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...an excerpt from The Paper of Record.. This is one story from one farm in one industry...there are many similar stories in the Hospitality, Construction and Service Industries. America needs immigrants to maintain and grow our economy, Yet Trump continues to ignore Congress' bipartisan efforts to have border security AND lawful immigration (see 2024 Senate Border Security and Immigration Bill...killed without even looking at it by Trump)

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For 20 years, Tim O’Harrow has asked lawmakers to acknowledge that America’s food supply depends on immigrants. Politics went in the other direction.

It was 5 a.m. and five degrees above zero on the O’Harrow dairy farm, and two workers, men from Honduras, moved down rows of outdoor hutches pouring steaming milk into buckets for mooing calves. A third followed in the darkness with a flashlight, looking for babies that did not drink, a sign of illness.

That worker, who came from Mexico as a teenager, knew that a calf that was sick in the morning could be dead by evening. He knew this because he has worked in the dairy industry in Wisconsin for his entire adult life, and on this family farm for about 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has mastered the intricacies of milking, birthing and inseminating, and logging it all onto a computer. This February morning, he was passing down his knowledge to the 19-year-old grandson of the family who employs him.

“We’re a little bit behind today, so you can hear everybody’s kind of angry at us,” said Sullivan O’Harrow, the grandson, who motioned toward the bellowing calves as he walked beside the worker training him.

Immigrant workers are the lifeblood of the O’Harrow farm, a four-generation family enterprise with 1,600 cows in northeastern Wisconsin. But many of them will not travel to Mexico to see dying parents, or drive to nearby towns to visit siblings, or let journalists use their names in newspapers, because they are afraid of being swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

That they need to hide strikes the O’Harrow family as morally wrong, but also as potentially bad for the country: These workers oversee America’s milk. By one estimate, dairies that employ immigrant workers produce 79 percent of the nation’s milk supply and the price of milk would double without them.

For two decades, Tim O’Harrow, 79, the family patriarch, has tried to persuade politicians he has voted for and donated to — most of them Republican — that they need to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.

But Washington has failed to make any meaningful changes, and Republican voters continue to be anti-immigration, particularly those in Wisconsin, a swing state where 95 percent of Republicans support mass deportation, according to a recent poll by Marquette University Law School.

That has left the O’Harrows in an uncomfortable place — stuck between what they see as an obvious truth, that immigrants are essential to America’s food supply, and a national political mood hurtling in the other direction.

And now, after generations of feeling at home in the Republican Party, the O’Harrows feel politically homeless.

“I don’t know that I’m a Republican anymore,” Tim said. “I don’t know what we are anymore.”
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