EDITORIAL: America’s Dairyland depends on immigrants

Without undocumented immigrants, Wisconsin would have to change its license plate motto. The dairy farm industry would be decimated to the point where the state could no longer claim to be “America’s Dairyland.”

John Rosenow, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Wisconsin’s Buffalo County who has become a leading advocate for federal action to provide a pathway to legal status for immigrant farm workers, told the Washington Post: “Eighty percent of the milk in Wisconsin is harvested by immigrants. If you took the immigrants away, way over half of the farms would go out of business.”

Most of the those immigrants, born in Mexico and other Hispanic countries, entered the U.S. illegally.

Dairy farms, including some in Ozaukee County, need immigrant employees because U.S. born people don’t want to do physically demanding farm work.

This reality gets little attention in the uproar fueled by a surge of immigrants that is so enormous it has overwhelmed the U.S.-Mexico border. The surge is caused by political and economic conditions in Latino countries that diminish the standard of living, but the result is America’s problem.

The untenable situation had been heating up for years and finally boiled over in December 2023 when southern border agents reported a record quarter million encounters with migrants in that month alone.

Meanwhile, members of Congress watched from their bunkers on Capitol Hill, apparently afraid to get in involved. Their cowardice was confirmed when Senate Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan immigration bill this year, which was crafted largely by Republicans and contained strong border control measures, because Donald Trump instructed them to vote against it.

The border crisis takes its toll in many ways, but one of its most damaging effects is the disparagement of immigrants. Immigrants were once celebrated as the pistons of America’s economic engine. Their arrival port, Ellis Island, was revered as the gateway to the good life in America. Those immigrants were mostly from Europe and the British Isles. Today’s immigrants are mostly from Hispanic countries. That seems to make a difference.

Immigrants from Central and South America and Mexico are condemned as an existential threat that “is poisoning the blood of our country.” They are “criminals” and inmates of “insane asylums” who are bringing violent crime and drugs to the U.S. “They are not people.” They are “animals.”

Those are Trump’s words. The former president and aspiring president to be has the loudest megaphone in the country on the subject of immigration, and many listeners take his condemnation of immigrants at face value.

The premise is false. A study by the conservative Cato Institute found that the crime rate for documented and undocumented immigrants was lower than that of the native-born population. What’s more, the incessant negative characterization of immigrants is hurting this country in its need for foreign-born workers to meet the demands of a growing economy.

This goes way beyond the struggles of the dairy industry. More than 50% of all agricultural workers in the U.S. are foreign-born and roughly half of them are undocumented.

It is not an exaggeration to say immigrants put food on America’s tables. They also provide shelter. There aren’t enough U.S.- born workers to sustain the construction industry. In many places, home building crews are largely comprised of Latino workers, and construction companies want more of them. Visa limits fall far short of the need, and many contractors turn to undocumented immigrants.

These workers do not just fill spaces. Construction employers praise their work ethic and skills. Rosenow, the Wisconsin dairy farmer, lauds the dedication of his Mexican workers to their jobs. At the same time, he laments that they live in fear of being rounded up and deported.

Farm employers had been pinning their hopes on the Farm Workforce Modernization Act introduced in 2019, federal legislation that would have established a program for agricultural workers to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment and provide protections for the workers.

The bill was passed by the House of Representatives, but killed in the Senate. It needs to be revived. Besides bringing a measure of relief to dairy and crop farmers and their undocumented workers, it could serve as a model for the essential revamping of the overall U.S. visa program to facilitate legal entry into the country and replenish the U.S. workforce.

Every nation needs to have control of its borders. It will be a sign that the U.S. has finally accomplished that when immigration rhetoric is no longer about keeping immigrants out, but about bringing them in—legally.