Thread: WI: Dairy farmers unhappy with immigration raids

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€

As long as people can hire as many illegals as they please, there will be no need to pay a decent wage, invest in automation, or upgrade workplace safety. Just throwing more bodies at a task is at best a 17th century solution to a 21st century problem.

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.

And has the concerned dairy farmer ensured the safety of our food supply by providing heath screenings and physicals of his 'immigrant' employees to assure none have T.B. or other diseases contaminating our milk supply?

You get what you pay for.

If America’s addiction to population growth – especially America’s addiction to illegal population growth – is broken, some of the biggest gains will fall to American employees whose wages will increase and whose unemployment rates will decrease. As the supply of cheap labor goes down, the price of labor will go up, especially at the low end of the wage scale, which has been hit especially hard by illegal alien labor.

Similarily, legal American workers cannot be exploited by employers as illegal alien workers cannot be exploited. Employers cannot threaten to report legal American workers to immigration officials. Consequently, legal American workers – and their union representatives – will insist on safety training and on safe working environments. Also, they will insist on being fully paid for time worked and will insist on being paid on the books so appropriate contributions will be made to their Social Security accounts.

If these poorly paid illegal alien workers were to leave America and return to their home countries, either:
1. The crops they have been planting, tending, and harvesting (and the cows they have been milking anc caring for) would no longer be planted, tended, and harvested, and milked or
2. Those workers would be replaced by American workers who would demand better wages, benefits, and working conditions, or
3. Those agricultural jobs would be mechanized so fewer workers would be required, or
4. A combination of the above would occur

Both the industry AND the market would adjust! Furthermore the tremendous cost burden to our economy, social systems and institutions would be significantly reduced, unemployment rates would drop as more American’s would have jobs available to choose from and the rule of law that was once a main cog in the gears of America will be restored.

Once again, the only ones complaining here are those framers who have a vested financial interest in hiring as many illegals as they can ,in violation of Fed Law.

Therefore, I do not care if the farmers are upset since they are engaged in reckless hiring pratices which violate the law.

I and many others get upset when we get a speeding ticket, but I have never seen a government who was willing to repeal speeding laws to satisfy my selfish desires, reason being, that speeding laws are necessary in order to protect society as a whole. I would guess there is a rational behind our immigration laws as well. I just seems as if our elected officials have forgotten why we had such laws to begin with.

We have farmers that are knowingly breaking US Law and then have the audacity to complain about it when law enforcement attempts to enforce the law.

That's insane.