“If the 75,000-plus immigrants who perform the hardest of work in Wisconsin’s dairy and agriculture were gone tomorrow, the state economy would tank.” — Jorge Franco, CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.
Immigration is one of the top, and thorniest, issues in this year’s presidential and down-ballot elections. It is polarizing, emotional, and filled with hyperbolic misinformation.
Is anyone telling the truth about it? And how would you know?
You’ve probably never heard of Peter Rousmaniere, but let me introduce him to you.
In 2006,when this Harvard MBA reached either the 2nd or 3rd act of his life, I’m not quite sure which, he dove into what he perceived as a then current and worsening crisis: Immigration in the U.S.
In the blog he’s written since then, Working Immigrants, he’s been relentless. One of the smartest people I know, Rousmaniere has become a recognized national expert and, somehow, manages to keep great swaths of data in his capacious brain.
Dividing his time between London and Boston, Rousmaniere never gets emotionally wound up in the issue. He just digs, finds facts, analyzes them, and presents data in a thoughtful and coherent manner. No shouting, no ranting, just cold, hard facts.
When considering the Democratic and Republican Platforms (as well as Project 2025), Peter Rousmaniere’s perspective is informative. For example, we all know that, if elected, Donald Trump plans the most “massive deportation in the history of America.” He says it will be 18 million people. The poorly written Republican Platform, Agenda 47, which compared to Project 2025 is the same wine in a smaller bottle, lists this as its third goal regarding immigration: “Begin Largest Deportation Program in American History.”
But, as Rousmaniere wrote last week:
H-2A temporary work visas designed mainly for farm workers have soared in usage, from 75,000 in 2010 to close to 400,000 today. Project 2025 calls for the elimination of these visas. Here is a 2022 in-depth demographic profile of unauthorized farm workers…
Nearly 45% of U.S. agricultural workers, or 950,000 out of 2.2 million, are unauthorized migrants. Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan would severely impact states like Wisconsin, where 70% of dairy farm labor is performed by over 10,000 undocumented workers. The state’s dairy industry would collapse without these workers. The National Milk Producers Federation states that immigrant labor accounts for 51% of all dairy labor, producing 79% of the U.S. milk supply. California would also be heavily affected, as approximately 75% of its farmworkers are undocumented.
With these numbers in mind, it is blazingly obvious that, even if Trump were elected, there is not going to be any kind of mass deportation of undocumented farm and dairy workers, but they have been painted darkly by politicians, especially Trump, who began it all when he first came down that faux (like him) golden staircase in New York’s Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015.
Immigration is a highly complex issue, but it has been made binary by most Republicans and some Democrats. I’m hoping, probably forlornly, that, when Trump and Kamala Harris meet for their debate on 10 September, ABC moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir will do their best to cut through the fog of partisan hyperbole and get the candidates to at least admit the complexity we all face dealing with our current immigration problem.
They could ask Peter Rousmaniere to send them some probing questions. But, given the history of presidential debates, probing questions with intelligent follow-up have as much chance of happening as looking up suddenly to see pigs flying by my second story window.
