Wait…I Thought Immigrants Were Monsters Polluting Our National Blood
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What I love about rural America is the anti-immigrant race hatred combined with the desperate reality that the only way the rural economy survives is through immigration. Take rural Wisconsin for example, Scott Walker country if there ever was one, an area festooned with Trump signs.
A Wisconsin farm group is helping producers navigate the process of bringing in foreign workers as the ag industry struggles to find enough labor.
The Wisconsin Farm Bureau recently announced a new partnership with Great Lakes Ag Labor Service, a company started by the Michigan Farm Bureau to help producers hire workers through the federal H-2A visa program. It allows employers to bring in foreign workers for a limited time to fill seasonal farm jobs.
Sarah Black, general manager of Great Lakes Ag Labor Services, said the program is used by producers of all commodities, from dairy to produce to corn and soybeans.
“People think, ‘Oh, that’s only for the really large farms,’” Black said. “In reality, we have a lot of farms that bring in one worker. So it’s the smallest of farms all the way up to the largest farms, because there’s no cap on the number of visas that you can petition for.”
Black said her company started 10 years ago in response to a growing interest in H-2A workers and has also expanded to Farm Bureaus in Texas, Ohio and Indiana.
She said demand has increased even further since the COVID-19 pandemic shook labor markets across the economy.
“Basically every corner that you drive by has a ‘help wanted’ sign,” she said, “It’s no different for our farmers. They’re struggling as well, trying to get a reliable workforce to help them in food production.”
Black said her company can help farms figure out how to meet the program’s requirements, file applications and recruit workers. But she said the H-2A program is not a quick fix, especially because farms are required to provide free housing and sometimes transportation to the temporary workers.
I’m not a big fan of guestworker programs for many reasons. The better solution is to allow some of the many migrants who have already entered the United States to have work visas and try to get them to go to Wisconsin to work. But the larger point here is simply the hypocrisy of rural America on this stuff. The only thing keeping rural America alive, to the extent that it even is at this point, is constant influxes of brown people from around the world, the thing these farmers hate more than anything else in the world, except for the black people to get welfare which is totally different than their own well-earned welfare subsidies.