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The US Immigration System Treats Workers as Disposable
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE KELLER
Countless sectors in the US, like the dairy industry, couldn’t run without undocumented workers. Yet those same workers are denied their basic rights and subjected to the constant threat of deportation — dehumanizing and terrorizing them while weakening the power of the broader working class.
A worker milks Holstein cows on April 16, 2020, at a dairy farm in Escondido, California. (Ariana Drehsler / AFP via Getty Images)
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In the course of researching her book, Milking in the Shadows: Migrants and Mobility in America’s Dairyland, sociologist Julie Keller interviewed Henry, the owner of a large dairy farm in Wisconsin that employed ten migrant workers from Mexico. Henry (Keller uses pseudonyms for the subjects of her book) explains that he worked out an arrangement with local law enforcement through his nephew, an officer: if his undocumented employees, who are not eligible for drivers’ licenses in Wisconsin, would keep their grocery runs to before midnight, they would not be pulled over.
It’s a startling admission of nepotistic corruption, but it also highlights how the US immigration system is set up to deny immigrant workers rights and provide employers with a more exploitable labor force. If Henry could protect his undocumented workers from the law, the inverse was also implicitly true: he could subject them to it, especially if they fell out of his favor.
As in many other sectors of the US economy, undocumented immigrants have become essential to the dairy industry. Wisconsin, where Keller focused her research from 2011 to 2012, is second only to California in dairy production, with more than nine thousand farms — one-fifth of whose workers are thought to be undocumented. Yet they’re denied workplace protections, see their organizing rights trampled upon, and face the constant threat of deportation. The result: a dehumanizing system that terrorizes the undocumented while also undercutting the power of the broader working class.
Jacobin contributor Arvind Dilawar recently spoke with Keller about the dairy industry’s reliance on undocumented immigrants and why both the state and business interests prefer porous — yet brutal — border security. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
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How much of the dairy industry workforce in Wisconsin is comprised of undocumented immigrants?
JK
In my book, I was relying on a study conducted in 2008, and that’s really the most accurate information we have. A full 40 percent of all hired dairy workers in Wisconsin are estimated to be immigrant workers. From there, it’s just a matter of how we estimate the proportion of that group that would be undocumented. The standard go-to is the national agricultural workers survey that’s conducted every few years or so, which assumes that 50 percent of agricultural workers are undocumented.
What I will say, though, is that because there’s no legal avenue for dairy workers to be in the industry, because they’re excluded from the temporary agricultural worker visa, I would expect that number would be higher than just 50 percent.
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Where do they hail from?
JK
That same study, which was conducted by the sociologist Jill Harrison and some other folks, did ask about country of origin. They found that, of the immigrant dairy workers that they had surveyed in Wisconsin, 89 percent were from Mexico, 3 percent from Honduras, 2 percent Ecuador, 2 percent Guatemala, and it just got smaller from there. So really the vast, vast majority come from Mexico.
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What kind of work do they do? In your book, you write that the labor regime is pretty caste-based, with certain workers doing certain work.
JK
It was quite unusual to find immigrant workers doing anything but the lower-tier tasks on the farm. Milking cows was the big necessity for employers. You’ll also see immigrant workers doing related tasks, like bringing the cows into the milking parlor to be milked or cleaning up the parlor and the barns, scraping manure.
If there weren’t jobs available as milkers, you would also see immigrant workers taking jobs feeding calves. From what I observed, it seemed like a stepping-stone to milking cows. But they were all low-level tasks.
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The growth of undocumented workers in Wisconsin’s dairy industry is a relatively new trend. When did it start?
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On the Minimum Wage, Joe Biden Chose Failure
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.