National Security Trump says American workers are hurt by immigration. But after ICE raided this Texas town, they never showed up.
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. JBS USA, a Brazilian conglomerate that now owns the plant, has raised starting wages nearly 25 percent in recent years, but like other meat processors across the country, it survived by finding a different set of foreigners to do jobs that used to be filled by illegal workers: refugees.
..There are Burmese meat cutters a few years removed from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia. “Chuckers” from Sudan, tall and strong, who specialize in separating the spinal cord from a side of beef swinging on a moving chain. Somalis who showed up in such numbers that Moore County at one point had the fifth-highest per capita Muslim population in the United States, according to religion survey data, though many of those workers have moved to join a larger community of their compatriots in Minnesota... Because refugees have a reputation for lower levels of drug use, they remain attractive job recruits.