Gee, that didn't take too long for them to figure out.... there are plenty of Americans all over the nation and our territories that can replace the illegal alien workers. These companies were finally desperate enough to comply with the law, get off their duffs and find LEGAL citizens to work. Attrition through enforcement works!

LINK:
http://www.pjstar.com/php/index.php?/ne ... rise_here_

BEARDSTOWN: Puerto Rican workers on the rise here as immigration crackdowns continue
Posted on 01/20 at 07:41 PM


BY ADRIANA COLINDRES
OF GATEHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

BEARDSTOWN — Drawn by a better-paying job, Andrea Agosto left her tropical home in Puerto Rico last summer and headed for Beardstown, a prairie city surrounded by cornfields and the Illinois River.

Agosto, who is 44 and divorced, had been working at a Starbucks in Puerto Rico, slicing ham and cheese for sandwiches. She earned $5.25 an hour.

So when officials from Cargill Meat Solutions began recruiting employees in Puerto Rico, Agosto took the job. At Beardstown’s Cargill plant, she earns more than $12 an hour packing pork butts.

She is one of dozens of Puerto Ricans who have moved to Beardstown since last summer to work at the Cargill plant.

The plant has long hired immigrants, but until last year, most of them came from Mexico. An estimated one-third of Beardstown’s population of about 6,000 now is Hispanic, and local officials suspect a large proportion of area Hispanics came into the U.S. illegally. Puerto Ricans also speak Spanish, of course. But there’s a difference: They’re also U.S. citizens.

A company spokesman said recruiters saw an opportunity to find workers in Puerto Rico because unemployment there is about 11 percent and a meat processing plant in Corozal had recently shut down.

The fact that people from Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens is significant, said Wilson Warren, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo who has studied the meatpacking industry for more than 20 years.
A major issue in the industry over the past couple of decades has been that “so many of the people, especially from Mexico,â€