This week Foxconn revealed the location
for its massive new technology factory.
The Racine County location is in
the Village of Mount Pleasant.
The Taiwan-based company is set to acquire
more than 2,500 acres for which includes the factory site,
additional land for future expansion and constructs staging.
Foxconn would be by far the largest manufacturing campus
in the state, with an estimated workforce of 13,000.
In addition to the $3 billion state incentive package,
the Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County will provide
Foxconn $764 million for development.
Local officials said all of it will be repaid by taxes
the project generates.
Our partners at WisContext have also learned
the city of Racine will provide water for the complex.
This week, our inside look examines a key labor market shift
in the state.
Wisconsin dairy farmers now depend on immigrant labor
to produce the amount of milk that ranks us
second in the nation.
But with immigration fears and an already short supply
of workers, farmers worry about who will help them
get the chores done and the milk to market
without breaking the bank.
This week we check in with
the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
which queried experts and farmers to ask what needs
to happen to stabilize the labor situation
on Wisconsin's dairy farms.
We started by asking Managing Editor Dee Hall
how fears of deportation have changed the landscape
for farmers and their immigrant workers.
- That's a big concern among the workers.
We're seeing some anecdotal evidence
that some of the workers are leaving
in anticipation of an immigration crackdown.
We haven't actually seen evidence
that there's a crackdown on farms
or in Wisconsin particularly,
but there is a fear because of the rhetoric surrounding
both the election and then the administration's talk
about getting rid of all illegal immigrants.
- So this would suggest that a certain number
at least of this immigrant labor are undocumented.
- Yes, it is not known in Wisconsin,
for example, how many people are undocumented.
We know numbers about immigrants
and it is pretty overwhelmingly immigrant labor
that produces most of the milk nationwide.
- One of your experts and that was kind
of the point of this overall coverage,
was to pick the brains of all these different people
in this regard.
But one of your experts said, "Immigration is really
"a symptom of a rural labor shortage."
What does your reporting show about that trend?
- We have actually at the Wisconsin Center
for Investigative Journalism,
we actually documented that several years ago,
that some of the most rural counties are facing
the largest depopulation, especially young people.
And these are the strong people that you would expect
to work on dairy farms.
So in fact there's no doubt that there is
a rural labor shortage of some type.
It's caused by many factors.
So there's a general rural labor shortage.
And then there's the specific one regarding dairy farms.
We have fewer family farms.
So that used to be a pipeline for people to come in
and work at farms.
A lot of those are closing.
They're consolidating and as a result you don't have
the people growing up on a dairy farm
who are ready to work on one when they grow up.
- Why can't this be mitigated by simply offering
higher wages, whether it's to local workers
or to immigrant workers?
- Well, that is a debate.
It is not known whether that would actually alleviate
the problem.
I know there are some experts who believe this simply
would not be enough.
American workers do not want to do some of
the really hard and dirty work of dairy farming.
It's 365 days a year, 24/7, erratic hours, long hours.
Others believe that if you did raise the wages
significantly enough that in fact at some point
American workers would be tempted to take the jobs.
- And yet that would be difficult according to
your reporting for the farmers and their businesses.
- Exactly, so the farmers cannot control the cost of milk.
It's a fixed price.
It's a very complicated formula.
Essentially they have to take what that price is
and use that to run their farms.
And what they're saying is sometimes they would be caught
very short if the price drops, which it tends to do.
It can be pretty erratic.
- And yet does immigrant labor drive
down the wages?
- That is one of the concerns as well.
Is that when you have immigrant labor,
people who are used to making significantly less money,
they will settle for lower wages
and that will become the market rate for those wages.
So that's another debate.
I can't answer it except that definitely there's
an opinion out there that this is happening.
And it's making these jobs even less attractive
to Americans.
- One of the people that you interviewed
talked about the need to automate on the dairy farm
to help this situation.
But can family farmers or even medium-size farms
afford this automation?
- That can be very expensive.
So that is the question, is what are you going to spend
on automation and will it replace enough labor
to make it worthwhile.
Some farms are finding that it does.
Some aspects of mechanization are working,
but others have not gone that direction yet.
- You also discussed changing
federal immigration law
because how are dairy workers treated now
under visa programs?
- Right now we have visa programs for temporary,
seasonal workers who come to the United States
to harvest crops for example.
We do not have a similar program for dairy workers
who need to be here year-round
because that's how dairies work.
There are some moves in Congress right now
to create a separate visa program that would meet
the needs of the farmers and the immigrants who are coming
here to work on the dairy farms.
I don't know what the chances of that passing are.
But there is a recognition I think now finally
that this is an issue that needs to be addressed.