Immigration Raid Opens Jobs For Legal Residents

Those who say illegal immigrants are not taking jobs from Americans need only look at a working class Massachusetts town where hundreds of locals have rushed to apply for jobs at a factory recently raided by immigration officials.

Incredibly, the raided New Bedford leather factory openly employed hundreds of illegal immigrants yet was awarded a lucrative $100 million Department of Defense contract to stitch back backs and vests for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Immigration officials raided the company earlier this month and arrested 361 illegal workers, mostly from Central America and Mexico. Sixty-six of the aliens arrested already had final deportation orders that predated the raid yet they remained in the U.S. undetected. The company’s owner and three managers were also arrested although a skeleton staff continues operating the facility.

Within days of the immigration raid, more than 400 local residents in the depressed factory and fishing town with the state’s highest unemployment rate, applied for the newly vacant jobs. New Bedford’s unemployment rate is nearly double the national rate although its estimated 100,000 residents are more than willing to work. The city’s mayor sees the immigration raid as a positive thing that has created hundreds of new jobs for New Bedford’s qualified and legal residents.

Immigration advocates cannot possibly accuse this working class city of being racist, since nearly half of its residents are foreign born and the entire state is ultra liberal and quite accepting of illegal immigrants. However, the legal residents recognize that the illegal aliens took jobs that should have been theirs. One liberal Massachusetts blogger even admits that this case presents an interesting challenge to her belief that illegals don’t take jobs from citizens.