When Cody Heller hears former President Donald Trump denigrate immigrants and promise mass deportation, it infuriates him. His Heller Farms, a fourth-generation family dairy in Jackson County, relies on immigrant labor. Thirty-two of the farm’s 46 employees are from Mexico.
He's hardly alone. A 2023 UW-Madison survey of Wisconsin dairy farmers found that nearly 40% of farms have at least one foreign employee; other studies have estimated that immigrants account for up to 90% of the labor force in the dairy industry.
“Mass deportation would have a dynamic, negative economic impact, to the point where it would destroy the food cycle in our country and literally change our food prices overnight” Heller said. A 2015 Texas A&M poll found that eliminating immigrant labor nationwide would increase retail milk prices by more than 90%.
Still, Heller, who said he does not identify with either political party, voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and said he will again this year.
In that, he's also far from alone — the UW-Madison survey found 59% of dairy farmers identified as conservative, while only 4% identified as liberal. The remaining 38% identified as moderate, progressive or libertarian. Yet, just 15% of respondents opposed creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented farm workers.
With his vote for Trump this year, Heller is betting that Trump's deportation promises are nothing more than "white noise" intended to appeal to his white working-class base.
“He believes that immigrant labor is directly competing for labor with his base, and that is what they like to hear,” Heller said. But that isn’t true in the dairy industry, he noted, where farm jobs are often turned down by domestic workers.
“He can’t do it, nor would he ever do it,” he said of a mass deportation.
It's a sentiment echoed by several farmers who spoke to the Wisconsin State Journal for this story, none of whom had confidence that Trump could actually enact sweeping deportations...
Rosenow said he thinks there is a “tradition” of conservatism among his community that can be difficult to change.
“There’s also a lot of apathy involved,” he said. “If you don’t care, you don’t want to see another political ad, you don’t want to talk politics, then when you go to vote, you just think, ‘well I’ve always voted Republican, so I might as well vote Republican again.’”
TLDR: Trump says he will do XYZ, but he wouldn't do XYZ if it would hurt me.