Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which hasa processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.
Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known asHB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.
Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggledto get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”
His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employerswho lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.
In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and unmade beds. “Somebody has to figurethis out. The immigrants aren’t coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,”Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs, and I need to give them to somebody.”
There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One ofthe big selling points of the immigration law wasthat it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentleysaid immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.
At a moment when the country is relentless focused on unemployment, there are still jobs that often go unfilled. These are difficult, dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for Americans.
For decades many of Alabama’s industries have benefited from a compliant foreign workforce and a state government that largely looked the other way onwages, working conditions, and immigration status. Withso many foreign workersnow effectively banished from the work pool and jobs sitting empty, businesses must contend with American workers who have higher expectations for themselves and their employers—even in a terrible economy where work is hard to find. “I don’t consider this a labor shortage,” says Tom Surtees, Alabama’s director of industrial relations, himself the possessor of a job few would want: calming business owners who have seen their employees vanish.

We’re transitioning from a business model. Whether an employer in agriculture used migrantworkers, or whether it’s another industry that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that business model is going to have to change.

This is proof Americans in general lost work ethic. Government hand outs poisoned people into doing for themselves and made them feel others should do for them. Look at the general attitudes of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Unions have people buffaloed into thinking employers are responsible for pensioning and health care. The fact is the whole situation is screwed up and worst is how lazy Americans have become since life got so easy for us. There is no justification for illegal immigrants or their presence here and I could care less if they want to do work Americans don't want to. Our prisons are full of people deserving to work long hard hours for little or no pay. Our prison system is desperate for jobs to occupy these men and women's time while they pay their debts to society. I have done my share of effed up jobs nobody else wanted to do. If I can roll up my sleeves then so can many others. Frankly the bulk of people on Welfare money should be taking these jobs whether or not they like them. If they want the hand out they can also do some crap work in the mean time and this should be part of Welfare Reform. If a person is disabled there is no excuse for them to not have meaningful employment of some kind. But this whole line a lot of single mothers use, "I got to stay home to take care of my babies" is old, worn out, and an excuse! People on welfare should not have kids they can't afford. People want the sun and moon for free. Time for all these poor Americans to wake the hell up and take these jobs and earn their way rather than try to baffle us with BS that they deserve something for nothing. Who do these "Poor" people think they are? The whole occupy Wall Street movement is a load of steaming feces considering that a bulk of these people want a living wage to do NOTHING!

Granted the income disparity is an issue but so is the BS these people try to feed us. It isn't like the jobs are not out there. There is work but it isn't the easy peasy BS stuff so many American's dream of doing.

Again Americans have lost work ethic because they think they are above menial labor. Those of us who do and have done menial labor are offended by these people for DAMN good reason!