Farmers from Wisconsin to California hit by Trump's immigration raids.

[riversedge]

Farmers from Wisconsin to California hit by Trump's immigration raids. What's next?

Farmers say few native–born residents will pick fruit or tend cows. The agriculture worker visa program can be costly, burdensome and limited. And they say Congress has failed to act for years.

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/nation/2025/07/30/trump-immigration-deportation-farmers-wisconsin-dairy/85407433007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z11xx98e000300v11xx98b00xxxxd11xx65&gca-ft=9&gca-ds=sophi

In Lincoln County, Wisconsin, where the rural landscape of pastures and fields is dotted with barns and silos, Hans Breitenmoser’s parents emigrated here in 1968 from Switzerland to raise dairy cows on a small farm.

He grew up amid the daily rhythms of feeding and milking. When the farm grew, they had to hire more workers. But they could find few native-born residents willing to take the jobs in the sparsely populated area. And over time, fewer younger people were sticking around the farms................

Link to tweet

[Norrrm]

1. Ironic, eh? Whining that immigrants take jobs from Americans, but they want more immigrants to take more jobs.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143503351

Some Republicans push more visas despite hard line on immigration

Ironic, eh? Whining that immigrants take jobs from Americans, but they want more immigrants to take more jobs.

[Igel]

2. What might happen is what my home state did some 50 years ago.

If you were on or wanted public assistance or unemployment benefits, you had to sign up on a job registry with the state. Only then could your application for benefits be approved.

In signing up with the job registry you basically completed a basic job application. You needed to keep the registry updated while receiving benefits. You could check the job board yourself for jobs you might actually like. But an employer could contact the registry for names/contact information of people that met their requirements/job qualifications. Then the employer would try to contact you and ask you to come in--or flat out offer you the job by phone. You had three choices: You could accept the job. You could turn down the job and then explain, when your benefits were cancelled for unwillingness to work, why, exactly, you could not possibly accept the job--it was 50 miles away and there was no public transportation, perhaps. Or you broke your arm just that morning. Whatever. Or you could just turn down the job and kiss the benefits goodbye for a period of time, then reapply for benefits.

This was also very Soviet. At the same time, the Soviet's went way past that--they had a nicely communitarian/socialist way of doing things. If you applied for a job and were picked up by an employer, you just might be bused to the middle of nowhere to work in a factory on or a sovkhoz (or the East European variants), housed in barracks, fed in a cafeteria, given your pay when you had time off each month, you'd be bused back home for a few days. If you got pregnant while there, the medclinic would provide free abortions for your standard 3-days off (common enough that any 3-day break by a woman, by the '80s, was assumed to be for an abortion). Industrial and agricultural policy, set by the government, didn't always align with the location of workers. And while each worker had a right to a job, nobody said it had to be a job they liked in the location they preferred. (Even college grads, from historians and math teachers through engineers and lab techs were subject to the 'raspredelenie,' or distribution--the state would match you with positions based on your political status and social status.) Moscow, Leningrad were plum assignments, Novokuznetsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok ... shit assignments. (Of course, summer breaks and weekends were high-stress times for agriculture, so they had required summer work on farms and, during things like the potato harvest, subbotniki for weekends--university kids had their mandatory 'community service' assigned to them.) Truly, a worker's paradise.

Note, that's one way of handling the work-requirements for some benefits. And making sure everybody contributes what they are able.

(I think it sucks, but then again, I've always been on the outs with socialism.)