are refugees.
As Ulukaya has stepped up his advocacy — employing more than 300 refugees in his factories, starting a foundation to help migrants, and traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos to witness the crisis firsthand — he and his company have been targeted with racist attacks on social media and conspiratorial articles on websites including Breitbart News.
Now there are calls to boycott Chobani. Ulukaya and the company have been taunted with racist epithets on Twitter and Facebook. Fringe websites have published false stories claiming Ulukaya wants “to drown the United States in Muslims.” And the mayor of Twin Falls has received death threats, partly as a result of his support for Chobani.
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“What’s happening with Chobani is one more flash point in this battle between the voices of xenophobia and the voices advocating a rational immigration policy,” said Cecillia Wang, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Chobani and Ulukaya declined to comment for this article.
Ulukaya arrived in upstate New York in the 1990s to attend school. By 2002 he was making and selling feta cheese inspired by a family recipe. A few years later he learned that a local yogurt and cheese factory that had closed was for sale. He received a loan of $800,000 from the Small Business Administration to purchase the factory and started selling Chobani yogurt in 2007.
As the business grew, Ulukaya needed more help. When he learned there was a refugee resettlement center in a nearby town, he asked whether any of the newcomers wanted jobs at Chobani. Ulukaya provided transportation for the new hires, and he brought in translators to assist them. He paid the refugee workers salaries above the minimum wage, as he did other workers at the factory.
When Chobani opened its factory in Twin Falls, Ulukaya once again turned to a local resettlement center. The company now employs resettled refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey, among other countries.
“The minute a refugee has a job, that’s the minute they stop being a refugee,” Ulukaya said in a talk he gave this year.
Today, Chobani has annual yogurt sales of around $1.5 billion.
4 Comments
I’m sure that not all who come across our borders are good people. Saying that all these people are evil is like saying that all the Irish immigrants (refugees) were allied with the IRA, all Italian immigrants belonged to the Mafia, or all Chinese belonged to Tongs.
This man is putting people to work in the private sector. They’re not on the welfare rolls, on unemployment, or collecting a welfare check.
Seems like the death threat and boycott crowd have way too much time on their hands, and too many bigoted bones in their bodies (and not just in this situation).
This isn’t the full story. Many of Ulukaya’s so-called refugees are Sharia-compliant Muslims. Three of their children participated in the rape of a young girl in the laundry roon of their apartment. The cover-up starts at the mayor and goes all the way to Loretta Lynch. This man has funded organizations with terrorist ties.
By definition a “refugee” has to be fleeing something. If, rather than “flee” islam, they want to bring it to our country, they are not refugees. If they are immigrants and want to become Americans (you say just having a job makes them Americans) they swear to give up allegiance to any other form of government (islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion). So, what these people actually are is foreigners living in our country wanting us to change to suit them.
Read the articles about what’s going on in Twin Falls Idaho (and other places) where the “refugees” have settled and are working for Chobani – The city is paid for each “refugee” they resettle and these people are not trying to fit into the culture. More than the one little 5-year-old girl has suffered at the hands of these barbarian males. If you check it out, they – the refugees – most likely are on food stamps and every other type of welfare they can drain from the good citizens of the United States. Does Chobani, owned by a Muslim, hire any non-muslims? As for me, I am boycotting Chobani because of whom they hire (I don’t know if they use their left hand without washing or . . .). There are other very good yogurt brands on the market that don’t cost as much and, in my opinion, are safer to consume.