Since the creation of the Texas/Mexican border, Texans and U.S. citizens have had to compete with cheap Mexican labor along the border. Here is a clear example of the impact of cheap Mexican labor on American workers.
This past June, the U.S. Department of Justice found against a Rio Grande Valley farmer for what was called an “unfair hiring practice” that discriminated against job seekers based on immigration status. DOJ argued that the farmer’s company preferred temporary H-2 visa employees from Mexico over U.S. citizens. The cry of “unfair hiring practices” is not new in the south Texas border region. In the 1940s, my father Eduardo Rodriguez, organized a printers’ labor union in Laredo to keep Mexican workers from taking American jobs.