At the Republican National Convention, speakers explained that a second Donald Trump administration would carry out the “largest deportation in history,” NPR reported. Trump has said that, if reelected, he would deport up to 20 million undocumented immigrants. (In 2021, Pew Research Center estimated there were about 10 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.)
If that came to pass, Idaho would acutely feel the effects, experts say. Foreign-born workers, including unauthorized or undocumented workers, play a critical role in the state’s dairy industry, says Phil Watson, an economist at the University of Idaho’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
Milk prices nationwide have been stagnant for years, The New York Times reported in October, leaving difficult, dangerous industry jobs low-paying and unappealing to many Americans. Foreign-born workers wind up “filling jobs that Americans are not taking,” according to a February study conducted by the University of Idaho’s McClure Center for Public Policy Research.
In dairy and other industries, “businesses employ unauthorized workers to meet their labor needs because authorized workers cannot be found,” the study’s executive summary says. Without this labor, “businesses adapt … by forgoing business growth opportunities, cutting back production or even closing.”
How many of Idaho’s dairy workers are undocumented?
In a departure from national trends, Idaho’s population of unauthorized immigrants remained stable at about 35,000 people between 2005 and 2021, the University of Idaho reported in June.
There are about 4,400 on-site dairy workers in Idaho, nearly 90% of whom are foreign-born, according to the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.
It’s hard to know how many of those workers are in the U.S. illegally, Watson told the Idaho Statesman by phone. Industry leaders are adamant that “nobody (they) hire is undocumented,” he said, but “whether or not those documents are legitimate or not … they would say, ‘That’s not up to us.’”
“The industry doesn’t want to be in the business of checking documents,” he said.
In a 2012 study, Watson and his colleague, Hernan Tejeda, found that the foreign-born labor force was much larger than census and other government population data suggest, though precise numbers were hard to come by.
Rick Naerebout, the CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, estimated that unauthorized workers fill up to 30,000 jobs in Idaho.
Watson and Tejeda’s research found that if Idaho cut its supply of foreign-born, less-educated workers by 50%, the state’s GDP would fall by over $900 million. By 2024, that number would only have grown, he told the Statesman.
Consequences of deporting dairy workers
Without foreign-born workers in Idaho’s dairy industry, Pete Wiersma, the president of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, told the Times that he didn’t think there would be milk. “I just don’t think we could get it done,” he said.
Watson said that claim might be a bit “bombastic,” but the state’s economy would take a serious hit without these workers. Dairy cows must be milked at least daily. If other states had more lenient immigration-related policies than Idaho, “you’re certainly going to see herds move,” he said.
“People don’t stop milking cows, but they change hands, for sure,” he said.
But given the abruptness of the policies proposed, Naerebout said the effects may be more widespread. Idaho is the third-largest dairy state in the country, he said, “so what happens here would impact the entire industry.”
There are simply not enough workers in Idaho to backfill the foreign-born workers in dairy jobs, he said. And if cows can’t be milked on time, they can quickly develop illnesses or stop lactating entirely.
Idaho could feel the effect beyond the 4,000 or so workers at dairy farms. The industry brings billions of dollars of revenue into the state, Watson has found, creating jobs for both milk producers and processors. Even residents with no obvious connection to the industry may feel the effects.
“Dairymen and movie theaters are connected,” he said. “Milking cows pays employees. Employees go to movies … There’s a lot of those jobs that, they don’t realize it, but they are working for dairy indirectly.”
Rural Idaho, where dairy farms are most prevalent, would “absolutely” see an “outsized impact” from the loss of these workers, Naerebout said.
Politicians who advocate for hard-line policies barring unauthorized workers know there could be negative effects, Watson said, but they may believe their approach is valid regardless — that the state or the country needs to enforce the rule of law.
He drew a comparison to a Washington state tax on carbon emissions that, The Washington Post reported, has driven up gasoline prices in an effort to require large emitters of greenhouse gases to “pay for their pollution.” Politicians in the state “understand that they’re hurting Washington’s economy … but they’re doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do,” Watson said.
Idaho’s dairy industry has long advocated for immigration reform, vying for changes to the country’s guest-worker visa program to create a “skilled, reliable workforce” and “provide security to farmers and their employees,” according to talking points the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation shared with the Statesman.
The association backs legal status for existing agricultural workers and their immediate families and access to a worker visa program for year-round agricultural employers. Its website says verification of workers’ legal status “is the responsibility of the U.S. government, not employers.”
The Idaho dairy industry has been especially outspoken about this topic because it faces particular difficulty accessing foreign-born workers. The industry is barred from the using country’s H-2A visa program, which brings workers into the country on a temporary basis and is designed to address seasonal spikes in labor needs, rather than the year-round work dairy farms require.
“But make no mistake,” Naerebout said. “Every reasonable estimate is that 50% of the workforce in agriculture is unauthorized. So this is much bigger than just a dairy issue, especially for a state like Idaho, where agriculture is the backbone of our economy.”
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