From the Washington Post:

At a Texas meatpacking plant, jobs Americans won’t take

Nick Miroff, The Washington Post Published 2:28 pm, Sunday, March 4, 2018

CACTUS, Texas – The DJs at the Spanish-language radio stations gave warnings whenever Immigration and Customs Enforcement came around. “Be careful out there,” they’d say. “The relatives are in town.” …

Their target that day was the huge, steam-billowing beef plant here on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, owned then by meatpacking giant Swift & Co. …

Operation Wagon Train hit Swift & Co. plants in six states on Dec. 12, 2006, arresting nearly 1,300 workers. In tiny Cactus, 300 were taken into custody – about 10 percent of the town’s population. It was the largest workplace raid in U.S. history. …

Cactus and surrounding Moore County have bounced back from the raid, and the plant today is once more thriving, shipping steaks to Walmart and hamburger meat to Burger King. But finding workers remains a perpetual struggle.

Do you ever get the impression from reading the Washington Post that its owner Jeff Bezos’s sympathies lie more with owners than with workers? I don’t mean to imply that the World’s Richest Man isn’t wholly unbiased on the question of grinding the faces of workers, but, yeah, actually, I do mean to imply that.

Back in the late 1970s, slaughterhouse work was unionized and fairly well-paid at about $18 per hour in northern cities.

iSteve commenter FPD72 writes:

Cactus, TX is an American s**thole. I used to have the city government as a client and worked there twice a year. In addition to the slaughterhouse there used to be a tanning company; I don’t know whether it is still operating. Its rendering plant was the foulest smelling facility I’ve ever been in.

The city’s waste water treatment facility had to take on all the waste that went down the drain from the slaughterhouse and tanning facility. The waste pond had a layer of scum that was literally a foot thick that had to be dredged several times a year by an outside contractor. Their nightmare fear was falling in, which they viewed as a fate worse than death.

The town’s entertainment venue was a bar, the name of which was Satan’s Palace. I’m not kidding. I don’t remember seeing it the last time I drove through town.

Towns all over the Midwest were sold a bill of goods in allowing slaughterhouses to be built. Most of the promised jobs went to illegal aliens and the increased tax base was more than offset by the rising costs of police, public schools, and social services, while the quality of life took a huge nosedive. Crime, litter, illegitimacy, and drug use all went up; social trust went down.

Smart towns have learned their lesson; I read about a couple of small towns in Nebraska that said “no thanks” to slaughterhouses in the last few years.

Believe me; no reader on this site would want to live in Cactus. It has been absolutely ruined by immigration, both legal and illegal.

The Great Plains have been quite prosperous in this century due to low population relative to the high demand for resources from Asia, so towns that turned down the slaughterhouses with their business model of offering terrible jobs at lousy wages are thanking their lucky stars.

[Comment at Unz.com]