- The superheated rhetoric over immigration and border security in the United States today is part of a long tradition of anti-immigration hysteria in the United States.

Today's guest puts our recent panic in a sociological context, exploring changes in who works on American Dairy farms and how they traveled from Latin America to farms in the upper Midwest.

She's Julie Keller, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(cheery bright music) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Alongside me is my friend and co-host G. Wayne Miller of The Providence Journal.

Story in the Public Square is an effort to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.

To do that we sit down every week with the best storytellers around.

Filmmakers, authors, scholars and more, to make sense of the big stories that shape public life in the United States today.

To help us this week we're joined by Julie Keller, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island, who's new book explores migrant workers in the American Dairy industry.

Julie, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much.

- So, the book is "Milking in the Shadows - "Migrants and Mobility in America's Dairyland".

This is a really interesting focus on the whole immigrant labor question because you're looking at, well tell us what you're looking at.

I'll let you tell the story.

- Sure.

So, I'm really interested in this new labor system that developed in Wisconsin, late 90s to early 2000's, you began to see instead of relying on local white European Americans to do the tough work of milking cows, we began to see more and more immigrants taking on these jobs.

I was really interested in how this new labor system developed, how is it that farmers began hiring some of these workers, where are they coming from, what is life like once they get there, what are there hopes, their dreams and their struggles.

- Well, let's take this step by step.

What triggered that change in the labor supply?

- So, a few different factors.

One is that farmers were absolutely experiencing this pressure to expand and expand in the late 90's.

In order to be profitable as an operation they really had to be milking more cows, putting in more hours, and that really necessitated more people to hire in order to get that work done.

There's this pressure to expand, looking around their rural community they didn't exactly see the kind of reliable help that they were looking for and that caused them to turn to other sources.

- And by other sources, where did they wind up turning?

- Eventually they did turn to Latin American immigrants.

Mostly coming from Mexico.

- So, what was the genesis of the work?

How did you get interested in this?

I mean, as a sociologist there are many topics you could have covered.

Do you have roots in Wisconsin?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So, I myself am from California, and I was born and raised in Fresno.

Fresno county is the number one agricultural county in the nation, actually, in terms of economic productivity it's an incredibly rich place for agriculture.

I was raised in the suburbs, actually.

I had never been on a farm, I didn't have that farm experience, but my Grandmother, as it turns out, she was raised on a farm and she was actually born in Wisconsin, spent a lot of her childhood on a Wisconsin farm.

Eventually her family moved to Oregon and then her family spent time farming in Oregon.

I used to sit at her feet and listen, as a child, to the stories that she would tell me of life growing up on a farm.

Drinking milk straight from the cow.

Picking blueberries.

Playing in the bales of hay and so forth.

- It's a Normal Rockwell-esque existence that you're describing.

- Right, absolutely.

I was in awe of that, being a kid in the suburbs it really fascinated me.

So fast forward years later, I'm in graduate school, I'm very interested in social issues, and so I chose to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A professor there who I started working with, Michael Bell, is interested in everything having to do with rural places.

He's fascinated by rural people, rural communities, rural culture, gender in rural spaces, rural masculinity.

So my interest in rural spaces and farms really began to develop when I started working with him.

- So, these undocumented workers who are filling a gap, for lack of a better word, in Wisconsin and other states, we'll get into that too in a minute, come mainly from Mexico.

Why is it Mexico as opposed to some other part of the world?

- Sure.

Another professor I worked with at Wisconsin, she conducted a survey of these immigrant workers in Wisconsin to understand where are they coming from, and it really was the vast majority of them were coming from Mexico, and it really seemed to be an issue of proximity.

You had 89% of immigrant workers who were coming from Mexico going all the way up to Wisconsin to work on these farms.

As far as we could tell, this happened through a process of network migration.

It's one person tells another person there are opportunities in Wisconsin and then before you know it you have this stream of people coming all the way up to the upper Midwest to milk cows.

- So when you talk about coming up, it isn't a question of getting on a train, a car or a plane and going to Wisconsin.

These are undocumented workers so the coming up is something that faces them with a lot of obstacles.

Talk about that, I mean, even getting here, and then we'll talk about the conditions they endure when they do work.

- Absolutely.

So it's absolutely a perilous journey.

The workers that I spoke with, I spoke with 60 different workers that I interviewed for my study, and of the 60, all of them were actually undocumented during their time in the US.

One of them did have a tourist visa for a certain period of time, but the fact that she was working on a dairy farm was in violation of that tourist visa.

It's a long journey, there are a number of risks and barriers taking on that kind of journey, and there's no guarantee that they will even make it across.

Many of the folks I spoke with when I went down to Veracruz and spent time in villages there, many of the folks I spoke with said, "I was caught at the border", "I was sent back", "We didn't cross but I'm thinking of trying again soon".

It's an incredibly complex, perilous journey that's full with all kinds of risks.

- Do you have to protect the identities of the people you interviewed, like it's to show your review board and stuff, because it'd be some legal consequence and some other consequences for these folks if you outed them and their employers?

- Absolutely.

I use pseudonyms throughout my book for the workers and for the farmers as well, for the people employing them as well, and I also come up with pseudonyms for the towns I visited, the names of the dairy farms, of course, I came up with pseudonyms for those as well.

Establishing trust was a really big concern when I started doing this work.

How am I, an American, white woman, I was a graduate student when I started this work, how am I going to establish that kind of trust with these workers in order to hear their stories and hear their struggles, and that was a difficult thing.

I had to rely on my contacts in order to make that happen.

I knew one person, who's a tremendous advocate for these workers, and once I met her that really opened up the gates.

I had the amount of trust I needed in order for people to say okay, I know Julie, I know who her friend is, I think it's okay to sit down and talk with her.

- So this is a process that took a number of years.

This wasn't just an overnight, I go down to Veracruz, I talk to three people or 60, whatever, and boom, we're done.

What are the economic conditions in this part of Mexico that would prompt someone to even want to take this very perilous journey?

It's not just getting there, it's coming home, but what are the economic conditions?

- The villages where I stayed, where the participants in my study come from, it's a context where there just aren't many jobs at all.

These are rural villages, it's actually an indigenous area, so for my participants their first language is not Spanish, it's their indigenous language that's their mother tongue.

After that, they then learn Spanish when they enroll in schools.

- [Male Interviewer] So these are natives?

- Exactly.

And then imagine moving somewhere else, to a different country, then they're learning English as well when they're moving to the US.

Trilingual really.

- Do you have an idea, an estimate, of the numbers of people we're talking about who would make this trip every year, or whatever period of time?

- Every year is tough to say but the same survey that a professor at Wisconsin I mentioned, her name is Jill Harrison, the survey she conducted back in 2008, she estimated that there were around 5500 immigrant dairy workers just in Wisconsin alone.

Now, we know that the pattern of migration seems to be that migrants would start off in their home village, they would make it to Wisconsin, and the goal for them was to work not just for six months or a year, but to actually work for two years, three years, four years, then return back to their village and work on building a house, investing in a business, what have you.

Then consider, okay can I make another journey?

Can I make it another three of four year long trip back to Wisconsin, earn some more money?

- There's so many places to go with this.

Absolutely fascinating work.

Describe the conditions that these migrant workers find once they get to the dairy land, once they get to Wisconsin.

- Sure.

So out of the 60 workers I spoke with it was pretty typical for workers to be living on the farm property, and this was seen as an advantage for farmers, and an advantage for workers, as well, because their housing was paid for by the employer.

So that's part of explaining, in some ways, how it was that Wisconsin came to be such a big destination for these immigrants, it's that the draw of free housing was big for them.

What I found, however, was just because you have free housing doesn't mean that it's high quality housing.

So unfortunately, in a lot of the cases where I would visit workers on the farm property they're living in a trailer and there's definitely not a high quality living situation.

I saw holes in the floor, heard mice scurrying around, oftentimes the bathroom would be broken.

On the other hand, I would go to some of the housing of a couple other workers that I spoke with and it was much better.

They were actually in a house that the farmer was paying the rent on and they were very happy with those conditions.

- So what kind of work are they doing?

Obviously they're milking cows, we know that, but that's not all they're doing.

What else do they do?

This is hard work.

- Primarily, they're milking cows.

What that consists of is taking on a number of different shifts milking cows in a milking parlor or milking barn.

The amount of time per shift really would depend on how many workers are there, how many cows, what's the herd size, but a typical arrangement would be, a typical length of working time would be waking up in the early hours of the morning and then spending, let's say, five hours milking cows.

That includes the pre-milking work that you have to do to prepare the space right, making sure that the equipment is clean, cleaning off the cows teats before you attach the milk machines.

Then after the cows are milked, after they're rotated through that milking parlor, you then have to clean everything off and make sure it's sanitary and ready for the next time.

That could take five hours, six hours, it could take less depending on the herd size, number of people working.

Then you would have another shift in addition.

Just because you have one shift that doesn't mean that's it for the day, but often you'd have two shifts one day, and then the next day you'd have one shift and then back to two shifts.

- Help me understand the economics of this.

Up until the late 90s, early noughts, this was largely done by family members, by local employees.

Why did they stop?

- It's a big question, you know.

I think that the answer is complicated.

Why are there fewer young people interested in farming today?

Why is it that we don't see a lot of young people clamoring to live in the countryside?

Farmers will tell you, at least they told me, that locals started to have different expectations for what work looked like.

They were more interested in having a job where they're inside in a comfortable environment.

They're not exposed to the dirt, to the manure, to the smell.

Moreover, they wanted higher pay than farmers are able and willing to provide.

- So there are two related questions in my mind is that is it an overstatement to say that these are jobs that American citizens don't wanna do?

And the related question is there an economic benefit to the local farmers to use undocumented migrant labor rather than paying more and finding other people who might be willing to do the job who are here legally?

- It's a tough question.

What I heard from farmers is that they couldn't find reliable, local help but I always like to push back on that a little bit.

You know, what does reliable actually mean to you?

Come to find it usually means someone who is willing to be paid very little, right, just above the minimum wage which in Wisconsin is $7.25, and putting in such hard hours, and no benefits beside free housing, that's a big one obviously.

You don't have a guaranteed day off, you don't have healthcare, you don't get sick time and so forth.

That's part of it, I think, is pushing back on that, well this reliability question, but the other part is surely if you have a group of people who are vulnerable, right, there is a high chance of them being exploited.

So it's much easier to pay that group less because they're less likely to stand up and push back and insist on higher pay.

- So let's say you work for a year on a farm, how much would you save and then send back, or bring back to your home country of Mexico?

- Thousands!

I mean, you could save thousands, especially with not having to pay for housing.

Workers would save up as much as they could, sending their remittances back to Mexico to their families to keep safe for them, and then once they felt as though they had sent back enough money to really make a start back home in Mexico they would think about making that return journey back home, and then the first thing, usually, was working on building a house for themselves.

Building a house out of concrete, something durable, something that would be around for a while that would be something they could hand down to their kids.

- Would these undocumented workers live in fear of ICE showing up at the farm one morning and we know what happens then?

- Absolutely.

I mean, there's an anxiety and psychological componenent here that seems considerable to me.

- Absolutely.

So this was a big concern for the workers I spoke with is anytime they're leaving the farm property you've got this cloud of anxiety, of any kind of contact I have with police could open the pathway to eventual deportation.

That was something workers talked to me about.

This was a fear that just permeated their very movement, and that's my focus on mobility, is every day movement, is that fear that's really part of their life.

Stopping them from leading their life, going to get groceries, going to the doctor, all of these sorts of things that you and I take for granted.

- So you're essentially a prisoner.

This isn't like you put it in a long week and you make some money, and then on Friday night you go to the local watering hole and see your friends, and dance and listen to music.

- It's very different.

At least the workers I spoke with many of them talked about that isolation.

That it was just very difficult for them to feel truly comfortable.

I could see the difference because when I was in the villages in Mexico I would walk around past the central square and there's so much social activity, you know?

People standing on the corner chatting with each other, going to the bakery chatting-- - [Male Interviewer] It's a real community.

- Absolutely, that communal feel, and I would ask workers, "What is it like "in Wisconsin compared to back home?

", and they would say, "It's just really different.

"We just don't go out", they would say.

- And the flip side of that, or the very related side of that, are the families back in Mexico, their loved one, father, mother, whatever it is, is in Wisconsin, could be grabbed, could never come back.

That has to have a toll of some kind, psychologically, on the family.

Did you talk to the folks in Mexico about that?

- I did speak with some family members.

I remember speaking with one mother in particular, and she has five sons, all of whom at some point made their way to Wisconsin to work on dairy farms.

She just told me about her faith in God.

She talked to me extensively about how much she prays to get word from her sons, to hear that they had made it across the border safely, and then waiting for them to contact her telling her okay I made it to Wisconsin safely.

It's very, very difficult.

In fact when I spoke with mothers and wives they told me that the passage of time works differently for them.

It's very slow, because they're waiting and waiting to make sure that their loved one has crossed successfully.

- This is a fascinating conversation and I don't wanna ruin it by talking about politics, but it seems like the elephant in the room is the recent debate that we've had about border security, and undocumented immigrants.

How does this manifest itself?

My stepson is obsessed with electoral maps, and so I remember Wisconsin in 2016, and all of those rural counties, where I'm assuming these dairy farms are, were very red.

How does this manifest itself in Wisconsin politics?

- It's quite complex.

I was watching that map too that night, I absolutely remember watching those counties and thinking wow, I've been to these places and-- - These farmers are dependent on this labor.

- Right, how could this happen?

- I mean, they know who they're employing.

It isn't like they wake up one day and go oh you came from Mexico, oh, wish you'd told me.

- Right, absolutely.

You know, there are two things here.

There's the fact that you could be a farmer and these are your workers, and down the road your neighbor who's not a farmer may have a very different outlook on this situation.

So I had farmers tell me that, that, you know, their neighbors, they know their neighbors are voting a certain way, and they felt as though their neighbors weren't totally aware of just how important this labor was.

Now on the flip side you had farmers who absolutely did vote for Trump.

As far as I can tell from the media accounts there that I've read, the newspaper accounts there, it seems as though they were hoping that this wouldn't mean that their workers would be deported.

- Well, that's sort of striking.

- It is striking, that is the word.

There are undocumented workers in the dairy industry in other states too though, is that not true?

I mean, you focus on Wisconsin for all of the obvious reasons, but what are some of the other states?

California?

Is there a situation parallel there?

- Absolutely.

So I come from California, California is the number one dairy state now.

It surpassed Wisconsin in terms of overall milk production.

Wisconsin's still number one for cheese, though, which I've gotta put in there, right?

The cheese heads, right, exactly.

- I'm glad you did because you kept all your friends back there.

- But we see a similar situation when we look at other top dairy states.

California, New York State, coming right up and increasing in production in recent years with their Greek yogurts, right?

Where is Chobani located?

In the state of New York.

So you're seeing some of these same issues around a workers rights and working conditions across different dairy states.

In Vermont as well, you're seeing a lot of activists coming together to advocate for the rights of immigrant dairy workers.

In Vermont there's been some incredible developments around this where Ben & Jerry's has, in the last two years, they agreed, finally they agreed after some pushing, to just source their milk from farms that were paying a fair wage to their employees, and that were offering quality housing, and that were offering health insurance, and that were offering workers education workshops to educate workers about how to stand up for your rights.

- So I can eat my Cherry Garcia now without guilt.

That's good.

I don't mean to make light of it, obviously that's a really good development.

Are there other states beyond what you just mentioned, New York, Vermont and California?

- Idaho as well.

Idaho is a top dairy state as well, and there are increasing efforts to protect workers there as well.

The tough part is networking workers together.

I mean, you're talking about rural places.

It's very difficult to get around when you're in a rural space, and depending on the state, undocumented immigrants may or may not be able to have a drivers license.

In Wisconsin they cannot get a drivers license if they're undocumented so that's another layer.

- Are you still in touch with any of the people that were subjects of your book?

What do they make about the recent politics in the United States around building a wall and increased enforcement in the separation of families?

What have you heard from people who have lived this life?

- So I have been in touch with a handful of the workers from my initial study.

When I went back to the villages in January 2017, so that was after the election but before the inauguration , workers had a lot of questions for me.

"What is he going to do?

", meaning Trump.

"Is he actually going to follow through "on these promises?".

I said, "I have no idea, "you're guess is as good as mine".

We didn't know a lot then, but I could feel the anxiety and I could feel the fear.

- There's a school of thought out there that says that some of the increased immigration over America's southern border right now is driven by this fear that it's actually going to get worse, that if you're going to come to United States you've got to come now before they build the wall, before they do all these other things, because once the door is shut you're not gonna get in.

Is there any validity to that?

- I hear the same thing as you do through media reports, I'm just not certain exactly what's driving flows right now.

I do know that the economy is a big one, and in fact we are not at the highest point of immigration flows, not at all.

- We're nowhere near it.

In fact, we're at historic lows.

- Absolutely, right.

And so if you see that data over time you recognize that, and so the fact that we have this supposed crisis, it's very interesting.

- Did putting a human face on this issue help in terms of the story telling, getting this across?

I mean, your book is obviously full of a lot of facts and figures but it's also full of people.

Was that deliberate?

I mean, you're telling their stories.

- [Male Interviewer] Got about 30 seconds.

- Absolutely.

I would encourage workers when I sat down with them, I'm not going to just give you yes or no questions here, it's elaborate, please.

Tell me a story, tell me the last time you left the farm.

What was it like?

Tell me a story about when you first got to Wisconsin.

How did you feel?

I really wanted to get that kind of story from my participants to put it in the book, and I just hope that I'm doing them justice by publishing the book and getting it out there.

- It is a remarkable book and we thank you so much for sharing it with us.

She's Julie Keller.

The book is "Milking in the Shadows - Migrants and "Mobility in America's Dairy Land".

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, hoping you'll join us next time for more Story in the Public Square.

(cheery music)