Donald Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign by attacking immigrants. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said of Mexicans coming to the United States.
In the past year, Trump’s rhetoric has gotten even worse. Immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country,” he’s been saying in campaign speeches that echo Adolf Hitler. “They’re destroying the fabric of our country.”
Others in the Republican Party haven’t exactly rushed to condemn Trump’s blatant white supremacy. Instead, Republicans in Congress have made “border security” their top issue in 2024, holding up aid to Ukraine until Democrats agree to tighten restrictions on asylum-seekers and reimpose draconian Trump-era immigration policies.
As migrants pour into Mexico en route to the United States to escape violence, economic disaster, and ecological collapse in their home countries, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has urged U.S. President Joe Biden to do more to address the root causes of migration. That includes supporting economic development and democratic governance in the countries migrants are fleeing and, specifically, lifting sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, two countries that are sending record numbers of migrants north.
Photos of thousands of people marching in migrant caravans through Mexico and accompanying news stories about the “border crisis” don’t capture how the United States drives migration. Neither do they show how policies have made life untenable in countries where the United States supports extractive industries and brutal regimes. Migrants are also pulled here by U.S. employers’ hunger for low-wage workers willing to do hard, manual labor.
The dairy industry in Wisconsin would go belly up without workers from Mexico and Central America who, over the last couple of decades, have been doing most of the work producing milk in America’s Dairyland. Those same immigrants are revitalizing once dying rural towns, opening new businesses on Main Street, and filling schools that were on the brink of closure because of low enrollment with a new generation of Spanish-speaking youth.
In my book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, I wrote about this recent transformation in the Upper Midwest. Since the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (and its substitute, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and the “get big or get out” pressure on farms have driven small dairy operators to hire immigrant workers. I was fascinated to learn about the relationship between these two groups of rural people from Mexico and the United States, who have been thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control.
Wisconsin and Minnesota still have small and mid-sized farms, and the relationships between families of Midwestern farmers and Mexican workers are still on a human scale, with farmers and immigrant workers laboring side by side and discovering a relationship based on a shared agrarian sensibility and a recent, small-farm past.
Trump’s racist rhetoric adds insult to the injuries of vulnerable children and adults who are victims of labor trafficking and endure grueling hours, abuse, and terrible physical harm.
But rapid consolidation in agriculture is overrunning that relationship the same way it has overrun the family farm.
We are just starting to learn how much the U.S. economy is dependent on the labor of exploited undocumented workers, including immigrant children as young as thirteen years old who do dangerous jobs in meat packing plants and factories that package Cheetos, Cheerios, and Fruit of the Loom underwear.
Trump’s racist rhetoric literally adds insult to the injuries of vulnerable children and adults, many of whom are victims of labor trafficking and endure grueling hours, abuse, and terrible physical harm to do America’s dirtiest, most dangerous jobs.
“I was lost because I didn’t speak the language,” Miguel Antonio López, a victim of labor trafficking who worked on a Wisconsin farm, told me recently. “We were there like little sheep . . . . We worked each day for ten hours, Monday to Saturday.”
López entered this country legally on an agricultural work visa. But an unscrupulous labor contractor who brought him here transported him with a group of other men from Georgia to Wisconsin, rendering their visas void. They were then given fake documents, kept in a hotel room together, and told to speak to no one.
Threatening them with deportation, the contractor who supervised the workers forced them to labor in the heat without water, drove them mercilessly, and cursed at them while they picked vegetables.
“The demands were more and more,” López said. “The man in charge was mean. He scolded us and treated us with no respect. He was crude. If we didn’t do what he wanted, he disparaged us.”
In one of the first efforts to crack down on labor trafficking in Wisconsin, law enforcement officers raided the Borzynski Farm where López was working in 2017. He stayed in the United States for years afterward to participate in a court case against his tormentors. Just over a year ago, after a lengthy legal process, members of the García family who ran the labor trafficking operation received sentences including time served and supervised release. To López and the immigrant advocates who worked on the case, the Garcías’s light punishment, and the respectful treatment by a judge who praised them as pillars of their community, was a slap on the wrist.
Immigrant rights advocates and law enforcement officers who have been working to bring more labor trafficking cases to light are beginning to force the issue into the public’s consciousness.
A couple of decades ago, the same thing happened with sex trafficking, when then President George W. Bush promoted an initiative to combat human trafficking, which the administration described as “a new form of slavery.” It particularly focused on vulnerable women and children. As a result, human trafficking became synonymous with prostitution. But labor trafficking may actually account for a larger share of human trafficking than sex trafficking.
Legal cases against labor traffickers take time to develop. But now that federal and state officials are paying more attention, the number of these cases that are prosecuted is likely to increase in coming years, says Neal Lofy, one of the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s brand-new labor trafficking agents. Lofy used to work on sex trafficking cases. He says he witnessed how sentences got tougher as judges and prosecutors became more familiar with the facts of these types of cases. He expects something similar to happen with labor trafficking as the public comes to realize how this veiled part of our economy works.
“The biggest problem is the lack of knowledge, the lack of understanding, the lack of awareness,” Lofy says. “And then just the isolation that’s involved in forced labor.”
“It’s more hidden, just by the nature of the work,” he adds. As a result, it’s hard to know how widespread the problem is.
Lofy worked on López’s case for six years, starting when he was an investigator with the Racine police department. He acknowledges that, for the victims, the result was disappointing.
“Keep in mind [that] . . . when we look at the penalties we were receiving in our early sex trafficking cases, they were minimal,” Lofy says. “Now, when we look at them, we see these rather lengthy sentences. We see people being held accountable by the criminal justice system. And all you can hope for is that the same push we made in awareness and education and training to get us to where we are in those investigations happens with labor trafficking, and the penalties, hopefully, will get to a point where they match the crime at hand.”
But that won’t happen in time for the 2024 elections. Meanwhile, the GOP immigrant-bashing continues.
Like Republican efforts to cancel school lessons about slavery and the lasting impact of structural racism, there is something about the rage toward immigrants that seems like a desperate effort to repress the painful truth about our country. We think of ourselves as living in the land of opportunity, not in a society fueled by the forced labor of a despised and exploited workforce.
Tragically, the immigrant workers who prop up so much of the U.S. economy share this view of the United States as a land of opportunity. They believe in the promise that with hard work, anyone can get ahead. But the gig economy and growing inequality are undermining that faith for a lot of Americans.
We need to realize, once and for all, that it’s not the immigrants who are coming for us, and that an economy based on inhumanity and rapaciousness will inevitably chew up all of us.