JOHN YANG: Advocates of illegal immigration say foreign born workers have long been a key factor in U.S. economic growth, and researchers say they've been crucial to the jobs recovery after the pandemic, but are immigrant workers sharing in the benefits of their contributions.

For more than a year ProPublica has been looking into the harsh realities of life for immigrant workers on Midwest Dairy farms.

Melissa Sanchez is a ProPublica reporter.

She focuses on immigrants and low wage workers.

Melissa, over this several months of working on the story.

What are the biggest takeaways that you came out of this reporting with?

MELISSA SANCHEZ, ProPublica: Sure a few of them are just how dangerous the work is.

I wasn't aware of it.

But workers are routinely injured.

And it's almost a normalized thing like workers say that if you haven't been hurt on a farm, then you really haven't worked on one before.

So the dangers one thing, and then also the lack of regulation like even though it's very dangerous.

Dairy work is less regulated than other kinds of work for a number of reasons.

But particularly workers on small farms have fewer protections.

And then the immigrant nature of the work, almost everybody that I've met is an undocumented immigrant from Central America or Mexico, who's on these farms.

JOHN YANG: These farms are less regulated than other agricultural operations.

Why is that?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: So it's basically a technicality, the way the laws are written some of the farm worker protection laws that we have, they apply only to work that seasonal or temporary and cows are milked year round.

And that distinction sort of leaves this class of workers out.

But we know that farm workers are sort of exempt from a lot of other labor laws and protections including overtime pay, for example, and you know, workers comp laws often don't cover small farms and a lot of these folks work on small farms, there's just like one after another after another of laws that leaves these people out.

JOHN YANG: Tell us what sort of an average day is like for these workers?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: The days are pretty wild.

One thing to know is that workers work 60 to 80 hours a week kind of on a regular basis.

And the shifts are scattered.

They might start a shift from 4:00 a.m. to 10:00 am.

And then again from noon to two and then again from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 pm.

And this kind of erratic schedule makes it very difficult to sleep.

And then depending on what their job is, it's either a lot of repetitive motions of putting on and taking off these tubes on to the teats of cows to pump out the milk.

Or it's work of shoveling and scraping cow manure and taking it to a manure lagoon on the site.

It's pretty heavy, dangerous work.

JOHN YANG: And aside from the work, what are the living conditions, like?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: I think one of the most important things to know is that it's really isolating work.

People live in rural communities, often on the farms where they work.

So it's routine for farmers to provide housing to their workers.

And there's very little if any regulation on that housing, so we've seen workers who have decent, you know, mobile homes on a property, and we've seen the houses on site with black mold in the bathroom ceilings, or, you know, cockroaches, my ceilings that are caving in.

When you live at work, you're living near your boss constantly, which is really hard to imagine.

And part of the reason for that is that you can't drive legally if you're undocumented in Wisconsin, and so workers are essentially trapped at work, JOHN YANG: How dependent or how important are these workers to the dairy industry in Wisconsin?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: I mean, I've had so many farmers telling me that their businesses would collapse without immigrant dairy workers.

I mean, farmers won't tell you on the record, that they knowingly hire people who are undocumented, but off the record, they will.

They have to they say that they can't hire U.S>> foreign citizens to do this work.

And again, the shifts are really, really intense.

And the pay isn't much better than what you would get at McDonald's.

If you have a choice between shoveling cow Memorial Day or you know, flipping burgers, you might choose the latter.

JOHN YANG: Is there a difference in the conditions, either the working conditions or living conditions for immigrants who are in the country legally and immigrants who are in the country illegally?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: So yes, and no.

So it's important to know that with dairy in particular, there's no guest worker program, there's no like agricultural guest worker program that they're able to access because dairy work is year round, unlike seasonal crop labor.

And so other kinds of agricultural work does often and increasingly rely on illegal immigrant guests workers, their conditions, it's, you know, it's hard to say whether it's significantly better, but there are some more regulations and standards for that category of work, and then the housing, et cetera.

And we've interviewed easily 130, 140 workers over the past year and a half, all but three or four undocumented immigrants.

JOHN YANG: I know you ask some of the people you talk to reach out to you using a messaging app and leave some messages about this.

We've translated them into English, let's listen to two of them.

MAN (through translator): How was my experience working as an undocumented migrant and a dairy farm?

The truth is that it has been one of the most difficult work experiences of my life.

It wasn't because of the work itself, but because of the way my boss would address me with insults and lack of respect.

He would do this knowing that as undocumented we always fear asking for help because of our migrant status.

It was very difficult to work for this person.

I believe that in all my working years, this has been the most difficult, and I hope that it doesn't happen again.

Because it really lowers your self-esteem.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ, Undocumented Worker (through translator): The reality of being a migrant is very complicated.

Because the fact that we are in this country illegally, there are many things we have to be silent about.

I think that the fear all migrants have is to be quiet, even if we for some reason decide to complain that some things are not right.

Sometimes it can be about where we live, or how bad the pay is.

But we're still migrants.

And it's best to for quiet and don't complain.

JOHN YANG: How representative or how typical are these messages to what you heard in your reporting.

MELISSA SANCHEZ: It's just extremely typical.

I mean, a lot of workers feel that they're treated like less than human from their employers, but they can't really do anything about it because of their immigration status.

It's really hard for people like that, to speak up to be willing to use their name, they're afraid of getting fired, getting evicted, getting deported.

And it's they're just real and present fears for these folks.

JOHN YANG: Did you ask the farmers of the people who run these farms about these conditions?

And what was their response?

MELISSA SANCHEZ: Yeah, you know, we've talked to maybe a dozen or so farmers over the past year and a half.

And it's hard.

They're in a tight spot financially.

They can't control the price of milk, and they don't always know what they're going to make.

And a lot of farms is you know, like go into bankruptcy each year.

So they're not really required to do a whole lot because there's just not a lot of regulations for them.

So a lot of them believe that they're doing the best they can for their workers.

But when it comes to things like injuries, or we've heard farmers kind of blame workers for their own for their own problems, including their own deaths on the farm, and because there's little oversight, they're just they're just not held accountable.

JOHN YANG: Melissa Sanchez, a ProPublica.

Thanks very much for sharing your reporting with us.

MELISSA SANCHEZ: Thank you for having me.