Rosenholm Dairy owner John Rosenow has been hiring immigrants from Mexico for over 25 years, and he said they get the job done.
“If we didn’t have them, we would not have a farm,” Rosenow told The Daily Cardinal.
Of the 18 total workers on Rosenholm Dairy, a 900-acre farm in Buffalo County, 13 are immigrants from Mexico.
While President Donald Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric in his second term, undocumented immigrants play a key role in Wisconsin’s farms. Undocumented immigrants alone make up an estimated 46% to 70% of the dairy farmers working, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Workers study. Nationally, both documented and undocumented immigrants make up 51% of dairy farmers.
Additionally, a survey by the American Immigration Council also found that undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin paid $240 million in taxes in 2022. They also don’t take new jobs away from citizens, despite what Trump said at Wisconsin rallies.
“We've turned to immigrants who are absolutely great workers, and they don't stand around. They do the work and get it done,” Rosenow told the Cardinal.
Dairy industry ‘survives and thrives because of Latin American immigrant labor’
Rosenow helped found the nonprofit organization Puentes/Bridges, which takes immigrant dairy farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota on annual trips to Mexico to visit their families and homes.
UW-Madison professor Armando Ibarra, an expert in Latin American working communities, told the Cardinal that Puentes/Bridges “brings humanity back” to the relationship between the immigrant farmers and the owners.
“I really admire John, and I really admire the program,” Ibarra said. He knows Rosenow and said the farm owner “looks at the dairy industry of something with pride, something from Wisconsin.”
Dairy is one of Wisconsin’s most vital industries, accounting for $52.84 billion in industrial revenue in 2022. Making up such a large sector in the state, Ibarra said the dairy industry is “part of our collective identity” as Wisconsinites.
Rosenow’s farm wouldn’t run without immigrant workers, but Trump’s anti-immigration efforts risk U.S. agriculture failure.
There would be a “substantial impact,” Ibarra said, on both the availability and cost of dairy products in Wisconsin without the immigrant workforce. Local economies where these farms are located would collapse if all undocumented immigrants didn’t work in the dairy industry.
“It only survives and thrives because of Latin American immigrant labor,” Ibarra said.
With so much of the industry’s workforce composed of immigrants, the industry would fail without them.
While Rosenow formally hired his workers 25 years ago, he no longer has to worry about the hiring process. Since his farm is currently fully staffed, his workers will find a replacement for him if they leave, which makes it more convenient for him as the boss. Oftentimes, an immigrant worker wants to go home to Mexico and will replace their spot with a friend or relative.
“I no longer hire and I no longer fire, I just accept what they bring me,” Rosenow said.
Prior to his immigrant workforce, he hired mainly local dairy farmers. He said it became almost impossible to hire locals at any rate, and as they left, he would replace them with Mexican immigrants that came to him.
Ibarra said immigrants often face violations of their labor and human rights, with their challenges ranging anywhere from unsafe working conditions to even human trafficking cases.
One of the biggest threats to all Mexican immigrants, Ibarra said, is the drastic increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surveillance. Not only are undocumented immigrants in danger of deportation sweeps, but so are authorized citizens. He recalled a case in Milwaukee in January where Puerto Rican citizens were mistakenly detained as undocumented immigrants by ICE.
“It's a racialized process of trying to determine people's citizenship status,” Ibarra said. “They’re looking at the color of skin, or whether they speak English or not speak English.”
This is a result of fear-mongering rhetoric from the White House, Ibarra said.
Trump recently invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives the president greater power to imprison and deport undocumented immigrants. The law hasn’t been used since World War II, in which German, Italian and Japanese immigrants were deported and incarcerated, even those who were authorized.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, issued an order temporarily blocking deportations as a result of the law. Despite a verbal order from Boasberg to turn around flights holding detainees that had already taken off, the planes still continued.
Ibarra said the country is “othering” Latin American immigrants as a whole through Trump’s rhetoric surrounding Latino immigration. He noted most ICE raids target Latin American communities, assuming immigration status based on appearance.
“There's an immigrant threat narrative that extends to this idea of a Latino threat,” Ibarra said. “So, the immigrant becomes the Latino. It becomes synonymous with one another.”
Rosenow recently asked his workers if they were scared about immigration raids as a result of Trump’s deportation plans, but they said they weren’t worried. Although a scammer contacted one of his workers pretending to be a U.S. official demanding $1,500 or be prosecuted for a crime, Rosenow said that happened about a year ago, and they aren’t concerned about new scams either.
For the last 20 years, Rosenow’s farm has held a class every Monday for a translator to teach the immigrant workers English. He said their second language is Spanish, while their first is the native Nahua language, Nahuatl, indigenous to Mesoamerica.
But if the harmful narrative of Latino immigrants as the “other” continues in the White House over the next four years, Ibarra said he foresees that Latin American immigrants will be labeled as “a threat to the national interest of the U.S.” and to the “cultural makeup of our country.”
Ibarra stressed the need for immigrant workers in the dairy industry and the agriculture sector as a whole, adding that if this rhetoric continues with legal deportation action from the White House, the state will face the consequences.
“This is who works,” Ibarra said. “Latin American immigrants are the ones who work within the industry that we cherish so much as a state.”
