Wisconsin farm group assails failure of House to pass immigration bill

Lee Bergquist | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

If falling milk prices and tariffs on dairy exports weren’t enough, a Wisconsin farm group Wednesday derided the failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a far-reaching immigration bill, saying the inaction hurts the industry’s efforts to recruit guest workers.

The bill was killed 301-121, with nearly half of Republicans opposing the measure.

The depth of GOP opposition was an embarrassing showing for President Donald Trump, who gave the measure an eleventh-hour endorsement. It was also a rebuff of House leaders, who’d postponed a vote twice and proposed changes in hopes of driving up the tally for a bill that seemed doomed from the start.

A Green Bay-based farm group, the American Dairy Coalition, said the dairy industry needs a guest worker program to operate its livestock operations.

“ADC is extremely disappointed and frustrated with the lack of desire to move forward a guest-worker program to ensure the dairy industry has an adequate labor force to feed the world,” the group said in a statement.

The measure, at one point, included visas for workers in agriculture, but that was taken out.

“The dairy industry is very labor-intensive and is suffering from a lack of available workers in our rural communities to take care of our animals, tend to crops and provide the world with healthy, affordable, safe dairy products,” said John Jacobs, the organization’s president.

The House vote seemed to empower GOP conservatives on the immigration issue. Last week a harder-right package was defeated, but 193 Republicans voted for it, 72 more than Wednesday’s total. In Wednesday’s vote, 112 Republicans voted “no,” including many of the party’s most conservative members.

“We need to start securing the border and not reward bad behavior, and that’s what this bill did,” said Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas.

Conservatives have opposed the bill’s provision offering a chance at citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. Calling it amnesty, they have said it doesn’t do enough to limit the number of relatives whom immigrants here legally can sponsor for residence.

Even if it passed, the bill would have been dead on arrival in the closely divided Senate, where Democrats have enough votes to kill it. House Democrats voted unanimously against it.

Wisconsin dairy farmers rely on workers from Mexico to milk and care for cattle, a trend driven by the lack of workers and the growing size of farms.

RELATED: Already in trouble, Wisconsin dairy farmers are now getting hammered by tariffs

Wholesale cheese and butter prices have slumped in recent weeks as buyers and sellers worry about the effect of new tariffs on dairy products, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Wednesday.

About 90 percent of Wisconsin milk becomes cheese. Mexico buys nearly a quarter of all dairy products exported by the U.S., and the American dairy industry is reeling from $387 million in Mexican tariffs — of between 15 percent and 25 percent — on cheese.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.