Banana workers (2)

Here are workers on the assembly line at the banana packaging plant. The plant is open air, modern and clean. In the distance you can see a worker loading bananas onto a conveyor belt to send the bananas into the assembly line.

In Costa Rica many of the field workers in agriculture are from Nicaragua. There are estimated to be between 300,000 to 500,000 Nicaraguans working in Costa Rica, some legally and some not. A few years ago the government tried to curtail undocumented Nicaraguan labor, but doing so hurt the economy because the agricultural and constructions industries lacked enough local workers.

This is characteristic of the worldwide phenomena of lower wage jobs being filled by immigrant labor to do the work that more prosperous local citizens prefer not to do. The workers in the banana processing plant make more money than agricultural field labor.