The problem at the Brooklyn-based company Agriprocessors has reached a climax: the company is fighting before the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent 21 meatpackers at its warehouse on 56th Street and 1st Avenue from joining a union. At first the grounds for this battle seem valid: 17 people in this group turned out to be undocumented immigrants – illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico.

When the agitators, loudmouths and chieftains at Local 342 of United Food and Commercial Workers got them involved with the union movement and they decided to join the organization, by a vote of 15 to five with one abstention, the management of the company – the largest producer of kosher meat in the country – said, “Over my dead body!” And when these firebrands went on strike, the company fired them without a moment’s hesitation, replacing them with undocumented immigrants from the “exchange” around the corner. That could have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t: The National Labor Relations Board ordered Agriprocessors to recognize Local 342 and its workers as union members and fined the company. The company was outraged: what relationship could these workers have with the union if they were illegal immigrants?

“Oh, they’re illegal?” the company was told. “Then why did you hire them, by what right?”

“We had no idea,” countered the company. “They gave us false Social Security numbers.”

Well, of course it had no idea. Just like it had absolutely no idea about what was going on at its enormous slaughterhouse in Iowa, where federal agents detained 389 illegal immigrants in the course of one raid and the unions announced that there were 57 juveniles among the workers. The unions set up a full-court press, to use the language of sports. As if it wasn’t enough for the company to show unceremoniously how hypocritical it was by hiring undocumented immigrants on the one hand and denying them the right to be part of a union on the other, the unions are presenting the Supreme Court with its very own ruling from 1984, which gave illegal immigrants the right to join American unions.

There really is such a ruling. Its goal was that “the salary and work conditions of law-abiding U.S. residents should not suffer from competition from illegal workers.”

So what now? Agriprocessors’s lead lawyer Nathan Levin states that everything has changed since that time. First of all, there are immeasurably more undocumented immigrants in the country, and second, there is a federal law, in effect for two years, prohibiting employers from hiring illegal immigrants under threat of fines and criminal investigations. And the lawyer is right: How can people, who should not be, join unions?

However, there are such people who join unions, as Local 342 organizer David Yang said, “earn a well-deserved salary, and receive time-and-a-half for overtime, medical insurance, and paid vacation.” And a union means dues and legal contributions from employers based on contracts.

So it turns out that unions are burying Immigration Reform. But at the same time employers like Agriprocessors are burying Immigration Reform by relying on undocumented workers. And they come out against each other with demands for kosherness, which is not and cannot be observed under the current legal framework as it concerns undocumented immigrants. Here, as they say, is a mixture of meat and dairy.

For now we will be happy for the workers at Agriprocessors who, thanks to existing circumstances, have had their salaries raised to $8.50 per hour on average, and are now guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime and a week’s paid vacation.