Reporter Jacob Kushner and photographer Jake Naughton went to Darlington, Wis., for the latest installment of our Dairyland Diversity package (it’s here: Immigrant dairy workers transform a rural Wisconsin community). And they came back with an unusual coming-to-America story. One in which the old guard and the new wave are actually living in relative harmony.

Mark McFall, 57, of Platteville, buys a coconut from Efrain Garcia, a dairy farmer from Dubuque, Iowa. Garcia's relatives live in Darlington and run the taco stand next to his at the community's annual Fiesta Latina. Jake Naughton/WCIJ

By Jacob Kushner
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

DARLINGTON — Before Sgt. Antonio Ruesga arrived in this southwestern Wisconsin community a decade ago, the police could barely communicate with the few Spanish-speaking immigrants who had come to work at local dairies.

While tensions mount in Arizona and elsewhere over how to curb illegal immigration, Ruesga, who is Hispanic and fluent in Spanish, has created an atmosphere of trust among police and local immigrants. Latinos — once fearful of the police — now help solve crimes in this city of 2,400 located 60 miles southwest of Madison.

A Hispanic grocery store owner recently called Ruesga about a suspicious group of men attempting to cash checks from a business where they didn’t work. Ruesga later arrested three men for alleged check fraud against local banks.

“They choose to take the next step which was to report a crime — to actually call us even though they weren’t victims themselves,” Ruesga said. “That means that they care about Darlington, they want to see it safe.”

It is, after all, their community too.

On the weekends, Christian music blares in Spanish from inside a church on Louisa Street.

Darlington High School students create brochures reading “Bienvenidos a Darlington, Wisconsin,” welcoming Spanish-speaking immigrants to their community.

There are two Mexican grocery stores in Darlington and similar markets in other small communities across the state.

And each May, residents turn out to celebrate Mexican culture through food, dance, music and conversation at Fiesta Latina.

A decade ago, Darlington was home to 27 Hispanics, according to the census. Today police say there are about 300 Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere living here. An unknown number are in the U.S. illegally; others have earned legal residency.

The rise has fueled a growth in Latino students in the Darlington School District, where 38 of the 752 students are Hispanic. As recently as the 2001-02 school year, all students were white.

Most of the foreign newcomers are lured by jobs in Wisconsin’s dairy industry, which is increasingly reliant upon immigrant workers. Dairies employ about 5,300 immigrants in Wisconsin, making up an estimated 40 percent of the industry’s workforce, up sharply from about 5 percent a decade earlier, according to the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS).

The trend could continue as farmers implement plans to expand herds, requiring even more workers.

‘Bringing new diversity’

Hispanic immigrants across rural Wisconsin have begun stepping off the farm and onto Main Street, working at jobs outside of agriculture, joining in community events and starting small businesses that boost local economies.

Darlington is an example of how a rural Wisconsin community overcame its hesitation toward an unfamiliar culture. And it isn’t the only one: Eighty percent of the dairy workers surveyed in a 2009 PATS study said they felt accepted in the communities where they lived.

“Immigrant workers are bringing new diversity to rural communities that hasn’t existed for decades and contributing to the local economy throughout dairy Wisconsin,” said Wilda Nilsestuen, executive director of the nonprofit Council of Rural Initiatives, which organizes summits to improve relationships between immigrants and local residents.

“It’s poverty that drives them from their homelands and opportunities that bring them here,” said Nilsestuen, whose brother Rod is Wisconsin’s agriculture secretary.

Darlington native Savannah Blaser has witnessed the change since her graduation from high school in 2005. Blaser now holds degrees in Spanish and global studies from UW-Milwaukee. And she’s using her worldly knowledge right here in Darlington.

“There were no Hispanics in my class (and) in the whole school maybe three when I was there,” said Blaser, who now teaches English to Spanish speakers at the city library. “Now there’s a lot more integration of the culture.”

A visitor to Darlington probably would notice more grumbling about the increase in Amish horses and buggies on the roads than the influx of immigrants. But Darlington’s transformation into a culturally diverse community wasn’t always smooth.

Police and local residents recall fights a few years back between local residents and Spanish-speaking newcomers. In the past, some parents told their children not to interact with Hispanics at school, Darlington High School teacher Dianna Rogers said.

Police Sgt. Tony Ruesga came to Darlington to build ties with its rapidly growing Hispanic population that initially was hesitant to interact with police. Now, immigrants report crimes just like other residents. Jacob Kushner/WCIJ

Police help ease tensions

These tensions became a challenge for Darlington Police Chief Jason King, who saw it as his duty to improve relations between long-time locals and the new immigrants.

“When I started policing here … there were not any non-English speaking citizens in this community. Darlington was not very diverse; it was 99 percent Caucasians,” said King, who is white and doesn’t speak Spanish.

When immigrants began arriving, the chief said he had a hard time connecting with them.

“There was a definite gap — we couldn’t communicate with them,” King said. “We weren’t providing the same level of services to them that we were other residents of the community. They were afraid of us.”

To build trust between Hispanics and his department, King hired Ruesga, now a well-known figure among both immigrants and native Darlington residents. Ruesga spends time interacting with local Hispanic residents to build trust and explain laws, like reminding them to fill out their U.S. census forms. He also started an advisory committee that helps integrate the newcomers into the community.

Ruesga was exactly what Darlington needed, King said.

“The end result in my mind has been, they aren’t afraid of us, they cooperate with us, they’re reporting crimes to us — all the things that we would want citizens in our community to do,” the chief said.

Immigrants themselves sometimes end up on the wrong side of the law in Darlington, mostly for minor infractions, Lafayette County District Attorney Charlotte Doherty said.

Obtaining a Wisconsin driver’s license became impossible for many undocumented immigrants since a 2005 state law passed to comply with the federal Real ID Act required applicants for a driver’s license to submit proof of citizenship or legal resident status.

“The vast majority of the cases involving Hispanic descendants are (for) operating without a license,” Doherty said. “They can’t get driver’s licenses, and they work on farms. The farms are out of town, and they live in town, and they drive back and forth to work.”

Francisco, who asked that his last name not be used because he’s in the country illegally, works on a dairy farm outside of Darlington. Because of his status, the Mexican immigrant can’t get a driver’s license. Francisco said he knows it’s not legal for him to drive, but he has no other way to get to work.

“If you don’t have a license, you’ll have problems with the police,” Francisco said. “In Mexico you just bribe the police, but here you can’t bribe the police.”

Doherty said about 5 percent all prosecutions involve Hispanic residents, and the costs associated with processing them are minimal. “These people pay their tickets — that increases the revenue in the clerk of courts office,” she said.

Adults struggle to learn English

Across the street from the police department, a librarian browses through the Spanish-language section at the Johnson Public Library before teaching an English class to Hispanic adults. Library director Nita Burke uses the collection to draw in members of the Hispanic community, but she said making connections to that group hasn’t been easy.

Eduardo Dorantes, a son of Alfredo Dorantes, works on Jay Stauffacher’s farm outside Darlington when he’s not attending class at Darlington High School. He hopes to go to college so he doesn’t have to do dairy work forever. Jacob Kushner/WCIJ

An adult learner may only come a few times and not return, or miss a lot of sessions, making consistent instruction difficult. “I’m reaching out to them,” Burke said. “It’s a long process.”

Immigrants say they don’t have a lot of free time to get deeply involved in local programs and organizations.

“The problem is that when we came here, we were thinking about working to earn money,” said Alfredo Dorantes, a Darlington resident and dairy worker who’s been in the U.S. for eight years. “We put school off to the side; we didn’t have time to study English.

“I can’t talk with Americans because it’s very hard work to communicate, and I feel bad when I can’t communicate with anyone,” he added in Spanish. “It’s uncomfortable to be sitting next to someone that you can’t have a conversation with.”

Integration starts at school

Dorantes said his three children, on the other hand, are all fluent in English.

In fact, schools often are the first place rural Wisconsin life meets Hispanic culture.

When Spanish-speaking students arrived in Darlington, teachers say they had trouble helping them learn English quickly enough to understand the material being taught. Sending notes home to parents was impossible for all but the handful of teachers who knew some Spanish. Some of those hurdles have evaporated as the children learn English.

“In the schools, they interact with Americans, their friends are Americans,” Dorantes said. “They are better adapted than us.”

But not everyone in the community was initially pleased with the arrival of foreigners to Darlington schools.

“When I first started, I would get a lot of ‘My dad doesn’t think I should learn Spanish because they should learn English,’ ” said Rogers, who teaches Spanish at the high school. “Now, it’s ‘I’m taking Spanish Three and Four because I know that I need that. I want to be able to talk at the restaurant … I work here and I need to be able to speak it.’ ”

Undocumented immigrants pay for, use public services

Many of the immigrants interviewed for this reporting project don’t have valid work visas to be in the United States. Farm owners say they deduct federal and state taxes from the paychecks of all of their workers — money that goes toward benefits such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that only legal residents are eligible to receive.

Still, volunteer firefighter and Darlington resident Mark Nelson said he takes issue with immigrants who are here illegally, especially when they break the law by driving without a license. He’s seen the problem play out at accident scenes involving undocumented residents.

“I’ve seen seven or eight licenses come out of their billfold,” Nelson said. “It takes two hours to run all of them through and figure out which one’s correct.”

Nelson, who ran unsuccessfully for Darlington mayor this spring, said illegal immigrants also may be suppressing wages in Darlington and elsewhere.

“If they’ve got these illegals coming in, and these companies can hire them seven, eight bucks cheaper, that’s not helping the unemployment rate at all,” he said.

Immigrants also use public services at Memorial Hospital of Lafayette County, and many are unable to pay for the emergency care the hospital is mandated to provide, hospital administrator Sherry Kudronowicz said.

Kudronowicz said dairy workers — both native and foreign — often don’t have medical coverage because most employers don’t offer it. She said uninsured Hispanics, like other patients without health-care coverage, make costly emergency room visits because their lack of insurance prompts them to skip preventive care. In the UW-Madison survey of immigrant dairy workers, 29 percent reported having health insurance.

Patients who can’t pay for emergency care may be eligible for the hospital’s charity-care program, which forgives part or all of the bill for poor patients. Kudronowicz said funding for that program comes from the hospital’s operating budget, which is supported by patients whose bills are paid in full.

“They’re using the services, they’re not abusing the services,” Kudronowicz said. “They’re using the services that they need, and as a hospital, that’s why we’re here.”

Local businessman Diego Camacho insisted that even immigrants who are here illegally aren’t a drain on the community. Camacho is an interpreter whose family owns the Steil Camacho Funeral Home in Darlington. He said many immigrants strive to improve themselves and their communities through hard work.

“They all want to contribute — nobody wants to be a parasite,” he said. “Very few people come to take advantage of the system.”

Bigger farms mean more immigrant workers

Click here to see data: In Part 5 of Dairyland Diversity, we explored the causes of the Wisconsin dairy industry's newfound reliance on immigrant workers.

Dairy farmers said they need the new immigrants to keep their industry growing. The flood of workers from Mexico to rural Wisconsin towns is likely to continue as dairy farms continue to get bigger — and hire more immigrants to shoulder the growing workload.

Farmers spent nearly $1 billion to modernize or expand their dairy facilities between 2003 and 2007, and they are expected to continue at least that level of investment between 2008 and 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007 survey of dairy producers.

Among those investing is farmer James Winn. He’s one reason Darlington’s Hispanic population increased significantly over the past decade. Eight years ago, Winn hired his first immigrant laborer because he couldn’t find enough local workers to milk the cows at his expanded dairy operation.

Now, 16 of his 23 employees are Hispanic, and Winn has been an official sponsor of Darlington’s annual Fiesta Latina.

State Rep. Steve Hilgenberg, D-Dodgeville, whose district includes Darlington, said the arrival of Hispanic immigrants is a boost to the struggling economy of southwestern Wisconsin.

“This is a labor force that dairy owners are pretty satisfied with. They seem to be hard working, they seem to be engaged,” Hilgenberg said. “It’s kept a lot of dairy farms running that would have had a difficult time doing so.”

Hilgenberg said waves of immigrants are part of Wisconsin’s history. Foreigners come to Wisconsin “to improve themselves and help the state develop,” he said — just like the others before them, including Germans, the Hmong, Italians, Norwegians and Poles.
Fitting into Darlington’s future

When Margarita Hernandez first came to Darlington in 2002, she expected to encounter xenophobia and uneasiness. Instead, she found acceptance and success. Over the past eight years, Hernandez has worked at a variety of jobs, including factory work. Until recently, she owned Las Margaritas, a Mexican grocery.

“Here, racism hardly exists at all,” Hernandez said. “In other places, racism is how Americans most frequently approach Mexicans, but not here — it’s a very easygoing town.”

Her son, Alex Rivera, 15, agreed.

“We have a lot of Hispanics here attending school, many Mexicans,” said Rivera, who switches easily between English and Spanish. “The (Americans) interact with us, they’re not racist, we all hang out together, we have class together — the teachers too — racism doesn’t exist.”

Moving in and up

Perhaps even more significant than the movement of immigrants to Wisconsin’s dairies is their movement beyond the farm.

Eduardo Dorantes, a son of Alfredo Dorantes who will be a junior at Darlington High School, works four shifts a week on Jay Stauffacher’s dairy farm outside of Darlington. He’s been there for a year and a half, balancing a social life, work and school. He recently got a 25-cent raise to $8.25 an hour, but Eduardo Dorantes doesn’t plan to be a farmworker forever.

“The truth is, I don’t want to keep working on a farm — I want to keep studying,” Eduardo Dorantes said in Spanish. “My interest is in learning, no matter where that may be.”

Parents often encourage their children to become educated, and many immigrants who begin working on dairy farms and other entry-level positions move on to other jobs.

The son of Puerto Rican parents, Camacho began 35 years ago as an apprentice at a Middleton funeral home. Now he owns two funeral homes in southwestern Wisconsin, and his daughter, Cristina, owns the family’s funeral home in Darlington.

Camacho has this advice for the new immigrants: “Don’t just take advantage of the employment at the dairy. One day you may be able to own that dairy.”

This is the sixth report for Dairyland Diversity, a collaborative project with The Country Today newspaper and other news organizations examining how immigration is reshaping Wisconsin’s dairy industry — and the state. The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

Darlington dairy owner James Winn, left, turned to immigrant labor a few years after expanding his farm to 600 cows in 1998. Winn said he needed more workers to help milk the larger herd, and local residents were unreliable or uninterested. Jacob Kushner/WCIJ

By Jacob Kushner
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Throughout America’s Dairyland, at places such as the dairy farms of James Winn in southwestern Wisconsin and Mike and Sandi Zirbel near Green Bay, farmers say they need immigrants to operate their growing farms.

As Wisconsin dairy farms expand, farmers have become increasingly reliant upon immigrant workers to milk the cows and clean the barns.

Immigrants make up nearly 60 percent of the work force at the state’s largest dairy farms, those with more than 300 cows, while just 20 percent of workers at smaller dairies are immigrants, according to a 2009 University of Wisconsin-Madison study.

Farmers are “looking for low-cost reliable workers,” said Brad Barham, a dairy researcher with the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, which conducted the study of immigrants’ roles on dairy farms.

“It’s met by immigrants or second-generation Americans.”

The demand for immigrant dairy workers is expected to remain strong as dairy producers and processors, who invested an estimated $1 billion in modernization projects from 2003 to 2007, have forecast similar expenditures in upcoming years.

But many — no one know how many — of Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are in the United States illegally. Farmers say they follow federal rules to ensure their workers are here legally. Immigration experts say the system doesn’t screen out all undocumented workers.

And farmers say the immigrants, most of whom are from Mexico, are now critical to their operations.

“If I couldn’t have my Hispanic labor, I’d sell the dairy tomorrow,” said Lafayette County farmer Winn, whose work force of 23 includes 16 Hispanic immigrants.

“I couldn’t do it without them.”

About 5,300 immigrants, 40 percent of Wisconsin’s total dairy work force, are employed by dairy farms, according to the study. A decade ago, immigrants composed just 5 percent of the dairy work force.

This rapid shift toward immigrant labor on dairy farms follows earlier labor patterns, the study said, such as the reliance upon Latino immigrants in the Upper Midwest’s vegetable farms since at least the 1930s, and the employment of immigrants in the region’s meatpacking and food-processing industries throughout the 20th Century.

To increase production, farmers are adding animals to their herds or milking three times a day instead of two.

These strategies “require more workers,” the study noted.

Immigrants also tend to work for lower wages than do native-born workers. The study found that in a review of pay for comparable jobs, immigrant dairy workers earned about $9 to $12 an hour, and those figures tended to run about $1 lower than what native-born workers earn.

“The lower wage seen for immigrant workers may be related to language ability and legal vulnerabilities,” the study reported.

Getting bigger, one step at a time

By the time Green Bay dairy farmers Mike and Sandi Zirbel more than doubled their operation to 200 cows in 1990, Spanish-speaking foreigners were already knocking on their door asking for work. The Zirbels soon realized they needed help keeping up with the larger herd, so they decided to give immigrant labor a try.

The farm, which has been in the family for nearly a century, formerly had fewer than 80 cows, milked by family members and local workers, including neighbors and teenagers.

The Zirbels built a “double 12″ milking parlor, in which workers connect milking equipment to a group 24 cows.

Twenty years later, they employ six immigrant workers to help milk their herd of 630.

With its increased capacity, through a second expansion completed in 2008, the farm provides employment to additional family members — Jordan, the couple’s oldest son, who wanted to farm after he graduated from high school; their daughter, Chelsea, who graduated from college with a degree in dairy science; and her husband, Kris, who also holds a dairy science degree.

“Now we’ve got three energetic young adults that want to work the family farm,” Sandi Zirbel said.

Motivations differ, but expansion is often the answer

While most Wisconsin dairy owners first hired immigrants after expanding their farms, their reasons for expanding differ.

In Jefferson County, located between Milwaukee and Madison, Waterloo dairy farmer Charles Crave turned to hired labor because his family was tired of a lifestyle that revolved entirely around work.

“As the family changed, the need for the labor force changed also,” Crave said. “My wife was no longer willing to tolerate working six and a half days a week, 14 hours every day, and neither was I.”

So, 15 years ago, the Crave Brothers farm hired the first of many Hispanic immigrants.

“After we saw their dependability, we never looked back,” said Crave, whose work force of 30 now includes about 15 Hispanic immigrants. Crave said he expects that his dairy business — and his immigrant workforce — will continue to grow.

Winn, the Lafayette County farmer, recalled that after expanding his dairy farm, he initially hired only local workers.

But there were problems.

“I’d get a phone call every Saturday and Sunday morning that somebody wasn’t gonna hit the five o’clock shift,” Winn said. “So I gotta scramble to try to find somebody to cover for them, or 95 percent of the time I’m the one that covered for them.”

On the western edge of the state in Buffalo County, Waumandee farmer John Rosenow saw expanding his dairy as an entrepreneur’s way to move up in the world.

“What always bothered me is that I did just as well as my sisters in school, and they went on to a medical profession, and they made more money than I was farming,” Rosenow said. “I didn’t think I had to accept that because I was a farmer, I had to accept a lower standard of living.”

After a 1989 barn fire decimated his dairy, Rosenow decided to rebuild at a level that would achieve the lifestyle he dreamed about.

“After a considerable amount of research, we decided that if we’re going to have the standard of living that we want, we’re going to have to milk more cows,” he said.

Rosenow increased his herd from 100 to 300 cows. In 1997 he entered into a partnership with his neighbor, Loren Wolfe, whose 100-cow dairy needed new equipment. The two farmers joined their dairies, increasing their combined herd size to its current 550 cows.

John Rosenow began employing immigrant workers on his dairy after expanding his farm in 1997. Robert Gutsche Jr./WCIJ

Like other farmers, Rosenow sought to hire local residents to help run the bigger farm. But local labor was hard to come by. So Rosenow made a phone call to an agricultural employment agency. Two days later, Manuel Perez arrived in Waumandee.

“Out of desperation, and unwillingly, we hired our first Mexican and found an incredible work ethic, incredible reliability, no problem getting people to come and work,” Rosenow said. “As more local people quit, we would replace them with Mexican labor.”

Rosenow estimates that since 2003, he’s continuously employed eight Mexicans to milk his herd and perform other tasks on the farm. Rosenow says his expansion, made possible by the help of immigrant laborers, allowed him to achieve prosperity.

Said Rosenow: “I make more money than my sisters, I’m doing what I love to do. I have spare time.”

The moves toward bigger farms are sometimes controversial.

One of the state’s largest dairies, the Rosendale Dairy in Fond Du Lac County, is about to double its operation from 4,000 cows to 8,000. The expansion comes after the state Department of Natural Resources approved a water protection permit in January — a decision that critics say may lead to environmental hazards associated with manure runoff from the farm.

For many, getting bigger is the only way

Some experts say there are alternatives to expansion to keep Wisconsin’s dairy farms profitable. UW Extension agricultural agent Paul Dyk said that too often, dairy owners buy into to the notion that getting bigger is the only way.

Dyk and Irv Possin, executive director of a state program that gives farmers financial incentives to expand, agree that viable alternatives to expansion exist, such as finding a niche market within the industry — going organic, becoming a seedstock producer or entering the compost business.

Rosenow is composting manure at his farm — and he said his compost business now has a greater profit margin than his milk production.

Another popular alternative to expansion can reduce technology and machinery on the farm, and prevent farm owners from entering into significant debt required by most expansions. Managed grazing takes cows out of their stall barns and back into pastures to graze for a portion of their food. A small UW-Madison study of 31 dairy farms found grazing operations earned twice as much income per cow as similar confinement farms.

Despite higher income, grazing operations are limited by the large amount of land they require.

The bottom line for many farmers is that alternatives to expansion, such as grazing, simply do not offer as much total income potential as a larger farm, according to Barham, the dairy researcher with the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies.

“If you’re only at a certain scale you’re only at a certain income level. It’s not the rate of return, but just the amount of income,” Barham said. “Small farmers are not changing because production is inefficient— it’s just seeking a larger scale to reach an income that they want.”

Expect even more large farms – and more immigrants

Hector Mendez found a job on the Cottonwood Dairy farm near Darlington shortly after owner James Winn expanded his operation-- and hired more employees in the process. Jacob Kushner/WCIJ

It should come as no surprise that in Wisconsin, the dairy industry means business. In 2007, dairy accounted for $4.6 billion of Wisconsin’s $9 billion in agricultural sales – or just over half, according to the 2007 Census of Agriculture.

The rapid arrival of immigrants to work in Wisconsin’s dairy industry is changing more than just the dairy workforce — it’s also transforming the makeup of many rural Wisconsin communities. Ten years ago, for example, Lafayette County was home to 92 Hispanics, according to the 2000 census. The estimate rose to 226 — an increase of 146 percent — by 2008, and some residents think the actual number is much higher.

“In the last five, six years, this area has grown by leaps and bounds as far as welcoming the Hispanic community,” Winn said.

“There’s grocery stores in Darlington, there’s restaurants in Darlington — Mexican — and we didn’t have those before. They’ve been a huge boost to our economy.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

This story has been corrected. The first names of two dairy farmers were incorrect. Their correct names are Charles Crave, not Chris, and Jordan Zirbel, not Jason.

Immigration “is an issue that has always tapped into great passions,” says Craig Regelbrugge, a lobbyist and co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform. He lobbies for dairy operators who say they need immigrant workers to stay afloat even in a recession. Photo by Staci E. McKee

This report is the fourth part of Dairyland Diversity, an investigation of Wisconsin dairy farms’ growing reliance upon immigrant workers. This report was produced in collaboration with Capitol News Connection. Earlier stories available here.

By Manuel Quinones
For the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

WASHINGTON — A newspaper cartoon above lobbyist Craig Regelbrugge’s desk shows farm workers harvesting lettuce. Two guys wearing American flags on their shirts shout, “Hey, Pedro! Go back to Mexico! But first, can you cut my yard and clean my swimming pool?”
Regelbrugge has spent much of the last decade pushing for an overhaul of America’s immigration laws. The cartoon illustrates the contradictory and often angry rhetoric he’s up against.

“This is an issue that has always tapped into great passions,” Regelbrugge said in his Washington, D.C., office, which has a view of K Street, the artery synonymous with inside-the-Beltway lobbying.

LISTEN: Click to download report broadcast by our partner, Wisconsin Public Radio, on March 12, 2010. Report produced by Manuel Quinones of Capitol News Connection for Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

As co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, Regelbrugge is a champion for dairy operators who say they need immigrant workers to stay afloat even in a recession. He recently spoke in Madison to a group of Wisconsin farmers, who told him they want action from their Washington representatives.

“The level of anxiety in the industry there and elsewhere is as high as I have seen it in my years working on this issue,” said Regelbrugge, vice president for governmental affairs for the American Nursery and Landscape Association.

Dairy farmers say they want access to workers without getting into legal trouble. Many say they would go out of business without immigrant labor, and consumers would likely end up paying more for milk.

But many lawmakers on Capitol Hill are running away from the issue. They worry tackling immigration could hurt them at the ballot box this November, and they appear to lack the legislative bandwidth to focus on much besides the ailing economy, joblessness and health care reform.

A cow on the Wisconsin dairy farm of John Rosenow, who relies heavily upon immigrants to keep the cows milked and fed. Photo by Robert Gutsche Jr.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin dairy producers John Rosenow and Loren Wolfe said they’ve had trouble finding enough locals willing to get dirty and work the long hours it takes to run their operation.

“We need (immigrants) to milk cows or we’d barely be in business,” Wolfe said of the Hispanics who work for the farm near Cochrane.

Immigrants now make up about 40 percent of the state’s dairy labor force, up from 5 percent a decade ago, according to a 2009 study by the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies. Many of the workers  are in the United States illegally.

Regelbrugge said the status quo creates economic instability and the risk that employers will exploit immigrant workers. He said it’s also putting dairy farmers in jeopardy.

“Frankly it poses a challenge to farmers who wonder whether they can pass their business to the next generation,” he said.

Bush tried, failed to change immigration

The last time Congress passed major immigration reform legislation was in 1986. It was supposed to fix the nation’s illegal immigration problem by granting amnesty to millions of people and beefing up enforcement. But the effort failed to properly control the future flow of immigrants and the demand for immigrant workers.

President George W. Bush gave it another try during his second term in office. It ended in a crushing defeat in the Senate in 2007.

Bush’s plan included a path to legalization and measures to strengthen border security and create a temporary guest worker program. Opponents called it an unacceptable amnesty. Many also doubted the government’s ability to fulfill the lofty promise of finally fixing the illegal immigration problem.

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, was one of the Republicans blasting Bush for his immigration proposal. For years, Sensenbrenner has been a thorn in the side of advocates of so-called comprehensive immigration reform.

“The American public is opposed to granting amnesty to illegal immigrants,” Sensenbrenner said.  “And no matter how they try to spin it by calling it comprehensive immigration reform, earned legalization, whatever, the public gets what it really is.”

Sensenbrenner said he hasn’t forgotten the concerns of dairy farmers. He said he may be willing to support some sort of temporary guest worker program. Yet his top priority is stopping illegal border crossings and the hiring of undocumented workers.

“And that means vigorously enforcing employer sanctions, fining those who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants,” he said.

Another Wisconsin Republican, U.S. Rep. Thomas Petri of Fond du Lac, considers himself a champion of the industry. But he cringed when asked about immigration reform and its impact on Wisconsin dairy producers. Petri didn’t want to go into detail but said he supports making sure producers have the workers they need while being tough on illegal immigration.

“We really need to make sure we get a handle on people coming into the United States illegally, both in fairness to those who come here legally and to give people confidence that there is just not going to be another wave of uncontrolled immigration,” Petri said.

U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, whose district relies heavily on the dairy industry, worries that too much of a strong hand from Washington may hurt farmers.

“They told me that if Congress were to do something too Draconian it would put them out of business,” Kind said.

Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow says immigrant workers are an important part of his farm's operations. Photo by Robert Gutsche Jr.

U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Appleton, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, didn’t comment for this story despite attempts to reach him through his office and in person. Kagen recently signed on to a resolution calling for tough enforcement against illegal immigrants.

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, said, “I don’t want to talk about that,” when approached just outside the House floor. He walked away.

U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., told this reporter, “You’re a good man,” when pressed about immigrants in the dairy industry. He then jumped into an elevator. In response to questions submitted to his office, Kohl said he supports reform.

“I understand there can be some apprehension about foreign workers and guest worker programs, especially as we face job losses and high unemployment figures in the United States,” Kohl wrote. “But it is important to balance the need to provide farmers with access to the workers they need, with the need to protect American jobs.”

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., sits with Kohl on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration issues. He called congressional inaction on the issue “irresponsible.”

Dairy producers say Congress can help by at least passing the so-called AgJobs bill. The legislation would overhaul the agricultural foreign worker program and create a path to legalization for certain farm workers.

Jaime Castaneda with the National Milk Producers Federation said dairy farmers currently are worse off than other agricultural producers because they can’t take advantage of the existing guest worker program, which only covers temporary and seasonal workers. Milk production requires a year-round workforce.

“Dairy farmers cannot have access to any visa system to bring foreign labor,” Castaneda said.  “Dairy farmers have access to nothing.”

Several Wisconsin lawmakers have signed on to the AgJobs legislation in the House and Senate, including Kohl, Feingold, Kagen, Petri, Ryan and Kind. But progress on the measure has stalled.

“Democratic leaders are weighing how many votes they win by doing immigration reform and how many votes they lose by doing immigration reform,” said Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Congress dodges, immigrants flow in

In the years since lawmakers last passed significant reform legislation, the number of illegal immigrants has grown dramatically, now estimated at about 12 million.

Rosenblum said lawmakers and government officials helped exacerbate the immigration problem through lax enforcement policies going back decades and tacit support for the growth of immigrant labor.

A study issued in December by Rosenblum’s group concluded that “policy inaction is a result not only of a partisan divide in Washington, but also of the underlying economic reality that despite its faults, illegal immigration has been hugely beneficial to many U.S. employers, often providing benefits that the current legal immigration system does not.”

In a November speech, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said immigration reform should be a “three-legged stool” including “serious and effective enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here.”

While Congress fails to address the last two legs, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has continued to pursue enforcement against illegal workers and employers. Last year, federal agents started going through tens of thousands of employment documents from businesses around the country, including dairy farms, as part of a new compliance campaign. ICE officials won’t release details but say businesses in Wisconsin are part of the investigation.

In a separate enforcement action in February, 49 foreign nationals were arrested in 11 central and western Wisconsin counties in a fugitive roundup. Some were charged with non-immigration-related crimes, and others had been ordered deported for violating immigration laws, ICE spokeswoman Gail Montenegro said.

While some celebrate the tough stance taken against illegal immigrants, dairy producers see it as a major threat to their business.

Said Regelbrugge: “People came here, we needed their labor, and we didn’t provide the legal means to do it.”

Strange bedfellows

The immigration reform debate is unlike any other in Congress. Members of both parties support fixing U.S. immigration laws. And the issue creates unusual alliances: Some labor unions have united with social conservatives in opposing generous immigration policies while the business community and political liberals have come together to call for more relaxed rules, Rosenblum said.

U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have been working together to fashion a compromise expected to be introduced this year. U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, said she’s hopeful Congress will act.

“The partisanship that has stalled other reforms may not come into play in the same way with immigration reform, so I think we have some prospects,” she said.

But just because immigration reform has bipartisan support doesn’t mean Congress will resolve or even take up the issue in the coming weeks or months. Members from both parties killed immigration reform the last time around. And the wounds of failure are still too tender for many lawmakers.

“My colleagues recall the last unsuccessful attempt and feel a little burned by that,” Baldwin said. Kind said the issue “has become such a political football, unfortunately.”

In December, several dozen Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, introduced a so-called comprehensive immigration reform legislation package. The proposal includes a path to legalization for many illegal immigrants and the provisions for immigrant workers contained in the AgJobs legislation. Some Republicans have labeled the bill dead on arrival.

While Congress debates, Wisconsin dairy farmers wait — stuck between following the rules and staying in business.

“We sat down at a partner meeting looking at the threats to our livelihood, and the No. 1 threat that we could envision was to lose our employees,” Rosenow said. “There is no way we can manage that. There is just no way.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) developed this report in collaboration with the nonprofit Capitol News Connection in Washington, D.C.  Manuel Quinones, who produced this report, is a reporter for Capitol News Connection. WCIJ collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

Victoria, an undocumented immigrant, works at a dairy farm east of La Crosse -- and gets there by driving, although she lacks a license. WCIJ/Robert Gutsche Jr.

By Andy Szal and Jacob Kushner

Drivers beware: There’s a woman driving a stretch of Interstate 90 between Sparta and Tomah — without a license or any training about Wisconsin’s traffic laws.

Her name is Victoria. She’s a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico who works on a Tomah dairy farm with other undocumented immigrants whom  she says “all understand our boss through signals” because of language barriers.

Victoria, who arrived in Wisconsin 13 months ago, hasn’t taken any drivers’ training in the United States because Wisconsin law prohibits her from obtaining a license. She says she hasn’t had any run-ins with police, but requested that her last name be withheld out of fear she might be pursued as an illegal immigrant.

She is among a growing number of illegal immigrants who are finding work on Wisconsin dairy farms, located in rural areas where the only way to get to work is by car.

Immigrants now account for about 40 percent of the state’s dairy labor force, up from just 5 percent a decade ago, according to a 2009 study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies.

These 5,000 immigrants have become a critical part of the state’s signature industry at the same time that some are calling for a greater crackdown on undocumented immigrants. While there are no estimates on how many of Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are here illegally, federal surveys have estimated that half of all immigrant crop workers nationwide lack immigration papers.

The debate over undocumented immigrants spilled into the state budget this summer as lawmakers debated a proposal that would have allowed them to get licensed.

The measure, backed by some dairy farmers and law-enforcement officers, would have reversed part of a 2005 state law passed to comply with the federal Real ID Act, which required applicants for a driver’s license to submit proof of citizenship or legal resident status.

Opponents argue Wisconsin shouldn’t be in the business of ignoring state and federal immigration laws, regardless of the limitations on state agriculture and driving enforcement.

“There’s a tendency to sometimes accept the fact that we have people here breaking the law,” said state Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia.

Still, the measure’s failure came as a blow to immigrant advocacy groups, which have long petitioned for the right of undocumented immigrants to drive legally in the state.

“It shows that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party in Wisconsin or nationally have the intention to fix the problems that are most urgent to our people,” said Alex Gillis, co-founder of the Madison immigration rights group Immigrant Workers’ Union.

No one knows how many undocumented immigrants are driving without licenses in Wisconsin. But state Department of Transportation data show that after the law requiring applicants to submit proof of legal residence took effect in 2007, the number of people taking the Spanish-language version of the road skills knowledge test plummeted 91 percent — from 42,500 in 2006 to fewer than 4,000 in 2008. The number of applicants taking the English version of the test also declined during the period, but by just 23 percent.

Patrick Fernan, the agency’s operations manager, acknowledged the possibility that the decrease represents a drop in the number of undocumented Hispanic immigrants applying for licenses, but cautioned it’s impossible to say for sure.

Driving a necessity for many immigrant agricultural workers

According to a 2008 study by Paul Dyk, a livestock agent at University of Wisconsin-Extension in Fond du Lac County, 78 percent of Hispanic workers at Eastern Wisconsin dairy farms arrive at work in their own car, but only 44 percent of Hispanic dairy workers have a driver’s license.

Mario Garcia, youth coordinator at the Madison-based nonprofit agency Centro Hispano, says driving legally in Wisconsin has become impossible for many of the state’s agricultural immigrant workers since the federal government passed the Real ID Act. The 2005 federal law was crafted to shore up the security of the state driver’s licenses, although deadlines for compliance have been pushed back amid complaints from states about its requirements and costs.

Garcia said the inability of immigrant workers to drive legally makes Wisconsin roads dangerous for all.

That was one reason a number of law enforcement officials came out in support of the license provision this summer during the budget debate. Police chiefs in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Appleton and Beloit each backed the provision, along with support from chiefs of smaller departments such as Whitewater, Shorewood and Dorchester. The Wisconsin State Troopers Association was also on board.

“Regardless (of whether) these cards are issued or not, undocumented individuals are going to be driving motor vehicles throughout the state,” Whitewater Police Chief James Coan said this summer. “Our traffic safety efforts will be enhanced by providing them with an opportunity to obtain a limited driver’s license.”

Tom Hochstatter, a Milwaukee attorney who practices immigration law, says giving immigrants driver’s licenses would increase safety and reduce the burden on law-enforcement officials to act as de facto immigration enforcement agents.

The potential downside is just that if you’re showing a law enforcement officer your document, then they know that it’s really a second-class driver’s license,” Hochstatter said. “If you have an agenda about immigration, you could end up pursuing your questioning … to a point where you find they are undocumented.”

The budget proposal would have required the limited-use licenses to appear “distinctive” from standard driver’s licenses and would also have required language on the new licenses to stipulate they could be used for driving only. Cardholders could not have used their cards for other identification verification purposes, such as cashing a check or boarding a commercial flight.

The measure also would have stipulated that law enforcement may not press cardholders on their immigration status if the limited-use license was presented for its intended purpose.

Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s office indicated he would be opposed to the bill’s provision on checking immigration status “to the extent these proposals limit the ability of law enforcement to work together at the federal, state and local levels.”

Debate in the state budget

The governor did not include the provision on driver’s licenses in the original budget for the 2009-11 biennium that he proposed in February. But state Rep. Pedro Colón of Milwaukee persuaded fellow Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee to add the measure during its deliberations on the budget.

The Assembly then approved the measure in its version of the budget.

Under Colón’s proposal, drivers unable to prove their legal residence could obtain a limited license provided that some key conditions were met, including establishing Wisconsin residency, providing proof of identity, being ineligible for a Social Security number and passing all relevant driving tests.

Colón said undocumented immigrants “were just in a panic. … They couldn’t go to work, they couldn’t go to the store,” and the issue was critical to his constituents.

At a December meeting of the Dairy Business Association, a group of large dairy farm owners, Colón told farm owners that the right to a driver’s license represents “the most basic of what we call the American dream, this basic attainment of what we call happiness.”

“Happiness to people in my district,” he said in a Madison speech, “is going to take grandma to the doctor and not being stopped by a police officer for four hours while they determine your identity because there is no way for you to get a driver’s license.”

Vos, a fellow member of the Joint Finance Committee, introduced a motion to eliminate the license provision during debate over the Department of Transportation budget.

“The entire idea … flies in the face of what common sense should be,” Vos said of the proposal, arguing that both dairy farm employers and potentially undocumented employees should be facing stiff state and federal penalties rather than being allotted a loophole in the state’s driving laws.

With Democrats in the majority in both houses, Republican opposition wasn’t enough to derail Colón’s proposal. Once the budget moved onto the Senate, however, some Democrats expressed concern about the measure, citing their constituents’ opposition.

Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, told a constituent in an e-mail that he was “able to convince” his caucus to drop the driver’s license provision. He represents a sizable Latino population and became the subject of intense scrutiny from the immigration advocacy group Voces de la Frontera.

But Carpenter was not swayed by the effort from law enforcement, labor groups and religious organizations, noting this summer that 90 percent of his constituents who had contacted his office were opposed to the measure.

Carpenter was also unhappy the provision was stuck into the budget during late-night deliberations and without a public hearing.
“I wasn’t the only one who had concerns,” Carpenter said of his discussions with fellow Democrats in the state Senate.

Colón said federal legislation left room for states to address the problem of undocumented drivers in the Real ID Act, and his staff analyzed two states that have implemented similar laws — Utah and Tennessee.

Tennessee, however, suspended its two-tier license program after the state found undocumented immigrants from neighboring states were attempting to acquire the licenses. Before the suspension of the program, the National Immigration Law Center estimated that Tennessee issued some 51,000 driving certificates to citizens who could not authenticate their legal status.

Vos said that while the public generally is not comfortable condoning what is seen as illegal activity, the economic issues surrounding the state and the country could also color voters’ views on immigration issues.

If the unemployment rate stays at current levels heading into the 2010 election season, Vos asked, “Will they be angry that you’re giving benefits to people here illegally?”

State fix likely to depend on Washington

Lawmakers on both sides of the driver’s license issue are united in one aspect: The Wisconsin Legislature shouldn’t be in the position of dictating immigration policy.

For now, Colón says he has no plans to reintroduce the plan as a stand-alone bill. In addition to the already difficult path it faces in the Legislature, Colón believes federal lawmakers are ready to make the state’s job easier by reforming how the nation deals with illegal immigrants.

“As a legislator in Wisconsin, I don’t want to be messing in immigration law,” Colón said, adding that federal lawmakers forced his hand with the mandates in the Real ID Act.

Vos acknowledged that he doesn’t have a say in the ultimate answer on immigration because, “I’m not in Congress.”

Andy Szal is a reporter for WisPolitics.com. Jacob Kushner is a reporter for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org). The two organizations collaborated on this report for Dairyland Diversity, an ongoing project with The Country Today newspaper examining how immigration is reshaping Wisconsin’s dairy industry.

]]> http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/12/16/while-wisconsins-immigration-politics-remain-stalled-undocumented-immigrants-drive-without-licenses/feed/ 0 http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/11/11/a-delicate-existence-undocumented-and-living-on-a-wisconsin-dairy-farm/ http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/11/11/a-delicate-existence-undocumented-and-living-on-a-wisconsin-dairy-farm/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:01:53 +0000 WisconsinWatch http://wisconsinwatch.org/?p=2105

José is one of an estimated 5,000 immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin. WCIJ/ROBERT GUTSCHE JR.

Immigrants cope with isolation, grueling hours.

But there’s room for family life, too.

By Jacob Kushner
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Yawning, the man pulls on his grimy work pants, then boots, then sweatshirt, releasing smells of animal waste and hay into the air.  The October morning is cold enough he’d see his breath if the farm wasn’t consumed by darkness, the moon hidden behind heavy clouds.

The woman calls out in broken English as she walks up and down the aisles of the barn: “Come on, let’s go. Come on, come on.” The cows glare at her before, one by one, they begin their familiar stroll toward the milking parlor.

The daily routine is not unlike the one experienced by generations of Wisconsin farm families. But unlike those farmers, this young Mexican couple, José and Victoria, said goodbye to their families and traveled 1,720 miles to work long hours on a dairy farm in Western Wisconsin among people who do not speak their language and in a place where their presence is illegal.

José says most Americans don’t like immigrants. “They think that we are here invading their territory. But we aren’t left with any other option because the situation in Mexico is very, very difficult.”

Despite the ever-present threat of deportation, José and his wife have a sort of job security they never found in Mexico: Their employment is all but ensured by the need for cheap labor at larger dairy farms that are increasingly common across Wisconsin’s rolling pasture lands.

The couple’s story is representative of roughly 5,000 immigrants who have become the labor backbone of Wisconsin’s signature industry. Immigrants now account for about 40 percent of the state’s dairy labor force, up from just 5 percent 10 years earlier, according to a 2009 study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies. While that study didn’t explore immigration status, earlier federal surveys have estimated half of all immigrant crop workers nationwide are working illegally.

José and Victoria requested their real names be withheld out of fear they might be identified by law enforcement and pursued as illegal immigrants. Though interviewed in Spanish, José and Victoria have learned enough English to understand directions on the farm and to function daily in Western Wisconsin while raising two bilingual children.

The work

To say José and Victoria work from sunrise to sunset would be inaccurate – their day starts in darkness before the sun rises, and ends in darkness, well after the final rays have been blocked by the hills to the west.

José drives his pickup truck to and from work, even though he’s ineligible to obtain a driver’s license. WCIJ/JACOB KUSHNER

With empty stomachs, save for a large mug of fresh milk from the cows, mixed with instant coffee and honey, Victoria and José climb into their pickup truck and drive the five-minute stretch of highway to the dairy farm.

While Victoria begins herding the cows into the milking parlor, José prepares the milking equipment.

The work is not altogether unskilled. In addition to directing animals using shouts, whistles and movements, immigrants also learn tasks such as operating farm machinery and monitoring the milk pumping system.

“Sometimes I come tired and there’s something I forget to do,” says José, recalling one morning a few months ago when milk began spewing on the floor from an overhead pipe because he forgot to correctly prepare the pump. “There’s a lot to remember.”

Once the cows walk into the parlor, José sanitizes their teats before attaching suction cups. The mooing crescendos as remaining cows grow impatient. Ten at a time, the cows are milked and led back to the barn.

By the time the cows return, Victoria has cleaned the barn and filled the stalls with feed. When finished, Victoria comes to the parlor to help her husband finish milking.

The couple talks sparingly as they focus on work, an old radio crackling out Mexican Maríachi and ranchera songs to the background noise of industrial-sized fans. By the time the sun rises, the work has become mechanical, routine.

Ask Victoria if it’s boring, and she laughs: “I don’t have time to be bored.”

Four hours after the morning milking began, the last cows head back to the barn, and José and Victoria clean the parlor.

At 11, the couple returns home to cook lunch – already six hours into the workday. Victoria, who works about 40 hours a week, usually spends the rest of the day doing chores or running errands. José averages 70 hours a week.

A couple of days a week, José will not return to work until it is time for the second milking from 5 to 9 p.m. José calls those his “easy days.” But on full days he works the entire afternoon, harvesting and transporting crops from the fields or feeding milk to calves out of oversized baby bottles.

“On a farm there is little rest,” José says. “It’s nothing but work and more work.”

Each autumn, José harvests the green peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes, corn, onions, potatoes and cilantro he grows in his garden outside their house. “Just think how much we save by not buying vegetables for three months,” he says. WCIJ/JACOB KUSHNER

For their labor, José earns $11 per hour and Victoria earns $8 per hour, and their combined take-home pay is about $1,900 every two weeks. Little remains after their employer deducts taxes (including Social Security, which they are ineligible to receive) and they cover their rent, truck payments, gas, utilities and groceries — plus the $200 per month they send to help support families back home in Mexico.

The family life

The work at the farm finally over, José and Victoria return to their modest but comfortable home, an old  two-bedroom farmhouse they rent from their boss for $330 a month. Awaiting them are their 13-year-old daughter María and 8-year-old son Antonio. The children have already finished their homework for the following day (there’s no TV until it’s all done).

It’s dinner time. Antonio and María run around the large kitchen, excited as mom prepares their favorite dish: Italian spaghetti, pasta cooked in a rich tomato-cream sauce with a Mexican twist (corn and jalapeños). The meal is indicative of the family’s lifestyle, a mix of Mexican traditions and rural Wisconsin comfort.

The children speak fluent Spanish and English, and their conversations switch almost randomly between the two. They always speak Spanish to their parents, who understand English well but are still uncomfortable speaking it.

After dinner, the children watch impatiently as dad navigates the Dish Latino channels. They want to watch “The Hulk,” but he prefers a Spanish-language soap opera. At a suspenseful moment in the show, José and the children watch with worried looks on their faces. Meanwhile, Victoria is curled up in a blanket, lying on the sofa – exhausted from the day’s work.

It’s a home life not unlike that of other families in rural Wisconsin. But the difference is, their home life is almost all they’ve got.

The family doesn’t usually go out to dinner, movies or bowling like other local families.

Twice a month, when they get their paycheck, they drive into town for a Domino’s pizza – Hawaiian with jalapeños. But as soon as it’s ready, they jump back in their pickup truck and drive out of town to eat their meal back at home.

Anticipating a twice-monthly treat, immigrant dairy worker José and his children await their takeout order at a Domino's Pizza. The family's discomfort among locals keeps them from venturing far from the farm where they work and live. WCIJ/JACOB KUSHNER

Sometimes they all drive into town to go shopping, but out of hesitation to communicate with store employees, their trip differs from that of most families. “Sometimes we eat out together, or go to the mall – only to look, nothing else,” José says.

It is less a fear of leaving the house than a sense of discomfort among a population that does not speak their language and, according to José, sees them as outsiders.

Coming to America

José, Victoria, María and Antonio each hold distinct memories of their life in Mozomboa, Mexico, their hometown of 3,000 located near the Gulf of Mexico, 175 miles east of Mexico City. While José took whatever daily jobs he could find on a local farm, the children sold snacks and water to locals as street vendors.

They all agree the hardest part was when José and eventually Victoria went to work in the United States, leaving their children behind.

“We couldn’t see them growing,” says Victoria, who tears up as she recalls leaving to create a new life for her children in America. After two years of separation, she returned to Mexico in 2007 to bring her children across the border.

José and Victoria don’t like talking about their journey into America – that episode in their life is over. But the kids can’t keep from recounting the story, and the memory of the blisters on their feet walking north through the desert with their mother.

Ask José why he came here, and he will say he wanted a job with a wage that could support his family. He entered the U.S. legally with a work visa, but decided not to return after it expired.

Ask him why he stayed, and the undocumented Mexican sounds more like a patriot than an alien.

“I love this country because there are many opportunities, many jobs — not like in Mexico,” José says. “And it’s more beautiful. Wherever one goes, one sees beautiful pastures.”

A traditional Mexican Sunday brunch is one reminder of the family's life before they moved to Wisconsin. A UW-Madison study estimates that 90 percent of the immigrant dairy workers are from Mexico. WCIJ/JACOB KUSHNER

But opportunity is not the same as security. That’s because a couple of state-issued photo IDs and Social Security numbers they purchased illegally for $400 each is all the documentation they have. Neither can get a driver’s license. Neither can get subsidized public health insurance in Wisconsin.

The cost of medical treatment is a problem José and Victoria know all too well: Three months ago, Victoria was rushed to a hospital for appendicitis. A $20,000 hospital bill on their kitchen table is a reminder of the challenge of being without insurance.

As María listens to her mom retell the story of the late-night hospital trip, a worried look creeps across her face. She knows her parents don’t have the money to pay the bill, and she’s scared about her future.

But, in her usual manner of making a lesson out of their challenges, Victoria turns to María, wipes away her own tears, and smiles: “If I were dead, how could I pay the bill then? Life is more important.”

A future through their children

José and Victoria seldom miss an opportunity to encourage their children to become educated and create a better future for themselves.

“Nothing is difficult, and nothing is impossible,” José says to María, telling her that not money, but dedication is the only real obstacle to overcome toward receiving a university education. He hopes the meager savings he hides away after each paycheck prove him right.

María is sometimes discouraged. At middle school, she sits alone at lunch because other children tease her and call her ugly. They hurl their insults just out of the earshot of the teacher, whom María says is oblivious to it all.

“Americans don’t like me,” she says. “It’s really hard to make a best friend.”

José and Victoria treat their kids like adults — they talk in goofy, ‘kid’ voices to the dog and cats around the farmhouse, but never to their children. They tell jokes and stories, challenging Antonio and María with trivia and word tricks.

“What weighs more, a kilo of cotton or a kilo of stone?” Victoria asks.

“Stone,” Antonio responds. “Cotton,” María says.

José strums a guitar as the family sings along to their favorite Mexican artists. They spend their evenings together in the living room, also watching television and playing games. WCIJ/JACOB KUSHNER

With such a close family life, it is easy to forget José and Victoria spend almost as many hours working as they do otherwise. They spend long hours milking cows not because they enjoy it, but because it’s their way of creating a better future for their children.

Ask José what his aspirations are, and the undocumented foreigner from Mexico describes a vision with a distinctly familiar tune. He hopes, against the odds, he and his family can become legal citizens. Some might recognize it as the American Dream.

“That my children continue with school and learn English well. That they become somebody in life, that they be important people here in the United States. Imagine, [Barack] Obama is an African American and he is president of the United States. It would be best for my children if next a [Latino/a] could be president, or secretary of state. One cannot lose hope.”

Editor’s note: This is the second part of Dairyland Diversity, a special report on Wisconsin’s growing reliance upon immigrant dairy workers. The stories are a joint project of several media organizations, including The Country Today, a weekly newspaper focusing upon agricultural and rural issues, and the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org). The Center collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

To see earlier Dairyland Diversity coverage, click here.

Dairy farmer John Rosenow says immigrant workers are "so much more capable than what we could find before" with local workers. WCIJ/ROBERT GUTSCHE JR.

By Jacob Kushner
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Like many Wisconsin dairy farmers, Tim Servais needed help and he reluctantly faced the facts.

After he expanded his farm operation outside La Crosse in 1995, Servais relied on local adults, teenagers and farm kids to do what work he couldn’t handle himself.

“I’ve always tried to hire people who were local so I had some background on them,” Servais said.

About three years back, Servais found the locals had stopped coming to his barn door. “I just couldn’t find people to do the work,” Servais said.

But he found Spanish-speaking foreigners eager to take their place. “I tried not to go that way because I didn’t know how it was going to work out,” he recalled.

Now immigrants do much of the field work and almost all of the milking for his 240-cow dairy herd.

“It worked out really well,” Servais said.

Servais is one of a growing number of Wisconsin dairy farmers relying on immigrants to milk their cows and keep their farms running smoothly.

Just 10 years ago, 5 percent of workers on Wisconsin dairy farms were immigrants — but by 2008, that number jumped to 40 percent, or more than 5,000 workers, according to a 2009 study by the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies. Those immigrants are changing the face of the state’s signature industry, while bringing increasing diversity and social challenges to the state’s rural areas.

As Wisconsin dairy farmers hire more immigrants, they face mounting pressure to ensure their workforce is competent, skilled, and above all, legal. Experts say farmers are often caught in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” web of federal employment regulations, with a strong incentive to know as little as possible about the legal status of their workers. The UW-Madison study didn’t inquire about immigration status, but earlier federal surveys have estimated that half of all immigrant crop workers are working in the United States illegally.

An immigrant worker milks cows in the parlor at John Rosenow's dairy farm in Buffalo County. Rosenow employs eight Mexican immigrants. WCIJ/ROBERT GUTSCHE JR.

Goodbye farm kids, hello immigrants

Servais remembers a time when the children of dairy farmers used to work on the farm, learning the ropes with the goal of one day inheriting it as their own.

Those days are disappearing for many families. Servais said farmers today simply have fewer children, and the remaining children don’t always share the traditional vision of taking on the family business.

It’s not hard to understand why children are choosing to go to college or pursue other industries over farm work.

“It’s labor intense,” Servais said. “When you’re (on) a dairy farm you’re on call 24-seven, 365, no matter if you’re on vacation or you’re down at the local store or what.”

Unsure of the aspirations of his own three children and in need of more workers after expanding his farm a few years back, Servais turned to local high school students, but found them generally unreliable in a business that requires timely and skillful milking at unusual hours.

“There are all kinds of people that want to come around and work, but it’s to their convenience,” Servais said. “It’d be Friday evening and they call at 5 o’clock and they’re supposed to be there at 5 o’clock – ‘I’m not going to make it tonight, something came up.’ Well you know what came up, something more fun than working.”

Servais said local teenagers come by his farm wanting work for the summer, but after spending a day in the parlor and seeing how messy and physically grueling the work is, most soon quit.

In need of a workforce he could depend on and afford, Servais turned to immigrants, and he now employs three of them.

“They don’t get paid a lot now, but that’s one thing I’m working on is paying them more because I really appreciate the fact that they’re helping me out, and they’re very good,” Servais said.

Servais is just one of many dairy farm owners increasingly relying on immigrants to keep operations running smoothly.

“We need them to milk cows or we’d barely be in business,” Loren Wolfe, co-owner of a 575-cow dairy farm near Cochrane, said of the Hispanic immigrants he employs.

The need for immigrant workers is exacerbated by low milk prices, as farmers depend upon cheap labor to remain profitable. Wolfe’s business partner, John Rosenow, estimated the pair would have to pay native workers twice the rate his Hispanic immigrants are willing to work for – $7.25 an hour, according to one of their immigrant employees.

Rosenow, who employs eight Hispanic workers, said even if he could find local workers who were dedicated to farm life, the increased salary costs would bankrupt his business.

Plus, Rosenow said, farmers hire immigrants because they are “excellent,” hard workers. In fact, they are “so much more capable than what we could find before” with local workers.

The hiring process

While locals are hard to find, immigrant applicants are numerous.

Sandi Zirbel, co-owner of a 635-cow dairy cooperative outside of Green Bay, said the influx of immigrants is evident in her company’s staff.

Zirbel said immigrants frequently come looking for work, and as many as 19 out of 20 applicants are immigrants. Two-thirds of those applications get tossed.

“Some of them simply just don’t fit into the system, either because of how much they’re asking per hour or what their experience is,” Zirbel said. All workers start at $7.50 per hour — but usually receive a raise to $8.50 after six months and are eligible for yearly raises thereafter.

Despite the number of applicants who are rejected, it’s easy to find enough qualified workers to fill the need at Zirbel Dairy Farms: Seven of the current nine farmhands are immigrants.

“They’re more likely to seek this type of work,” Zirbel said. “Why somebody would want to leave Mexico and come to Wisconsin to milk in the middle of winter, I don’t know … but there’s a lot of them up here.”

Tim Servais used to employ locals to milk cows on his mid-sized dairy farm in Vernon County near Stoddard. Now he hires immigrants to fill the spots, because locals no longer come around looking for work. WCIJ/ROBERT GUTSCHE JR.

The rules

Although dairy farm owners go through the same legal hiring process as all employers, many say the process is complicated by the assumption many Hispanics are undocumented, meaning they don’t have the proper work visas or have come to the United States illegally.

“In my opinion there is a high percentage of undocumented labor that is being used in dairy farms,” said Erich Straub, a Milwaukee attorney who specializes in deportation defense. Straub said because of contradictory immigration laws, it is in the best interest of farmers not to know if their workers are illegal.

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I don’t think they want to know,” Straub said. “I think they’re in a very difficult position where they have a need for labor, they have a declining labor pool in their community … it’s a very challenging environment for farmers to run a business.”

While most farmers will tell you they follow the rules, Straub said the larger problem is employment law is vague enough to allow some undocumented workers to slip through the cracks.

Employers must require all job applicants to fill out a federal I-9 employment eligibility form and show multiple forms of identification to prove they are authorized to work. Employers send the applicant’s Social Security number to the Social Security Administration for tax purposes. Unless they receive a “no-match” letter stating the Social Security number does not match a known worker, applicants are cleared for employment.

Undocumented immigrants often evade the issue by guessing at a valid number, or by paying someone to provide them with a Social Security number of an eligible worker, immigrants and experts said.

Employers must examine a worker’s identification documents and make a good faith decision as to their validity. The confusion arises with the notion of “constructive knowledge,” which states that employers who have an indication an employee may not be eligible must take further steps to ensure their eligibility or terminate the employee. This constructive knowledge could arise from a document that looks false, a “no-match” letter, or even overhearing the worker say a visa expired.

But Tom Hochstatter, a Milwaukee attorney who specializes in immigration law, said the constructive knowledge provision creates unique problems for dairy farmers.

“Dairy farmers,” he said, “are freaked out because their situation is such that, while they might not know that any particular person is legal or illegal, they know statistically that if they have 15 dairy workers … statistically the chances are that some don’t have genuine documents. There’s this fear.”

Rosenow, the Cochrane farmer, said the constructive knowledge provision gives farmers an incentive to know as little about the legal status of their workers as possible.

“If a reasonable person could look at the documents and would make the assumption that they’re legit, then you accept them,” Rosenow said.

A sign on the office door at John Rosenow's Cochrane Dairy farm reads "Don't enter with boots" in Spanish. WCIJ/ROBERT GUTSCHE JR.

E-Verify and the future of hiring

While dairy farmers admit it is possible undocumented workers slip through, they maintain they do everything within their power to ensure their own employees are documented. Not everyone is so sure.

For example, Zirbel’s cooperative outside Green Bay is one of only three Wisconsin dairy farms registered with E-Verify, a voluntary federal Web-based system allowing employers to instantaneously validate Social Security numbers of job applicants. Farmers acknowledge that applicants whose numbers don’t match often leave without providing another.

U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., is sponsoring a bill to require employers to use E-Verify before hiring.

But many say E-Verify is inconvenient, unreliable and will only make hiring workers more difficult. “I don’t see the downside of the system we’re using now,” Rosenow said.

“I know that there are accuracy problems with the database,” Straub said. “Sometimes those problems are exaggerated by some people who don’t want E-Verify. On the other side of the coin, I think E-Verify is promoted as some magic bullet that’s going to fix the immigration problem in the United States. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.”

While she’s one of the few using E-Verify, Zirbel disagreed with the assumption farmers are trying to manipulate the hiring process to benefit from cheap and illegal labor.

“I would like to assure anybody who doesn’t know anything about dairy farming that we’re doing everything possible to legally hire (immigrant workers),” Zirbel said.

“It’s peace of mind,” Zirbel continued. “We do our job to make sure we have all the right documentation. Whether or not they give us the right information, that’s really out of our hands.”

Coming Nov. 11: A delicate existence: A look into the life an undocumented Mexican family, working and living on a Wisconsin dairy farm.

Editor’s note: This special report on Wisconsin’s growing reliance upon immigrant dairy workers is a joint project of several media organizations, including The Country Today, a weekly newspaper focusing upon agricultural and rural issues, and the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org). The Center collaborates with its partners — Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication — and other news media.

At a glance:

Wisconsin’s immigrant workforce

• In 2008, immigrants represented 40 percent of the estimated 12,551 hired workers on Wisconsin dairy farms. Of the immigrants, 89 percent are from Mexico.
• In total, Wisconsin is home to an estimated 85,000 undocumented immigrants.  Federal estimates have said that 50 percent of immigrant agricultural crop workers nationwide are not authorized to work in the United States.
• Immigrant laborers on dairy farms worked an average of 57 hours per week and took off about 4.8 days per month.
• 91 percent of dairy workers surveyed said they want to advance and learn new skills like animal health care or machinery operation.
• 68 percent of dairy workers surveyed have children. Of those, 74 percent live with their children in the United States, and 83 percent of these children attend school.
• 80 percent of dairy workers surveyed said they felt accepted as part of their community here.
• Some Mexican-born persons seeking permanent resident status may wait up to 18 years for their cases to be approved.

Sources: UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, based in part on survey of 267 immigrant workers on Wisconsin dairy farms; U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey; Pew Hispanic Center, U.S. Department of State.

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"My goal has been to teach the (immigrant) children there's something better for them to do than what their parents are being forced to do because of the economy," Iowa County resident and bilingual volunteer Martha Boyer, left, told attendees at a Rural Immigration Summit sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Extension. Dodgeville School District English language teacher Michelle Meier, Darlington police Sgt. Tony Ruesga, Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz and Iowa County dairy farmer Dan Patenaude joined Boyer for a panel discussion on Oct. 17 in Dodgeville. WCIJ/KRYSSY PEASE

By Kryssy Pease
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

DODGEVILLE — Rapid increases in the Latino population of Wisconsin’s rural areas are reshaping work, school and social life, but also are raising concerns that Spanish-speaking immigrants are often isolated and mistrusted, experts and residents said at an event aimed at fostering better connections between newcomers and long-time residents.

Dan Patenaude, an Iowa County dairy farmer who employs two immigrant workers, told about 60 people attending the Oct. 17 Rural Immigration Summit that Hispanic immigrants in rural Wisconsin are an “invisible community.”

“I think a good part of the reason is because we’ve created a system that doesn’t encourage them to be a part of our society,” Patenaude said. “We can’t fix international problems in Dodgeville but maybe we can work on this community problem. We can find whatever ways we can to assist the foreign workers to participate in the community or to feel as comfortable as they can day in and day out going about their daily business.”

The event at Plymouth Congregational Church was sponsored by University of Wisconsin-Extension. Similar events were held in other parts of rural Wisconsin in 2007 and 2008.

Wisconsin’s Hispanic population was heavily concentrated in the urban, Southeastern parts of the state in 1990, but now is increasingly dispersed in rural areas. Iowa County experienced a 262-percent increase in its Latino population from 1990 to 2007.

The impact on the workforce of the state’s dairy farms is dramatic. A decade ago, immigrant workers held 5 percent of the jobs on Wisconsin dairy farms. Now the figure is 40 percent, according to a survey by the UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies.

Iowa County resident Kent Mayfield helped organize the event after attending one of the previous summits and noticing changes in the makeup of his community over the past several years.

“I wanted to find an opportunity for the community to learn from each other, to build awareness, to become more sensitized,” Mayfield said.  “I wondered what we could do in our own community to change the quality of life for the people with whom we are living and for ourselves as well.”

Presenters covered demographic, political, social and historical issues related to Latino immigration in rural Wisconsin.

Rep. Pedro Colón, a Puerto Rican immigrant and Democrat from Milwaukee, discussed the frustrations he’s faced regarding immigration policy. This year, the Legislature passed a law that makes some undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition. But the Legislature rejected a measure from Colón that would have allowed undocumented residents to obtain a driver’s identification card.

“Undocumented people aren’t going to stop taking their kids to school, they’re not going to stop grocery shopping, they’re not going to stop visiting the doctor. These things are going to happen so we do need this driver’s license bill,” Colón said. “Unfortunately, politically, the conversation doesn’t allow policymakers to do the things that we need to.”

One attendee, Dodgeville resident Michael Langer, tried to broaden the summit’s local focus by raising questions about national immigration policy — particularly the fact that many undocumented immigrants entered the United States illegally.

“The issue that’s being ignored today is the part about our laws,” Langer said. “These people broke the law and did not play by the rules, and that is a source of a lot of anger.”

After some debate, Paul Ohlrogge, a community resource development agent at UW-Extension in Iowa County, steered the panelists back to discussing immigration in Southwestern Wisconsin.

Mayfield and several people interviewed after the event said it succeeded in bringing immigrants out of the shadows.

“These people are not going to go away,” Mayfield said. “If we keep them in this invisible, isolated situation, we won’t gain from the opportunity they afford us and they won’t gain from us. It will be a win-win if we can find the mechanisms for bringing them into our community, and that’s what I hope people got out of today.”

Editor’s note: The Country Today, a weekly newspaper focusing upon agricultural and rural issues, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism are collaborating on a project exploring Wisconsin’s growing reliance upon immigrant dairy workers. The news organizations are seeking story tips and perspectives. The first stories will be published in November.

Click to watch Wisconsin Public Television, a partner with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, talk with state  farmers about the role of Hispanic immigrant workers in the dairy industry, as part of a new investigation launched by the Center.

View the Center’s Dairyland Diversity coverage

]]> http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/07/26/video-farmers-discuss-immigrant-workers/feed/ 0 http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/07/26/doyle-on-dairy-immigrant-worker-role-increasing/ http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2009/07/26/doyle-on-dairy-immigrant-worker-role-increasing/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:36:03 +0000 WisconsinWatch http://wisconsinwatch.org/?p=1246 Originally posted July 21, 2009

By Lexie Clinton and Jacob Kushner
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

WATERLOO — Top Wisconsin officials acknowledged Tuesday that Wisconsin dairy farmers increasingly rely upon immigrant workers, including large numbers who may be undocumented — a result of demand for labor and the nation’s porous borders.

“It is true in agriculture in some areas of the state more than others, that the need for agricultural workers is very strong and that increasingly the number of people working are immigrants,” Gov. Jim Doyle told the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism at Farm Technology Days, one of the state’s largest annual gatherings of farmers.

Today, about 40 percent of the workers in the state’s dairy industry are Latino immigrants, according to a UW-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies report.

The high concentration of immigrants in the dairy industry, Doyle says, means “we have a lot of jobs and we need to hire a lot of people.”

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