Voters, be careful what you ask for

Trump's mass deportations would create a "huge problem" in rural Iowa

Photo by Chino Rocha on Unsplash

We are in the home stretch of another presidential campaign, and it is important for voters to be alert for the unintended consequences of candidates’ promises.

Office-seekers and their supporters like to portray issues in terms of absolutes — as in, my position is the correct way to address this issue; my opponent’s way is all wrong.

Most of the time, issues are not all black, nor all white. Most of the time, issues involve many shades of gray, meaning there are no simple solutions.

Take illegal immigration.

There should be a vigorous debate of how the United States should deal with people who have entered our country without permission or who have remained here after their visas expired. This issue has been around for decades, but the public is imploring our leaders in Washington to confront these challenges now.

Of course, politicians find it easier to issue press releases and offer their thoughts in 30-second television sound bites.

Donald Trump, for example, has made no secret about the solution he favors: “To keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” — an effort that would remove 15 million to 20 million people who are in the U.S. without authorization.

But his Iowa supporters who cheer his promise may want to pause to think about the economic effects such an undertaking would have.

There could be dramatic consequences in Iowa, where foreigners are an important labor source in livestock confinement facilities, in milking parlors on large dairy farms, and in livestock slaughter and meatpacking plants. The shockwaves would ripple farther, too, through landscaping and roofing businesses whose owners often turn to immigrants to take hard-to-fill jobs.  

In northwest Iowa’s Sioux County, farmers raise thousands of head of pigs, beef cattle and dairy cattle. About 2,000 foreign-born workers are employed on those farms, the Des Moines Register reported in 2018. The total includes people who are authorized to be in the U.S., as well as those without the proper legal documents.

Cattle producer Kent Pruismann, a former president of the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, told the Register, “If all of Sioux County’s immigrant labor left tomorrow, we’d have a huge problem. … We don’t have the people to replace them.”

Undocumented workers fill thousands of Iowa jobs

Sioux County is not unique.

The Register reported the Pew Research Center estimated Iowa had about 40,000 workers 10 years ago who were undocumented immigrants. That represents nearly half of the 84,000 immigrant workers believed to be in the state in 2018.

It is not simply a matter of replacing immigrant labor with workers born in the United States. It is difficult finding people who want jobs involving the backbreaking work of mucking out manure, hauling bedding for the animals and moving thousands of pounds of feed for them every day.

Craig Lang, a Poweshiek County dairy farmer and former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, told the Register in 2018, “It’s just that local people are fully employed. And they don’t want to milk cows when it’s 20-below zero.”

Don’t think for a minute Lang and other livestock leaders are advocates for open borders. What they want is for the federal government to increase the number of year-round visas that are available to bring foreigners into the U.S. to work on farms and in other businesses.

But such initiatives could hit a roadblock during a second Trump administration. Ken Cuccinelli, his former acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has recommended the government should reduce the use of temporary work visas for farm labor.

Some of the products Daisy Brand produces. (Company photo.)

New milk plant creates huge labor need

The demand for ag labor in Iowa is going to continue to rise, even as the population in rural counties continues to decline.

One of the nation’s largest dairy companies, Daisy Brand, announced in April it will build a $625 million milk processing plant in Boone to produce cottage cheese, sour cream and dips. The plant will employ 250 people. It will process the milk from 43,000 dairy cows each day.

That would represent an 18 percent increase in Iowa dairy herds. Those cows are estimated to need about 4,000 more farm laborers to care for them.

The former president has said his plan to round up illegal immigrants will be larger than President Dwight Eisenhower’s mass deportation in 1954 of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants — and some U.S. citizens, unfortunately. But scholars note Eisenhower’s crackdown came at the same time as the government was increasing the number of migrants who would be lawfully admitted to the U.S. through a “guest worker” program.

“It wasn’t really about getting rid of immigrants in any real sense,” University of Pittsburgh historian Eladio Bobadilla recently told States Newsroom publications. “It was a way to sell the American public that the problem had been solved.”

During his four years in the White House, Trump also tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which affects about 500,000 undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children, called “Dreamers.” Many of those children grew up in communities like Iowa and do not speak their parents’ native languages.

The Supreme Court blocked the president’s efforts the last time, but Trump is not one to give up after an initial court loss. This does not mean Kamala Harris and Democrats can simply dig in and ignore the desire of Americans to find some middle ground on immigration.

Middle ground means neither side will be entirely happy. But middle ground is much better than where we are.

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“Stray Thoughts” is part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, a rich variety of columns and opinion articles written by 50 Iowans and former Iowans. You will find links to their columns here. Please consider subscribing to the columns you enjoy.

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