The Chobani yogurt company owner Hamdi Ulukaya is at the forefront of advocating middle eastern immigration into the U.S.

Image from Flickr.

The following information is summarized from a Breitbart article:

Hamdi Ulukaya is a Turkish born Entrepreneur who has become wealthy building the Chobani yogurt company in the United States, and he has become a vocal advocate for increasing middle eastern immigration into the country.

Ulukaya came to the US in 1994 to study business, and in 2005 he bought a Kraft Foods yogurt plant in central New York with a loan from the Small Business Administration.  Due to Ulukaya’s political connections, especially with New York Senators Schemer and Gellibrand, Chobani is now the main supplier of yogurt for the US federal school system.  In 2012, Chobani opened its second U.S. production facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, being the largest yogurt plant in the world.

Ulukaya, who is now a billionaire, represents a new globalist reality of big government and big business being intermeshed.  He’s used local, state, and federal resources at every stage of his business growth.

The Chobani company began to hire middle eastern refugees to work in its upstate New York plant in 2008, and Ulukaya frequently proselytizes about the hiring practice at establishment events such as the Clinton Global Initiative and Davos.  Ulukaya’s speeches about the issue of refugees combined with his extensive political connections makes both Republican and Democrat establishment politicians line up to form “business / government partnerships” with him.  Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are vocal supporters of him.

Earlier this year, a five-year-old girl was raped by three Muslims migrants brought by Chobani to Twin Falls, and more recently a Muslim refugee molested a mentally disabled woman.  The news of the assaults was initially covered up by the media, and the then-Mayor of Twin Falls Greg Lanting was eventfully forced to apologize for attacking in the media the family of the five year old who was raped by migrants.  The occurrence was the first that most people have heard about such refugee resettlement programs.

In January 2016 Ulukasya launched his Tent Foundation, which is “a personal foundation focused on helping refugees,” listing other founding partners as companies like Airbnb, Ikea Foundation, MasterCard, LinkedIn, UPS, and Western Union.  The Tent Foundation’s main three focuses are said to be “direct giving, generating employment opportunities for refugees, and incentivizing partners to source products and services from companies that employ refugees and their host communities, or support refugee causes.”  Ulukaya describes the Tent Foundation as “a platform for corporate leaders to join forces to more effectively leverage the support, ingenuity and dynamism of the world’s businesses to help end the refugee crises.”

From Breitbart: “Ulukaya lives in the rarefied world of the ‘doing well while doing good’ crowd, a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires whose supposed altruism always seems to pay off handsomely for them. … Now a billionaire, Ulukaya pledges the majority of his personal wealth ‘to help refugees and help bring an end to this humanitarian crisis.’ He does this through the Giving Pledge, an organization started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.”

Warren Buffet also helped to finance a local Twin Falls newspaper “The Times News”, which defends the refugee program and repeatedly attacks critics of it as racist, as the reporter Michael Patrick Leahy points out.

Ulukaya is also on the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York despite still being a Turkish citizen.

In January 2016, Ulukaya made an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he called on more businesses to begin taking in refugees as workers, saying that it is ‘mind-blowing’ how little firms are doing to economically integrate refugees.