The Great Replacement In Action: Rural Nebraska Edition

 We only just learned of Tyson Foods firing American citizens in favor of hiring illegals. Now we see the downstream impact of those intentions. From Daily Mail: "Tiny rural Nebraska town that banned non-citizens from renting is overwhelmed by a huge influx of migrants - as asylum seekers flock to fill jobs at meat processing plants."

    Fremont, a small town with a population of 27,000, is home to several meat processing plants including Costco's chicken factory and Wholestone Farms pork plant.

    Locals have said the town's natives are leaving for jobs elsewhere and migrants have come to take those vacant jobs at the slaughterhouses, reported NBC News. That is despite a decade-old law that prevents anyone who is not a citizen from living in the area. 

    The town, which was once nearly all white, now has a Latino population of 16 percent in 2022, according to U.S. census data.

    'We need these people. We need this work done. This is what feeds the nation and the world,' said Mark Jensen, president of the city council.

This exemplifies Paul's teaching that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10). As illegals take the jobs, the few remaining locals won't be able to get jobs at these facilities even if they wanted because the businesses won't hire someone unless they are fluent in Spanish. 

    The increased use of foreign labor, illegal or not, also stifles innovation. As the following articles relate, historically as the agricultural labor market tightened and wages went up, producers increasingly turned to developing mechanized methods of harvesting (which was the subject of the articles).

• "Can U.S. Farm Workers Be Replaced by Machines?Mechanizing fruit and vegetable production" by Philip Martin, Center for Immigration Studies.
• "Fewer farm workers leads to more mechanization"--The Prairie Star.
• "From strawberries to apples, a wave of agriculture robotics may ease the farm labor crunch"--CNBC. 
• "Farmers Are Replacing Migrant Workers With Robots"--Popular Mechanics.
  

But each time labor markets tightened and efforts to mechanize and automate harvesting started, those efforts stalled because Congress would intervene to allow more migrants in or, in the case recently, the federal government simply encouraged illegal immigration and didn't enforce immigration laws, allowing the labor markets to loosen.

    Although there has been less effort to automate the meat industry, I did come across a number of articles that indicated that it too is possible. (See, e.g., "Robots: the future of meat processing?"--The Western Producer). 

    Although automation would likely save producers and processors money over the long run, the agricultural industry (including farmers) would rather encourage the invasion of our country by foreigners to avoid the capital investment that would be required. Of course, if we weren't funding so many wars, we could afford to offer grants or other financial assistance to agricultural producers to get them past the financial hurdles.