The tiny Texas Panhandle town of Cactus is being featured in a Washington Post article that questions President Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans.
In 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a surprise raid on the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Cactus that resulted in 300 immigrants being taken into custody.
While Cactus has since rebounded from the raid, the plant, now owned by JBS USA, has had an ongoing struggle with finding workers and like other meat processing plants, has increasingly relied on refugees from Burma, Sudan and Somalia, to fill the jobs that used to be filled by illegal workers.
The Trump Administration is focused on restricting legal immigration because it argues that doing so will tighten the labor pool and subsequently raise the wages of blue-collar American workers, but few in Cactus believe the meatpacking plant jobs will be filled by American workers.