Al Jazeera America
By Naureen Khan
August 19, 215
By
the time the first rays of sun touched down on Mitch Bruenig’s farm,
sprawled across 900 lush green acres of America’s dairyland, the
operation was whirring with activity.
Bruenig,
the Wisconsin-born-and-bred owner who came back to tend to the family
farm in 1993 after studying dairy science in Madison, attended to an
early morning equipment
delivery. Juan Sancristobal, a stocky, tanned Uruguayan who prefers
Madison summers to those in his home country, spent the morning
preparing the feed in a mixing truck. And as the cows were ushered from
the barn into the milk parlor, 20 at a time, Hermes
Francisco, who learned to take care of farm animals in his native
Nicaragua, worked methodically, wiping down their undersides with a
towel dabbed with disinfectant before hooking each to the milking
machine.
With
380 cows, the process would take all morning, before it was time to
start all over again for the afternoon and night milkings. Hours of
gritty, grueling work would
ultimately lead to the production of hundreds of pounds of dairy bound
for high-end pizza parlors up and down the East Coast via Bruenig’s
buyer, a Wisconsin-based cheese manufacturer.
Bruenig
said maintaining a reliable workforce—seven out of nine of whom are
immigrants from Latin and Central America—is a critical part to keeping
his business afloat.
“I
couldn’t do all of this and at the same time, run the business,” he
said. “The most important thing is, who’s willing to do the job, willing
to train and improve everyday,
and that’s what my staff really wants. We are always working on getting
better.”
These
days, Bruenig’s employees looks much like the rest of the labor force
powering Wisconsin’s $43.4 billion dairy industry, more than 40 percent
of which is made up
of immigrants, according to a conservative estimate from a 2009
University of Wisconsin-Madison study. Many of them—like Sancristobal
and Gonzalez—are undocumented.
The
importance of immigrant labor to dairy may come as a surprise to some
who have followed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s trajectory on the issue
as he’s gone from a swing
state governor to a 2016 presidential contender. Critics say Walker’s
rightward drift reflects a tendency to capitulate to the whims of the
Republican party’s base, particularly on social issues, no matter what
the realities on the ground may be.
As
recently as 2013, Walker said he supported a pathway to citizenship for
a portion of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants and
derided a “broken system.”
The year prior, he told his Republican-led legislature that bills
cracking down on the immigrant population in Wisconsin, modeled on
Arizona’s SB 1070, “would be a huge distraction.”
But
as the governor ramped up his national profile, his rhetoric and
positions have changed. Walker now says that after learning more, he no
can no longer support “amnesty.”
In recent months, he has gone even further, suggesting that he may be
in favor of limiting legal immigration and ending birth right citizenship. On Monday, he said his immigration plan was “very similar”
to that of GOP rival Donald Trump, who has said he would
deport millions of undocumented immigrants and build a wall, paid for
by Mexico, along the United States's southern border.
That
protectionist stance not only puts him to the right of many of his
rivals for the Republican nomination—including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas,
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida
and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—but at odds with the state’s dairy
industry, which has actively lobbied for years for immigration reform.
"The
need is real and it is immediate for us and it’s something that we
needed to address years ago,” said John Holevoet, director of government
affairs for the Dairy
Business Association. "We’d like to see some avenue to allow those
workers who are currently working for us to stay regardless of their
status... They already know the trade and there’s no reason that they
shouldn’t stay and continue working."
Holevoet
emphasized that such an avenue didn't necessarily have to include a
path to citizenship and that Walker had been a friend to the dairy
industry in the past.
Erich
Straub, a Milwaukee-based immigration lawyer who works with dairy
producers took a bleaker view. If the policies Walker is espousing now
were actually enacted, including
sending undocumented immigrants back to their country of origin to “get
in line” for legal status, the dairy industry and the Wisconsin economy
would be decimated, he said.
Straub
said it’s particularly galling to see Walker take such a position when
the governor is well aware of that immigrants fill a critical labor gap
in the state. None
of the current temporary agricultural visas meet dairy’s needs, he
said, given that farmers need a steady supply of workers not just
seasonally, but every day of the year.
“Scott
Walker on immigration puts his finger up to the wind and sees where
it’s blowing,” he said. “Now that Governor Walker doesn’t need the
Wisconsin dairy industry
and he is more concerned about winning the GOP nomination—where folks
who are very anti-immigrant have a much greater say in the nominating
process—he has tacked right and done a complete 180. He’ll do what he
needs for the particular election that he’s in.”
John
Rosenow, a fifth-generation dairy producer who owns a farm in western
Wisconsin, too said his livelihood depended on his immigrant workers.
Ten of his 20 employees
are immigrants from Mexico.
If they were driven out of Wisconsin, “I would have to sell out, and quit farming,” he said.
Moreover,
Rosenow said the characterization of immigrants as a burden on the
United States rang especially untrue in his experience.
“These
are human being that are here working, they’re picking the strawberries
and milking our cows, they’re putting roofs on our buildings in the
middle of August and
doing all this stuff that the rest of us don’t want to do anymore,” he
said. “We make it look like they’re all horrible. All they want to do
is make a living.”
The
Walker campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the
governor’s specific immigration proposals, in general or for agriculture
specifically.
Immigration
is not the first hot-button issue on which Walker has been accused of
pushing red-meat proposals in the service of his presidential
ambitions—particularly
his need to curry favor with the conservative activists who play an
outsized role in the GOP nominating process—despite the practicality of
those policies.
After
cutting an ad in the heat of his 2014 re-election campaign that
affirmed his opposition to abortion rights but emphasized that a final
decision should be “left to
a woman and her doctor,” Walker signed a bill last month that outlawed
the procedure after 20 weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest. In
this year’s state budget, Walker also championed and ultimately passed a
measure that would require some applicants
of public assistance to undergo drug testing, despite that there is
little evidence to suggest substance abuse is a problem among low-income
benefit recipients.
“Drug
testing for FoodShare recipients may be a good talking point on the
campaign trail but there’s no evidence that it’s a cost effective
investment of state funds,”
said Jon Peacock, research director of Wisconsin Children and Families,
referring to the state’s food stamp program. “It’s tapping into
people’s worst instincts and incorrect impression that people on public
assistance are more likely to use drugs, when the
evidence shows that they are not.”
Matt
Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national director of American Majority, a
national grassroots conservative organization, nonetheless said Walker’s
record of sticking
to his guns on issues of importance to Republican voters and notching a
series of conservative accomplishments would serve him well as he
campaigns for president.
“Pound
for pound, he has the strongest conservative record of any governor
running for president and that matches up well against the senators who
are running, who were
serving in the minority or are up against the veto pen of the
president,” he said. “He has credibility with the base on the right.”
Politics aside, workers on Bruenig’s farm said normalizing their status would make a meaningful difference in their lives.
Santocristobal
has worked at Mystic Valley for 11 years, almost as long as he’s been
in the United States, first as a milker and now as a general
jack-of-all-trades. His
wife and four children, the eldest of whom is a participant in the
Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program,
have far better opportunities in Wisconsin than they would have had in
Uruguay, he said. Still, he wishes for a more stable
existence.
“The situation is kind of hard,” said Santocristobal. “I want to work and for my kids to go to school—that’s all.”
Bruenig
said he understood why immigration presented such a conundrum for
policymakers and touched off so many emotions for Americans. But for
him, hiring and retaining
immigrant workers was a matter of dollars and cents, the only way his
business can survive.
He
first tried part-time high school students, but they couldn’t keep the
demanding hours. Then came Russian immigrants, who eventually obtained
professional visas and
moved away from dairy work. Now, it’s mostly Hispanic workers who come
looking for jobs on farms and can do them well. Some of Bruenig’s
employees now live in his childhood home across the street.
“It’s
such a complex issue and there’s so many different ways to look at it,”
he said. “But people that are here and contributing to society, they
deserve a chance to
have it be right—have it so that people aren’t hiding in the shadows.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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