No doubt we’ll hear a lot about immigrants during the GOP convention in Milwaukee this week. Expect a lot of the usual xenophobic rhetoric. But don’t expect an acknowledgement of the role immigrants play in “America’s Dairyland.” It’s an open secret that across Wisconsin, industries like dairy rely on immigrants. But under the mass deportation plans endorsed by convicted felon Donald Trump and the former Trump officials behind the Heritage Project’s dystopian Project 2025, these industries would collapse.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Just listen to the state’s farmers. The mass purging of these workers, “if carried out, would likely hit Wisconsin dairy farms hard,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported in April.
“It seems foolish to just pretend that foreign-born workers aren’t here and that we don’t need them,” dairy farmer Hans Breitenmoser told the outlet. John Rosenow, also a dairy farmer, said that he first hired an immigrant worker after “there wasn’t anybody left to hire that was hireable,” PBS Wisconsin reported in January. He said that the immigrant worker, Manuel, “just did such a fantastic job. And when he left, I hired two more, and now we have three or four families that are working here.”
The National Milk Producers Federation estimated in 2014 that just over half of Wisconsin’s dairy workers are immigrants. Many are undocumented. Last year, ProPublica reported that one conservative estimate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated that roughly 6,200 workers at larger farms lack legal immigration status. And because the study excluded small farms, the total number could be even higher.
“Talk to workers in Wisconsin, and they express little doubt immigrants account for a larger portion of the dairy industry workforce today,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. In fact, “[s]ome farmers say they haven’t encountered a U.S.-born applicant in years.”
Immigrants statewide are critical to the state’s economy, contributing billions of dollars in local, state, and federal taxes every single year. According to the American Immigration Council, immigrants paid $2.5 billion in taxes in 2019, while their spending power totaled more than $7 billion in the state. Nearly 200,000 immigrants are in the state’s labor force, specializing in fields ranging from software development to agriculture.
Wisconsin’s positive population growth has also been thanks to immigrants. Wisconsin Public Radio reported in January that most of the 20,000 individuals who moved to the state between July 2022 and July 2023 were immigrants.
“Whether or not more people are moving to our state or leaving our state is a sign of how satisfied people are with the quality of life that we’re providing,” John Johnson, a research fellow at the Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, told the outlet. “So I think that is an important indicator. And we do see positive net migration to Wisconsin overall.”
Despite immigrants’ immense financial and cultural contributions to Wisconsin and the nation, the GOP platform under Trump and Project 2025 calls for a red state army to go door-to-door in blue states and round up millions of farmworkers, construction workers, teachers, and frontline workers. In states like Iowa, these workers have helped reverse challenges posed by an aging population and alleviated key labor shortages. When plants like Tyson Foods struggled to find U.S.-born workers to fill these often grueling and dangerous positions, immigrants helped fill these gaps.
And even though this is the single most consequential immigration topic of this election, Trump refuses to explain his plan to deport Dreamers, rip apart American families, turn troops and police into a show-me-your-papers force to go into neighborhoods across the country and upend industries, including in Wisconsin.
States like Georgia have already found out the hard way what happens following the passage of anti-immigrant laws that actively harmed their local communities and economies.
”Georgia Farmers Say Immigration Law Keeps Workers Away,” NPR reported following the passage of the anti-immigrant H.B. 87 in 2011. “Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers,” the Associated Press reported the same year. “The Law Of Unintended Consequences: Georgia’s Immigration Law Backfires,” Forbes said in 2011. That piece notably acknowledged the not-so-secret secret of the importance of immigrant workers.
Wisconsin’s essential dairy and farm workers likely won’t be seen in the halls of the Fiserv Forum this week, but that doesn’t mean their presence won’t be felt. GOP officials and operatives enjoying cheese plates or crudité in swanky VIP rooms can thank an immigrant (but they likely won’t). And Wisconsin’s delegates, elected officials, and voters should know you can’t be “America’s Dairyland” without immigrants.
RELATED: Teachers, Business Owners, Farmworkers, Care Workers: Trump Wants to Purge Millions from USA
