Farmers push for immigration reform

Milwaukee— Wisconsin dairy farmers are pushing for immigration reform, saying they need a federal labor policy that guarantees they will have enough employees to maintain and expand their businesses.

By some estimates, nearly half or more of the hired help on U.S. dairy farms is immigrant labor— with a large percentage of those workers being undocumented.

Without the foreign help, some farmers say, they would be forced to quit milking cows because there aren’t enough other people willing to do such physically demanding work.

“If our immigrants left, we would have to dispense of everything, I guess,” said John Rosenow, a dairy farmer who milks 550 cows and has employees from Mexico.

Members of the Dairy Business Association, based in Green Bay, recently went to Washington to meet with lawmakers on immigration law reforms.

“I felt it was important to attend because the immigration issue is so critical to our industry, and really to the entire country,” said dairy farmer Paul Fetzer.

Unlike immigrants who can obtain a work permit for seasonal agricultural jobs, foreign workers on dairy farms can’t get the H-2A visa because the jobs are year-round rather than temporary.

Yet many dairy operations are “overwhelmingly staffed” with immigrant labor, said Erich Straub, a Milwaukee lawyer who handles immigration law cases.

“The reality is that probably 75 percent or more of that labor is undocumented,” Straub said.

Gov. Scott Walker has taken an increasingly tough stance on immigration, and earlier this year said he now opposes granting citizenship to illegal immigrants until there is greater border security and tougher enforcement of immigration laws.

Farmers say it’s difficult to find reliable help, even in rural areas where people were born and raised on farms.