Dairy farmers unhappy with immigration raids
Gil Halsted, Wisconsin Public Radio,
Published Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have been stepping up the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin recently.

It’s a trend that’s beginning to worry some Wisconsin dairy farmers who employ immigrant milkers from Mexico.

A new study of employment patterns on 600 farms in four Wisconsin counties found that 90 percent of the milkers on those farms were Mexican immigrants.

It’s a trend that ballooned between 1998 and 2000, soon after the North American Free Trade Act went into affect.

Study author Brent Valentine of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Rural Sociology says he wasn’t able to find out how many of the milkers are here legally, but he says the increasing number of immigration arrests has both farmers and workers worried, because they depend on each other.

He says the reality is that there’s a lot of negative press and there’s a lot of fear.

Valentine presented his report at a rural immigration summit in Baraboo last week.

La Crosse County Dairy farmer Jim Servais attended because he says he’s worried about the impact the immigration crackdown might have on his ability to staff his 200-cow dairy.

He says he’s been using Hispanic farm labor and has been “very pleased.â€