None of the billion-dollar-plus data centers planned for Wisconsin are yet online, but the nationwide, artificial-intelligence-fueled market is already spurring economic growth in the state.

Wisconsin business leaders say no comprehensive accounting has been done. But just three Wisconsin companies have already amassed more than $1 billion in data center-related business: 

• Regal Rexnord, a Milwaukee maker of motors, announced in February it had received $735 million in orders from data centers.

• Generac, a Waukesha-based manufacturer, told Wisconsin Watch it has a backlog of $400 million in orders for backup generators for data centers. Moreover, Generac announced Feb. 19 it is acquiring a 120-employee Illinois engineering company to help meet data center demand. 

• Racine-based Modine announced in February 2025 it received $180 million in orders from a new customer for data center cooling systems to be manufactured in Virginia and Mississippi. In addition, the company in November opened a 155,000-square-foot plant in suburban Milwaukee to manufacture the systems.

Many companies don’t publicly report details on data center business they do, so it’s impossible to tally total economic impact in Wisconsin. But there are other examples.

Trane Technologies is manufacturing cooling systems for data centers in La Crosse, where it was founded in 1913, and says data centers are a strong part of its business. In November 2023, Excellerate opened a 385,000-square-foot plant in Little Chute, primarily to manufacture “modular electrical buildings” for data centers. Maysteel, a Washington County manufacturer, opened a data center hub in November 2024 and announced in February it is expanding the operation. 

The sheer demand to outfit data centers has meant that some business has trickled down from larger companies to smaller ones.

Modular Power & Data has 90 employees in Dane County and suburban Milwaukee to manufacture electrical distribution products. Chief Operating Officer Erik Thompson told Wisconsin Watch that Modular did $10 million of data center business in 2025 and expects to more than double that in 2026.

That work is “transforming a very small company into what I believe will be a very large Wisconsin manufacturer,” Thompson said. “Without this growth, we’d always be much smaller.” 

Because no hyperscale data centers are scheduled to begin operating in Wisconsin until later this year, their ultimate economic impact remains unknown.

Nationally, data centers are known for spurring construction work. That includes companies such as Brownsville-based Michels Corp., a lead contractor on the $15 billion data center under construction in Port Washington, and Waukesha-based Boldt Co. But those jobs are often temporary. 

“The standard data center development model — speedy dealmaking and opaque negotiations — delivers short-term construction jobs and revenue, but little durable local economic upside,” the Washington, D.C.- based Brookings think tank concluded in February.

In Wisconsin, data center expenditures are projected to raise the state’s gross domestic product from $354 million in 2024 to $881 million in 2029, according to University of Virginia economist João-Pedro Ferreira, author of a study done for the Joyce Foundation. The data center workforce is expected to triple from 360 to 1,143 jobs, but constitute only 0.09% of the overall labor market.

“The impacts might seem a lot, but they are not,” Ferreira said.

At least $46 billion in hyperscale data centers are under construction or under consideration in Wisconsin. Besides Port Washington, $20 billion worth of data centers are under construction and planned in Mount Pleasant, and a $1 billion facility is being built in Beaver Dam. Proposals are pending in Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie. 

That’s as concerns about impacts on land, water and electricity spur loud opposition to data centers in Wisconsin. On Facebook alone, more than 24,000 people have joined groups to fight hyperscale centers that are proposed or under construction in the state. 

But Wisconsin businesses see more growth from AI. In November, a foundation connected with Waukesha County-based Pieper Electric announced a $2 million donation to expand Waukesha County Technical College’s Applied AI Lab.

Dale Kooyenga, CEO of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and a former Republican state lawmaker, said skills being developed for data center construction have value after the facilities are built.

“These men and women building these data centers aren’t building just buildings, they’re building the world’s largest computers,” he said. 

Kooyenga also pushed back on claims that AI will be bad for the economy.

“The concept that robots and technology are out to get your jobs has been a concept in America since 1900. That’s not a new fear,” he said. “But the fact is, is that there will be a different-looking economy and different opportunities.”

AI’s growth is affecting workers unevenly across industries. 

It’s reducing employment in the most AI-exposed industries, such as computer systems design, and it’s especially hitting younger workers, according to a new Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas analysis. 

But wages in those sectors have continued to grow as AI tools are benefiting veteran workers — those who have gained knowledge from experience.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Data centers fuel $1 billion in Wisconsin business growth, but some question long-term impact is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

When the Social Development Commission stopped running its anti-poverty programs and services in 2024, it left many employees and contractors unpaid for completed work. 

Nearly two years later, some have received a partial payment, while others are still waiting.   

Deja Allen, a former housing intake specialist for SDC, is owed $2,518.09 in gross wages, according to her wage claim. 

She said she was out of work for eight months and the unpaid wages affected her tremendously as she figured out how to pay her rent and bills. 

“I am thankful for my family being able to assist me while I looked for other employment,” Allen said. 

SDC stopped running its anti-poverty programs and laid off staff in April 2024. Since then, the agency has dealt with board turnover, lawsuits and the loss of access to community action funding.

What’s happening with the wage claims lawsuit?

The Wisconsin Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state’s Department of Workforce Development that claims SDC owed nearly $360,000 in back wages and benefits to former employees.

Sarah Woods, former youth and family services staff, was laid off when the agency paused services in April 2024. She filed a wage claim with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, which informed her that she is owed $4,756. 

Woods said she last received an update from the state in May 2025, when a representative said SDC would not have more information until the legal process is completed. 

Department of Justice attorney Michael D. Morris said at a status conference last month that William Sulton, SDC’s former legal counsel, is still working behind the scenes with him on reaching a resolution and requested additional time. The next status conference is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on March 26. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Workforce Development said the department isn’t able to provide additional details on the lawsuit’s status or outcomes while litigation continues. 

Jorge Franco, interim CEO of SDC and chair of the SDC board, said that paying employees and contractors what they’re owed remains a major priority for SDC. He advised former employees to follow the legal process closely. 

“It’ll be upon the attorneys for the claimant to determine what and how they proceed through next steps,” he said.

Contractors still owed

In his more than 40 years providing weatherization services in the Milwaukee area, Jaime Hurtado said SDC had one of the best and most robust weatherization divisions. 

Hurtado is the owner and president of Insulation Technologies Inc., or Intec, and worked with SDC for more than 20 years.

SDC received funding for the work through Wisconsin’s Weatherization Assistance Program. The Wisconsin Department of Administration suspended SDC’s participation in the program in March 2024 and began a forensic accounting after it reported a misallocation of funds. 

“They had built a professional, top-tier delivery service, a program to deliver these services in weatherization for people who need it the most,” Hurtado said. “It’s a heartbreak to see that go out of existence.”

Franco has said the department refused to reimburse SDC for nearly $490,000 in weatherization work and let it continue accumulating expenses before shutting down the program.

Intec and two other contractors, Affordable Heating and Air Conditioning Inc. and DMJ Services LLC, otherwise known as Action Heating & Cooling, sued SDC on claims that it failed to pay for weatherization work completed under contract in 2023 and 2024.

A judge granted the contractors a money judgment of $186,517.03 plus statutory costs and interest in October. About $112,500 of that would go to Intec, but it hasn’t been collected yet.

Jon Yakish, owner of Micro Analytical Inc., said his asbestos-testing laboratory has not been paid for 90% of the contracts it had with SDC before it closed. 

“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” he said, estimating the remaining unpaid work cost around $2,300. “And I know there’s other people out there where it was a much bigger deal, so it’s hard for me to complain.”

Loss of work

More than the missing payments, Yakish and Hurtado’s businesses have felt the sustained impact of losing a loyal customer. 

Intec continues to perform work in the state’s weatherization program, Hurtado said, but at a reduced level. He said other providers have brought in a smaller volume of business than SDC. 

“We just move our attention to other parts of the market,” Hurtado said. 

Yakish said Micro Analytical also hasn’t received the same amount of business it had from SDC from the other organizations that have taken over the weatherization program services in Milwaukee.

“We don’t want to rely on the government, but it is a baseline of work that’s always going on, that kind of, in a way, helps us be recession-proof,” Yakish said. 

Moving on

Hurtado said the lawsuit was the only way to secure Intec’s rights to collect the money that it’s owed, though he acknowledged that SDC owes other lenders and suppliers.

“Who knows if they’ll have enough money to pay our balance, but at least we’ll be in the list,” he said. 

The $112,500 amount is about 25% of the total amount Intec was owed from SDC, Hurtado said. He said the state worked with other weatherization service agencies to pay Intec the other 75%, which helped the company. 

“Thank God we’re diversified enough, and we’re a strong company,” he said. 

Yakish said he submitted invoices and data on work performed at the state’s request in order to get paid, and a few contracts were paid. He became frustrated after the companies that had taken over SDC’s weatherization contracts kept asking for the same information.

“I kind of told them, ‘Look, I’m throwing my hands up.
This is the last time I’m doing this,’” he said. “So I don’t know if they took that as I was unwilling to work with them or whatever, but it just seemed really clear that nothing was actually going to happen.”

Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.

Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Nearly two years after SDC shutdown, former workers and contractors still seek payment  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Editor’s note: This is a static version of the interactive story found at this link.

Part 1: A struggling regional carrier

The legacy network

Air Wisconsin Airlines has not been spared by the nationwide decline of regional air service. The 60-year-old carrier laid off hundreds of employees in Appleton and Milwaukee last year after terminating a contract to provide aircraft, crews and services to American Airlines in January 2025. The airline’s planned pivot to charter service and federally subsidized connections to underserved airports didn’t pan out, prompting another round of layoffs by the spring.

But the company’s troubles didn’t entirely ground its fleet. Flight tracking data indicate that Air Wisconsin continued to provide regional air service through the end of 2025, primarily connecting its Wisconsin hubs to mid-sized Midwestern airports as it had for decades.

The sale

In January, Harbor Diversified Inc., the Appleton-based parent company of Air Wisconsin, sold the company’s operations and 13 of its jets to CSI Aviation, a New Mexico-based air charter company and longtime federal contractor owned by former New Mexico Republican Party chair Allen Weh.

Air Wisconsin sent recall notices to the company’s furloughed flight attendants after the sale to CSI Aviation, and the Association of Flight Attendants — the union representing the furloughed workers — negotiated an immediate raise for returning members. In a January press release announcing the recall notices, the union noted that only a third of the furloughed flight attendants opted to return.

Neither CSI nor Harbor Diversified responded to requests for comment.

CSI is central to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.

It has provided charter services for ICE since 2024, transporting detainees and deportees both directly and through subcontractors.

The company entered its current $1.5 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security in November of last year.

Demand for private charters surged after 2010, when the Obama administration moved away from relying solely on the U.S. Marshals Service.

Air Wisconsin isn’t alone. Avelo Airlines began deportation flights last spring, but backed out last month following intense public backlash.

A transformed network

CSI’s acquisition of Air Wisconsin transformed the airline’s flight patterns within a matter of weeks. The airline’s website no longer lists passenger routes, but flight data collected between Jan. 9 and mid-February indicates that the airline has largely ceded its role as a Midwestern regional carrier.

Instead, the airline increasingly looks south: Destinations in Louisiana and Texas replaced the mid-sized Midwestern airports that were, until recently, the airline’s most frequent destinations.

Flight data indicates Air Wisconsin planes made at least 125 trips in January 2026, up from roughly 60 in December 2025. Thicker lines on the map indicate more frequent routes.

Part 2: Air ICE

Many of Air Wisconsin’s new destinations are within easy reach of ICE detention facilities in Texas and Louisiana, including some of the agency’s largest.

The Minnesota operation

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is among the busiest in the country, but Air Wisconsin rarely provided service to the Twin Cities in the final months of 2025.

That changed in January, just weeks after the Trump administration dispatched thousands of federal agents to Minnesota for an immigration enforcement offensive dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Hundreds of immigrants detained in the operation have since departed the airport in shackles, loaded onto charter flights bound for ICE detention facilities farther south.

Alexandria

The modest airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, is now the epicenter of ICE’s deportation flight operations. Air Wisconsin has flown to or from Alexandria at least 30 times since the airline’s acquisition by CSI, on par with the airline’s service to Madison and outpacing service to Appleton, home to the airline’s corporate headquarters.

The GEO Group, an international private prison operator, runs an ICE detention facility on the airport’s tarmac. A dozen other ICE facilities sit within easy reach. Among them is the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, where Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in custody on Dec. 14, 2025. ICE acknowledged the incident in a press release four days later, though the agency did not specify the cause of Rodriguez’s death.

El Paso

Camp East Montana, ICE’s largest detention facility, sits just east of El Paso International Airport. Air Wisconsin flights took off from or landed in El Paso at least 32 times in January and early February, second only to Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport.

The camp drew national attention in early January after Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national, died by asphyxiation after guards pinned him to the floor of a cell. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office later ruled the death a homicide.

Lunas Campos’ death came a month after Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old from Guatemala and detained at Camp East Montana, died in an El Paso hospital; ICE attributed Gaspar-Andres’ death to liver and kidney failure.

Another detainee, 36-year-old Victor Manuel Diaz of Nicaragua, died at the camp on Jan. 14 in what ICE described as a “presumed suicide” — an explanation his family questions. ICE agents detained Diaz in Minneapolis only days before his death.

Back at home

Air Wisconsin hasn’t entirely withdrawn from its home state hubs. Many of the airline’s remaining pilots, flight attendants and ground crew are still Wisconsin-based, and Milwaukee remains the airline’s primary hub.

The airline is now hiring for more than a dozen Wisconsin-based positions — including legal counsel.

About the data

Wisconsin Watch used FlightAware AeroAPI data (Sept 2025 – Feb 2026) to reconstruct patterns before and after the Jan. 9 sale to CSI Aviation.

Hubs on these maps represent the 10 airports most frequently used. While the routes align with ICE operations, the data does not confirm if specific flights carried detainees.

Air Wisconsin turns to ICE (static version) is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Air Wisconsin turns to ICE is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Children love to dress up as firefighters and police officers. They imagine themselves rushing into danger, answering the call when people are in need. 

But how many of them realize they could literally be the one to answer those calls — as a 911 dispatcher?

 “Not many people know about this as a career field,” said Gail Goodchild, emergency preparedness director for Waukesha County, at a Wisconsin Watch virtual panel discussion on Wednesday. “I think about trick or treaters … Nobody walks around with a headset and says, ‘I’m going to be a dispatcher someday.’”

The panel of emergency telecommunications professionals and educators said the low profile of emergency dispatch is one of many reasons that 911 centers across the country struggle to fill openings.

In Wisconsin, rural and urban communities alike are regularly short of dispatchers. Wisconsin Watch reported last year on Brown County’s “relentless” shortage and what the city can learn from successful changes in Waukesha County. This panel, moderated by reporter Miranda Dunlap, continues that conversation by highlighting perspectives and solutions from experts across the state.

“We have a critical, nationwide shortage of 911 professionals,” said Chippewa County Emergency Communications Center Director and longtime dispatcher Tamee Thom, who is also president of WIPSCOM, a board representing 911 professionals across Wisconsin.

Solving the problem, panelists agreed, will require both attracting new dispatchers and supporting those already on the job. They recommend raising awareness about the career, improving pay and working conditions, providing mental health support and technology to reduce burnout, and officially designating these professionals as first responders, in the same category as paramedics, firefighters and police.

Lives on the line

Emergency dispatch work is mentally and emotionally taxing, panelists said. At any moment, a dispatcher must be prepared for everything from talking someone through delivering a baby to responding to an act of violence. 

“It can go from zero to 90 in seconds,” Goodchild said. “One minute you’re talking with your podmate, and then the (phones) are ringing off the hook for … a car accident or, God forbid, an active shooter at the local school.”

Dispatchers must remain calm to gather necessary information, relay instructions —  say, how to perform CPR or deliver a baby — and de-escalate tension if needed. Meanwhile, they’re doing multiple other tasks, including taking notes, using mapping tools to better locate the caller, and talking with law enforcement dispatchers. 

When a call ends, the dispatcher might never find out what happened afterward. Sometimes, they finish a life-or-death call and then pick up a mundane call about trash pickup or parking tickets, sending them on an emotional rollercoaster.

The job only gets harder when 911 centers are shortstaffed. Staff who typically work 8- or 12-hour shifts could have to work 16, Goodchild said. In some cases, they leave work only to clock back in eight hours later. 

“You might have time to go home, maybe tuck in your kids at night. You’re getting a couple hours of sleep … pack your lunch … then get back to work,” Goodchild said. 

But despite the challenges, veteran dispatchers say there’s a reason they’ve stayed in the field for decades. 

Billi Jo Baneck, communications coordinator at the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office, once quit dispatch work to direct events at a wedding venue. 

“I tried to leave … and I came right back,” Baneck said. “It just consumes you.”

What’s working

Waukesha County offers some clues about how to fix the shortage. In 2023, the department had 20 vacancies. By July 2025, it had just two. 

One of the most important changes was to start hiring candidates based on personality rather than specific skills, said Goodchild, who took over as director a year ago. 

“We can teach customer service. We can teach them how to read a protocol, but if they’re coming in with a bad attitude, it really messes up the culture in that environment and adds to the stress.”

The department also conducted a compensation study, which led it to raise the starting wage for dispatchers from around $27 to almost $29.50 to compete with other employers. 

“People were leaving for less stressful jobs … They were going into the private industry because they could get paid better to do less,” Goodchild said. 

Waukesha’s success has caught the attention of emergency telecommunications leaders across the state. Still, Goodchild said, the county’s work isn’t done.

“While we’ve made changes and we’ve seen improvements,” Goodchild said, “we’re still not at full staffing … We have to continue to stay vigilant and identify those gaps and issues before they get to be bigger problems, and remain adaptable in meeting the needs of the center and certainly the communities that we serve.”

Thom agrees. In Chippewa County, her department has created part-time positions for dispatchers who wanted to cut back their schedules, and it’s passed some administrative and training duties to once-retired dispatchers who don’t want the stress of taking calls. 

That kind of “innovative” scheduling is essential, she said. 

“These days, people are really looking for that work-life balance … so I think any way that we can help add to that … I think we’re going to retain staff,” Thom said.

To support dispatchers’ mental health, some departments have created peer support programs for dispatchers and other first responders to supplement existing mental health services. 

Meanwhile, Waukesha County has hired a specialized therapy contractor called First Responder Psychological Services to meet with new hires and check in once or twice a year with every employee. All the company’s staff have worked in public safety, so they understand the specific stresses of the job, Goodchild said.

A role for AI?

Another way departments are easing the burden on overworked dispatchers: artificial intelligence. Waukesha is among the Wisconsin departments that now use an AI agent to answer non-emergency calls. That could include questions about how to pay a parking ticket, or what time the local fireworks show starts. 

“I just want to be clear, because I know everybody’s fear is that you’re going to get an AI agent (when you’re) calling 911: That’s not the case,” Goodchild said. 

That change, Goodchild said, means dispatchers get a little more down time and don’t experience so much of an emotional rollercoaster.

“You’re not going to send a law enforcement tactical team to go get a kitten out of a tree, right?” Goodchild said. “We train our 911 dispatchers at such a high level to provide CPR instructions, childbirth instructions, the de-escalating skills, multitasking skills. Why are you having them focus on a caller that’s calling in about when the fireworks are?”

Some schools and 911 centers are also using AI to train new dispatchers, said Shawano County’s Baneck, who also teaches emergency telecommunications at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. 

Tech colleges step in

Wisconsin’s tech colleges can play an important role in fixing the shortage by raising awareness about the field and helping potential dispatchers figure out whether the job is right for them, panelists said.

Andrew Baus, associate dean of human services at Moraine Park Technical College, helped create the college’s new emergency dispatch certificate program. Baus worked for years as a paramedic, the third generation in his family to work as a first responder. 

“Growing up, the options were always fire or criminal justice. It really never dawned that dispatching was right there with them,” Baus said. Now, he said, he’s trying to show students that dispatch is another “great option.”

To excel in dispatch, a person must multitask and be friendly with strangers, Baneck said. Those people can be hard to find.

“People with customer service experience that are used to angry customers, angry shoppers, (and) people that have been in the food service industry that are used to running back and forth, taking multiple orders … they do really well in this kind of job.”

You don’t typically need certifications to get a job as a dispatcher, Baneck said, noting that departments usually offer a 40-hour basic training in-house or send new hires for training elsewhere. 

But taking those classes in advance can help a person figure out whether dispatch work is right for them, before they ever apply for a job. That, in turn, can reduce turnover.

“Your heart’s got to be all-in to be able to work nights, holidays, weekends, around the clock, serving your community,” said Baneck, who also urges students considering dispatch to contact a 911 center and ask to shadow a dispatcher at work. “This is a good way of knowing whether their heart’s going to be in it or not, or whether they’re going to be capable of doing it.”

Thom agrees. “They see what it’s really like, and not what it looks like on TV,” Thom said. 

Meanwhile, Thom said WIPSCOM is still pushing Wisconsin lawmakers to include dispatchers in newly adopted legislation that lets first responders diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder apply for worker’s compensation benefits. Some states have officially reclassified dispatchers as first responders. Such a change can mean dispatchers qualify for  higher pay, better benefits and even the chance to retire earlier.

“There’s a difference between what we do every day and being a clerical worker. We are part of the emergency services world and are, honestly, the first first responder there,” Thom said. “We will continue to be a thorn in their side … speaking on behalf of our 911 professionals across the state.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Who you gonna call? Wisconsin 911 dispatchers discuss fixes to national, statewide shortage is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Minimum-wage workers in 19 states saw their paychecks increase this year. But Wisconsin hasn’t changed its minimum wage — just $7.25 per hour — for 17 years, shrinking the buying power of the lowest-earning workers.

Wisconsin ties its minimum wage to the federal level, which hasn’t budged for its longest stretch in history. Had Congress indexed the wage to inflation in 2009, it would have risen to $10.88 in 2025. That’s a difference of $145.20 over a 40-hour workweek. 

Elsewhere, 34 states, territories and districts have set minimum wages above $7.25.

Neighboring Minnesota raised its minimum wage from $11.13 to $11.41 this year, while Michigan’s leaped from $12.48 to $13.73. Illinois kept its threshold at $15, the highest level among noncoastal states.

In 2024, about 1% of the Wisconsin workforce earned at or below the state’s minimum wage. Those people generally worked as salespeople, automotive service technicians or food preparation workers, U.S. Census data show.

Wisconsin’s tipped workers have an even lower minimum wage of $2.33 per hour, slightly higher than the $2.13 federal minimum, which has not changed since 1991.

Meanwhile, the average living wage for a single adult with no children in Wisconsin in 2025 is $20.96, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, with higher costs in metropolitan areas — including $22.18 in Madison and $21.07 in Milwaukee and Waukesha. The living wage is significantly higher for adults who raise children and lower for people living with a working partner. 

New York campaign sparked ‘Fight for $15’

Campaigns to raise the minimum wage have regularly drawn national headlines. In 2012, fast-food workers and their supporters began calling for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in New York City. Their victory inspired a broader ‘Fight for $15’ movement, including in Wisconsin, as Wisconsin Watch previously reported.

This year, The Living Wage Coalition — a group of labor and progressive organizations — launched a campaign to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage to $20 per hour, calling the status quo far below a reasonable standard of living for the lowest-wage workers. 

An increase to $15 per hour would be politically popular and directly or indirectly raise the wages of 231,800 (18%) women workers, 36,200 (25.6%) Black workers and 50,200 (26.6%) Hispanic workers in Wisconsin — narrowing gender and racial wealth and income gaps that are some of the largest in the nation, according to a 2025 High Road Strategy Center report. The University of Wisconsin-Madison-based “think-and-do tank” focuses on solutions to social problems — including those related to the environment, opportunity and democratic institutions. 

Still, multiple bills to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage — largely proposed by Democrats — have stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have cited concerns about burdening small businesses.

Higher wage ‘has to come from somewhere’ 

Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work. 

“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”

Economists worry that dramatic minimum-wage hikes could lead to higher consumer costs  — or prompt businesses to cut worker hours or eliminate their jobs entirely, Freitag added.

The key would be an increase that benefits the lowest-paid workers without significantly affecting the broader economy. But it’s unclear what that sweet spot is.

Conditions of the labor market — the supply and demand for workers — shape wages across most of the economy. Wages typically increase when there are more openings than workers, and they decrease when there are few openings for available workers. 

Setting the minimum wage close to or below an equilibrium wage — where the demand for labor matches the supply — only minimally affects wages across the market, economists suggest. 

States that hiked minimum wages saw slightly higher gains across the lowest-tier wages (the bottom 10%) between 2019 and 2024, but not enough to claim a correlation, an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found. A range of factors could have shaped the wage increases, which also played out in the Midwest.

Wisconsin has seen slightly faster growth in bottom-tier wages than its neighbors — even without increasing the minimum wage. The state’s bottom-tier wages increased from $10.92 hourly in 2009 to $14.58, Wisconsin Watch found by analyzing EPI’s data.

Bigger hikes strain employers 

While basic economic principles suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage would decrease the hiring of unskilled workers by 1 to 2%, recent studies suggest an even smaller shift, or no effect at all. 

Most minimum-wage studies published between 2004 and 2024 have shown little or no job loss, Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, found. 

Researchers tend to focus most on cities and states that have significantly increased their minimum wage. Seattle, Washington, which has hiked its threshold annually since 2015, has among the highest in the country at $21.30 this year. 

In a 2022 study, University of Washington researchers found that Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $11 hourly in 2015 “had an insignificant effect on employment,” but a spike to $13 in 2016 “resulted in a large drop in employment.” 

But the findings might not directly apply to other places, the researchers found, because industries and the makeup of the labor force might look and act differently elsewhere. 

A separate University of Washington study found that a minimum-wage increase to $15 hourly affected most child care businesses, which commonly responded by raising tuition and reducing staff hours or total number of staff — potentially harming staff and lower-wage customers.

What work is worth

“Minimum wage legislation commonly has two stated objectives: the reduction of employer control of wages; and the abolition of poverty,” George Stiegler, a leader of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in 1946 — an era when Congress was debating bigger increases to the minimum wage in the policy’s early years. 

But Stiegler was pessimistic about the prospect that minimum-wage hikes were the best way to eliminate poverty. He instead called for lawmakers to grant lower-income families other forms of relief, including tax cuts and credits. 

That spirit was reflected in the “no tax on tips” bill, which the Wisconsin Assembly passed this month to benefit tipped workers. 

Still, Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center, views the minimum wage as an important floor to benefit workers at the margins and signal “work is worth this.” 

“People who are working full time should be able to afford life,” she said. “At $7.25 per hour, there’s almost nothing you can afford, and it feels far below what a wage floor really should function as.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

DataWatch: Wisconsin hasn’t raised its minimum wage for 17 years. What does that mean for workers and the economy? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A bill moving through the Wisconsin Legislature would offer low-interest loans to small dairy farmers to boost efficiency as the state’s dairy industry rapidly consolidates into larger industrial operations.

But ahead of the state’s legislative session, which resumed in early January, major farm and dairy industry representatives pushed for changes that would allow large industrial farms to access the loans, according to lobbying communications and draft legislation obtained by Investigate Midwest through open records requests.

The state has lost nearly 18,000 dairy farms over the past two decades and, as of 2022, has roughly 6,000 operating dairy farms, with small-scale farms dwindling rapidly. 

Wisconsin dairy farms with fewer than 500 cattle have decreased 67% since 2002. Almost every county in the state has lost at least half of its small farms in that same time, according to an Investigate Midwest USDA data analysis.

Senate Bill 323, introduced in July 2025, would set aside $20 million to create an innovation program for dairy farmers in the state to fund the purchase of new equipment or expand animal health practices to produce more milk. Farmers would apply through the state’s agriculture department.

Bill authors said farmers could also use the funds to develop manure management plans, create products from manure and improve animal health and outputs to produce higher-quality products, such as buttermilk. Medium and small dairy farmers can access up to $500,000 administered by the state’s agricultural department. 

The bill was passed by the Senate 18 to 15 on Jan. 21 and can now be heard by the state Assembly.

Dispute over dairy herd sizes

State Sen. Rob Stafsholt, a New Richmond Republican who authored the bill, said economic sustainability has been an issue brought to him by farm operators throughout his rural, northwestern district.

“Some of the technology that can make farmers as efficient as possible and would help the smaller guys to compete with the bigger guys is often financially out of reach for our small and medium farms,” he said. 

The Wisconsin dairy industry is worth nearly $53 billion, and its farms have become increasingly larger in recent years, while the overall number of farms continues to decrease. This trend has created legal clashes between rural towns and dairy farms across the state.

Bigger farms increase profitability by working with consolidated dairy processing companies. Small operations also work with large-scale processors but often rely on boutique dairy product sales, such as those from small-scale creameries or co-ops.

Cost is a major factor in the decline of small farms. The cost of operating a dairy farm in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the last decade, while the price farmers receive for their milk has fallen 15% in the same time frame, according to an analysis of USDA data.

The Wisconsin Farm Bureau and the Dairy Business Association, lobbying and advocacy groups for the state’s dairy and agriculture sector, both asked bill authors to remove the bill’s limit on the number of animal units a farm could have to apply for funding.

In Wisconsin, animal units are a metric primarily used to determine whether a farm meets the threshold for being considered a concentrated animal feeding operation, otherwise known as a CAFO. A single animal unit does not equate to a single animal. For example, a dairy cow is the equivalent of 1.4 animal units, while it would take roughly 30 chickens to equal a single animal unit.

Farms with 1,000 or more animal units have to apply for additional permits through the state’s Department of Natural Resources to manage waste. As farms get larger, increased waste can lead to runoff and pollution problems for nearby communities and waterways. Livestock runoff has been linked to cancers, infant deaths and miscarriages. 

The current bill language sets an applicant’s limit at roughly 999 animal units, or roughly 700 dairy cattle.

In a letter to the bill authors, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau requested that the cap be removed, allowing the size of the farm to be part of the determination when applying for funding, rather than disallowing a larger farm from applying altogether. 

“By aligning the program’s design with its intent, the bill can more effectively support on-farm innovation and ensure that Wisconsin farmers of all sizes have the opportunity to modernize, improve herd health, and maintain our state’s leadership in agricultural innovation,” the letter stated. 

The Dairy Business Association, a trade group headquartered in Green Bay and operated by a board of executives with ties to CAFOs across the state, dairy processors and cheesemakers, told lawmakers in a letter that the state’s large farms provide stability to the milk supply and should be a part of the funding pool.

“A strong dairy economy depends on participation from farms of all sizes,” the letter states. “If this program’s eligibility criteria exclude large farms, the ripple effects will weaken — not strengthen — rural Wisconsin.”

Records show that Dairy Business Association lobbyists met with bill authors soon after the bill text was circulated in early June 2025 to discuss the herd size provision and other concerns with the legislation. The Dairy Business Association did not respond to requests for comment. 

The office of state Rep. Clint Moses, a Menomonie Republican who co-introduced a similar bill in the state’s Assembly, provided an early draft of a bill amendment to Dairy Business Association lobbyists ahead of the release of the amendment, according to an Aug. 5, 2025, email.

Despite meetings with lobbyists to express concerns about the bill’s language regarding herd size, the language has not changed to remove the animal unit cap. 

Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, said that if the legislation caps farm size, the funding will help more farmers. He said the Wisconsin Farmers Union supports maintaining the animal unit limit in the current legislation and will continue to watch the bill closely. 

“The dollars that are available there could be easily swallowed up by two or three of the biggest farms in the state, and then nobody else will be able to be a part of that process,” Von Ruden said.

Stafsholt, the senator who introduced the bill, said that the original purpose of the bill was to support small and medium-sized farms and that keeping a limit on animal units will stop large farms from taking larger pieces of the program’s budget. 

“Going forward, I have no intention of switching that number,” he said. 

Bill addresses dairy’s undocumented workforce

The bill also points to the realities of drafting legislation affecting the dairy industry and navigating the sector’s open secret: undocumented labor. 

Draft legislation shows bill authors intent on blocking farms that use undocumented labor from qualifying for the loan program. The current version of the bill would only allow farms that employ workers who are authorized to work in the state to apply for the program.

There are no definitive counts of the number of undocumented laborers working on Wisconsin dairy farms, but research estimates that nearly 70% of the state’s dairy industry relies on undocumented labor. 

“I don’t have an issue with (farms) doing what they are doing,” Stafsholt said. “It’s more about following the law. We want to make sure taxpayer dollars funding the dairy cattle innovation program are not necessarily being utilized by those who fail to follow the basic law.”

In September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested dairy farm workers in Manitowoc County as part of a larger raid in the area. This comes as ICE raids have hit major agricultural industries and cities, detaining workers and increasing anxiety throughout the labor force. 

Lobbyists from both the Farm Bureau and the Dairy Business Association initially expressed concerns about the impact this limitation would have. 

In an August email from a member of Stafsholt’s staff to the senator, meeting notes show that Dairy Business Association representatives expressed concerns about the original requirement that farms employ only individuals legally authorized to work in Wisconsin, but that language remains in the current version. 

“After conversations with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection on how the bill provision will be facilitated and discussions with the bill authors, staff, and stakeholders, we are not prioritizing changing that provision,” Jason Mugnaini, a Wisconsin Farm Bureau lobbyist, told Investigate Midwest in December.

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

CAFOs want in on proposal meant to help Wisconsin’s small dairy farms is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Ricardo Manriquez starts his shift at the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry headquarters in Manitowoc long before the sun rises. More than 100 miles away, on a dairy farm near Madison, a herdsman named Alex is heading out to the barn with his crew to milk a few hundred cows.

Both are middle-aged fathers with neat haircuts and sensible work boots. Both studied at technical schools and have years of hands-on experience in their fields. Both are immigrants from Latin America who settled in Wisconsin over the past two decades. The Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement and overhaul visa rules leave both men and their employers in difficult positions.

The recruitment pathway that brought Manriquez, an engineer from Mexico with a temporary work visa, to Wisconsin remains mostly untouched by the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal immigration policy, but his prospects of securing permanent residency in the foreseeable future have faded. Alex, an undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua, is in a more precarious position. His small team is poised to shrink, and finding new hires is more difficult than ever.

At least one in 20 Wisconsin workers is a noncitizen, and many Wisconsin employers have watched recent federal immigration policy changes sever, clog or redirect their hiring pipelines. Those employers — in manufacturing, dairy and innumerable other segments of Wisconsin’s economy — are finding their bearings in the new policy landscape, and more shake-ups or reversals may lie ahead.

The Tijuana engineer pipeline

Manriquez’s office sits near a door to the Manitowoc plant’s labyrinthine production floor, where the motion alarms on forklifts periodically cut through the hum of heavy machinery and a Nirvana album blasting from a worker’s portable speaker. 

“All my life I was involved with grease and cars and steel,” Manriquez said. His father was a mechanic, he said, and his hometown, Tijuana, is a manufacturing powerhouse. Relatively low labor costs have drawn hundreds of manufacturers to cities near Mexico’s northern border, which now serve as a hub for the North American electronics, automotive parts, aerospace and medical device industries. 

With an electro-mechanical engineering degree from a local technical university in hand, Manriquez found work at Prime Wheel, an American automotive parts company with a corporate office and fabrication facilities in one of Tijuana’s factory districts. He spent nearly a decade there, working long shifts with tedious commutes while attempting to raise a family. “In Mexico, we work 48 to 60 or even 80 hours a week without extra pay,” he said. “You get paid $50 to $60 a day … If you have a family, it really doesn’t help. You need to do a side job.”

Though his supervisor promoted him from designer to project engineer, Manriquez saw few opportunities to climb higher at Prime Wheel’s Tijuana plant. Prime Wheel did not respond to a request for comment.

The TN visa program was Manriquez’s ticket to cross the border. A product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the TN visa provides a three-year work authorization to Mexican and Canadian nationals with job offers for a limited number of high-skilled professions. 

Compared with other types of employment-based visas, like the H-1B favored in the tech and health care industries, the TN visa offers a straighter path to the U.S. for skilled Mexican workers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved nearly 16,000 TN visas for Mexican nationals in 2024, compared to just under 2,000 H-1B visas for Mexican nationals. Only 42 Canadians received TN visas that year.

Manriquez learned about an opening in Manitowoc through word of mouth, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry was already primed to use the TN visa program to recruit skilled engineers.

When Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry purchased a metal castings manufacturer in New Hampton, Iowa, in 2024, the company absorbed the plant’s team, including four TN visa holders. It has retained those workers and hired three more since the acquisition, including Manriquez, who joined the company last February. Most came from Tijuana’s metals industry.

The company is trying to build a domestic pipeline. It has a relationship with Wisconsin’s technical college system, which trains engineers for a range of manufacturing roles, including on quality control teams like Manriquez’s. “It’s really hard to say if (those) skill needs are growing or shrinking,” said Iain Cameron, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing, noting that day-to-day responsibilities and compensation for engineers with similar titles vary between companies.

But attracting and retaining talent for plants in small Midwestern towns is a constant challenge, said Michelle Szymik, the company’s human resources director. New Hampton, population 3,500, sits in a quiet stretch of northeast Iowa, and skilled engineers with U.S. citizenship tend to favor less-isolated workplaces.

Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry’s product line compounds its recruiting challenges. The foundry produces intricately detailed castings for Dodge sports cars and SpaceX satellites, among other clients, and few students of U.S. technical colleges have mastered the skills needed to design those castings by graduation. “It takes a long time to come up to speed on that kind of stuff,” Szymik added. “So we do internships, but at the end of the day, it’s really nice when you can find somebody who’s already got the skill set.” 

Mexico’s advanced manufacturing industry provides a straightforward solution. Engineers like Manriquez come with years of experience and, Szymik said, are more willing to settle in small towns to “take care of their family and build a career.” Manriquez can earn more in two hours than he did in a day in Tijuana, and he no longer spends hours of his day trapped in gridlock.

The visa comes with trade-offs. Manriquez’s wife and children remain in Mexico, and while they are eligible to join him in Manitowoc as dependents, his wife would not receive work authorization.

The TN visa is not a path to permanent residency, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry would eventually need to sponsor Manriquez for another employment-based visa before helping him secure a green card and a long-term career with the company.

One of the more common paths would involve securing Manriquez an H-1B visa, which would allow him to simultaneously hold a “nonimmigrant” visa and apply for a green card. But the company would first need to prove it can’t find an equally qualified U.S. citizen for the job. If it finds a qualified candidate, Manriquez would be out of a job and on his way back to Tijuana. 

The company spent nearly $12,000 to transition another employee from a TN to an H-1B visa, most of which went to legal fees. The Trump administration raised that hurdle even higher last year, introducing a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications — a price tag few employers can afford, including Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry. 

Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector could bear the brunt of the new H-1B fees. Of the more than 1,600 workers employed in Wisconsin who received H-1B visas or renewed their visas last year, roughly a quarter worked in manufacturing. No other sector in the state sponsored more H-1B visas in 2025.

Manriquez can still renew his TN visa, but the breakneck pace of the Trump administration’s policy changes gives him reason to wonder whether that will remain true. “Suddenly, one day to another, (things) probably can change,” he said. 

Wanted: ‘a good future for our children’

On a chilly morning in early December, Alex wore only a long-sleeve thermal shirt and a vest as he checked on the herd.

“We deal with the cold and the heat. We’re out there in all of that,” Alex told Wisconsin Watch in Spanish. “And it doesn’t matter to us because what we want is to work. What we want is to build a good future for our children.”

Alex is at ease around the animals. He studied agricultural sciences at a technical high school, and he was partway through a veterinary degree at a university in Managua 15 years ago when he headed north from Nicaragua to the U.S. He feared that the country’s security apparatus would some day come for him — a vocal opponent of authoritarian President Daniel Ortega.

He eventually approached an attorney about obtaining legal status, only to learn he had missed the eligibility window, which ended a year after his arrival. Because he lacks legal status, Wisconsin Watch has agreed to use only his first name.

“After 15 years in this country that respects your rights as a person, as a worker,” he said, going back to Nicaragua feels unthinkable. His brother, who spent four years working in Wisconsin, recently returned to care for his son, reporting back that allegiance to the ruling party is now required to access government services.

Alex has worked in dairies and manufacturing since arriving in Wisconsin, settling down at his current workplace in south-central Wisconsin to join his partner, with whom he has U.S.-born children. To minimize their risk of crossing paths with immigration enforcement, Alex’s family has cut back on all but the most basic errands. “We no longer think, ‘Oh, it’s a summer weekend. Let’s go to the mall. Let’s take the kids to an amusement park,’” he said. “We’ve reduced it to the minimum: if we need to go to a clinic or a hospital for a medical appointment, to school, to buy food.”

Alongside his daily duties leading a crew of fellow immigrant workers — all from Nicaragua — Alex serves as the farm’s recruiter. He’s held the role for the past five years, giving him a front-row view of the federal immigration crackdown’s impact on hiring.

“It’s been eight months since the last person came (to ask for work),” he said. “Before, people came here constantly.”

With two members of his small crew preparing to leave the U.S., Alex now relies on his extensive network of former colleagues and acquaintances across Wisconsin to drum up replacement candidates. He’s competing with manufacturers who can offer overtime, but the farm’s isolation is now a selling point.

“Right now, security is a consideration. A farm is more separate, less involved, fewer moving people and cars,” he said. “The working conditions will be a little harder, but there’s more security.”

The farm’s owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid drawing the attention of immigration enforcement officials, added that skilled dairy workers can now be more selective when searching for new jobs. “The (labor) pool is clearly getting smaller,” he said. “If you don’t have a number of things — a nice, comfortable, attractive facility, one that people want to work in, if you don’t have a good company culture, and if you can’t provide housing, you’ll have a hard time hiring and retaining people.”

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Van Ruden expects the labor drought to inflate farm wages. “You’re going to have to pay more to keep help,” he said, “which means paying someone $25 an hour versus $15.” Not all farms will be able to afford the new labor market, he added.

Alex’s employer says he has looked into the H-2A program, which provides temporary visas for hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers each year, as a backup if his current crew shrinks. At least 16% of the agricultural employers that hired through the H-2A program last year own dairy herds, up from just 6% in 2020, but most sought agricultural equipment operators in seasonal job listings submitted to the U.S. Department of Labor. But the H-2A program does not provide visas for year-round roles like milking cows — a core responsibility of Alex and his crew. With that source of labor off the table, the farm’s recruitment options are slim. 

While some farmers are exploring reducing labor needs through automation and rotary milking parlors, akin to a lazy Susan for cows, those options don’t eliminate the need for workers entirely.

While automation may reduce the need for some types of labor on dairy farms, some workers may simply shift to other tasks, said Hernando Duarte, a farm labor management outreach specialist with UW-Madison.

 “Maybe you can need less people in the parlor,” he said, “but who is going to feed the calves? All the calves have to be fed two or three times a day. I’ve also seen more people moving more into tractors and feed work.” Rotary milking parlors, he added, also require trained staff to operate and clean. 

Many workers who will learn to operate the automated milking equipment, Duarte added, will likely come from the same labor pool that currently keeps many Wisconsin dairies afloat: immigrants. But Wisconsin’s technical colleges are also preparing dairy science students for the industry’s technological frontier. Greg Cisewski, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Agricultural Sciences, Utilities and Transportation, said several graduates have gone on to manage automated milking operations.

Meanwhile, Alex is preparing for the worst. He and his partner have arranged to temporarily transfer custody of their children to a U.S. citizen if they are arrested or deported, and he has been sending money back to Nicaragua for years to build a backup nest egg. 

When Alex came to the U.S., he left behind a 1-year-old son. He has kept in touch, and his now-teenage son recently shared his plans to study veterinary medicine. “The degree I couldn’t finish is the degree he’s going to study,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of the story misspelled the first name of Iain Cameron, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Skilled but uncertain: Immigrant workers and employers navigate hiring hurdles under Trump is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

From the docks of the Port of Santos, a 58-terminal complex covering an area the size of 1,500 American football fields, ships loaded with soybeans prepare to set sail for China. 

Less than 45 miles from São Paulo, the port services nearly a quarter of Brazil’s soybean exports. For decades, U.S. agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill have operated facilities at the port. 

Today, they share space with COFCO International, China’s state-owned food conglomerate, which has invested around $285 million in recent years. The expansion will make it the port’s largest dry bulk terminal.

And Santos isn’t alone. In the west, the Port of Chancay is rising on Peru’s central coast.

COSCO Shipping, a state-owned Chinese company, is investing at least $3.5 billion to construct 15 berths, logistics facilities and a 1.1-mile tunnel, enabling cargo to be channeled directly from the port to nearby highways.

Once fully operational, Chancay will function as a regional redistribution hub for exports from Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia: from copper and lithium to soybeans and other agricultural products. Upon completion around 2035, it is expected to become the region’s third-largest port.

These and other recent investments across the region have positioned China to source more agricultural products from Latin America as it pivots away from U.S. farmers in response to President Trump’s higher tariffs. 

China first began that pivot in 2018, when Trump’s first-term tariff hikes ignited a global trade war. But since returning to office, the president has renewed that strategy, and China’s investments signal a generational shift that may not reverse if and when the trade war subsides. 

“What are the signs that China’s here to stay (in Latin America)? Really, the infrastructure,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow with the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a U.S. nonprofit policy research organization that reports 23 ports across Latin America have some degree of Chinese investment.  

“Ports, railways, roads, bridges, metro lines, energy, power plants are probably the best signs that China has a long-term commitment … These are long-term projects.”

Daniel Munch, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that when a country gains control over ports that make trade faster, cheaper and more reliable, such as the Port of Chancay, trade flows tend to “lock in.” Reversing that trend, he warned, would require the United States to narrow its efficiency gap, noting that none of its container ports rank among the world’s top 50.

“It could entrench patterns,” Munch said.

This is bad news for American farmers, particularly soybean growers. 

Soybeans are a cornerstone of American agriculture, particularly in the Midwest. Nationwide, more than 270,000 farms grow the crop, according to the latest Census of Agriculture. In Illinois, nearly half of all farms depend on soybean production, and in Iowa and Minnesota, about four in 10 do.

In 2024, more than 40% of U.S. soybean production was exported, with about half going to China.

But tensions between the United States and China have risen this year – Trump has increased tariffs and recently threatened a 157% tax on all Chinese imports, while China responded by reducing U.S. soybean imports to near zero for six months. 

A trade deal announced in November ends the suspension and includes commitments for China to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and at least 25 million metric tons annually through 2028, according to Purdue University and farmdoc Daily. 

Brazil has stepped in as China’s biggest supplier of soybeans, which are used to feed livestock to support protein demand. 

China has become one of the two main export markets for at least 10 nations, most of them in South America, according to the International Trade Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2023 report by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

From 2010 to 2022, the region accounted for nearly one-third of China’s food imports. Brazil alone supplied about 21% of those imports over the same period.

“In recent years, there has been significant growth in telecommunications projects and across all areas of transportation – including airports, ports, roads, railways, and subways – as well as in sanitation and urban mobility. These sectors account for nearly 60% of the total number of projects,” said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of ECLAC, who highlighted the scale of China’s involvement during the 2024 International Seminar on Contemporary China Studies in Costa Rica.

China has viewed Brazil as a strategic partner for several years, primarily because of its soybean supply, and has responded with infrastructure investments, according to Fernando Bastiani, a researcher with ESALQ-LOG, the Group of Research and Extension in Agroindustrial Logistics at the University of São Paulo.

“Today, COFCO has direct access to farmers, purchases soybeans and oversees the entire commercialization chain, including storage and transport to China,” Bastiani said. “In recent years, (COFCO) has also realized it needs to control logistics systems and infrastructure, because that’s a key part.”

In Brazil, Bastiani explained, logistics costs account for 20% to 25% of the final soybean price, mainly due to the long distances between farms and ports and the high cost of trucking. “China understood that by investing in infrastructure, it could help make Brazil more competitive,” he said.

In May, the two countries signed new agreements to deepen their agricultural trade ties, granting Brazil authorization to export meat and ethanol byproducts. 

“Amid the changing and turbulent international landscape, China and Brazil should remain committed to the original aspiration of contributing to human progress and global development,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China’s pullback squeezes US port volumes  

While Latin America has seen growth, many U.S. ports have experienced a significant decline in business.

At the New Orleans District — a dominant grain corridor — soybean exports grew by less than 3% between September 2024 and September 2025, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Shipments through the Los Angeles District fell almost 15%, while the steepest drop came in the Seattle District, where exports plunged 81%.

Nearly half of all U.S. corn, soybean and wheat exports move through the Mississippi River system, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Market Intel report.

This major inland trade artery connects the Midwest’s farming regions to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying an average of 65 million metric tons annually of bulk agricultural products by barge over the past five years to export terminals near New Orleans, where shipments depart for international markets.

“The facilities that purchase soybeans from farmers extend to our freight railroads, where they don’t have as much volume that they’ve been moving, at least for soybeans,” said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. 

Steenhoek noted that corn exports have remained strong, which has helped sustain some port activity — but it hasn’t solved the underlying problem: “China imports more U.S. soybeans than all of our other international customers combined,” he said.

At the Port of Los Angeles, the largest container port in the Western Hemisphere, agricultural exports have also weakened as trade with China cools.

“Exports in general have been very soft, and we attributed it to the retaliatory tariffs that have been put in place by China,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. “Our single biggest export sector is agriculture … of that, soybeans are the number one export commodity.”

Before the first tariffs were introduced in 2018, China accounted for about 60% of the port’s business. Today, it’s closer to 40% and falling, as trade flows and sourcing shift toward countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. 

“We’ve been very aggressive in finding cargo out of other countries,” Seroka said. “But there is no doubt in my mind that we are concerned every day that these policies could impact the amount of cargo that comes to Los Angeles.”

The decrease in exports is not just a hit to farmers, but also to port workers; each four containers handled at the port generates one job, according to Seroka.

“In Southern California, one in nine people has a job related to this port,” said Seroka, referring to dockworkers, truck drivers, brokers and warehouse employees. “It truly is a conversation of national significance.”

U.S. port traffic isn’t poised for a quick rebound despite a recent trade agreement that ends China’s suspension of U.S. soybean imports. After six months of near-zero shipments due to retaliatory trade measures, Beijing in November agreed to purchase 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and to commit to annual purchases of at least 25 million tons through 2028.

A recent analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily said the announcement offered some relief to U.S. farmers at the tail end of harvest, but overall exports to China this year are still on track to be the weakest since 2018, when trade tensions during the first Trump administration slashed volumes to 8 million tons.

“It is very difficult to take a market (China) of over a billion people and replace that,” said John Bartman, a soybean farmer from Marengo, Illinois.

By October, Brazil had exported a record 79 million metric tons of soybeans to China, nearly 80% of its total soybean shipments during the period, according to a farmdoc Daily analysis of data from Brazil’s Foreign Trade Secretariat. Brazil’s total soybean exports reached about 100 million tons between January and October, already surpassing the country’s full-year total for 2024, which was just under 99 million tons.

“U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, wrote in a statement. 

US trade strategy remains unsettled as China moves ahead

While China builds long-term infrastructure to secure its supply chains, Washington is still struggling to define its trade strategy and to contain the political fallout of renewed tariffs.

In mid-September, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives moved to block Congress from influencing Trump’s tariff policy, even as Senate Democrats prepared to force votes challenging his trade war, The New York Times reported. The maneuver effectively stripped lawmakers of the ability to advance measures to lift tariffs until March 31, 2026, extending a prohibition first imposed in the spring to spare members from taking a politically difficult vote.

“Tariffs not only cause farmers to pay more for their inputs, but they have also seen tariffs reduce markets for U.S. farm products,” said U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, during an October session.

If the November soybean agreement between Trump and the Chinese president holds, Beijing’s purchases would still fall short of recent norms. Even if China buys at least 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually over the next three years, that volume would remain about 14% below the five-year average shipped to China from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily.

Some purchases have started rolling in. But April Hemmes, an Iowa soybean farmer who has promoted increased trade with China, said the agreement would be difficult to fulfill, noting that delivering 12 million metric tons of soybeans by early next year is “not very realistic.”  

As China establishes new trade routes across Latin America, every new port or shipping lane makes a future recovery for U.S. farmers more challenging.

Despite the tensions, Hemmes still views China as an essential market. 

“I don’t think our relationship with China has been damaged,” the Iowa soybean farmer said. “China is a low-cost buyer and will need soybeans from the U.S. for a long time. But we will never be their number one source.”

For her, the changing politics and policies have made the United States an “unreliable trading partner.”

“The only way that we become their top choice would be if our soybeans were far cheaper than South America’s.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

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China is investing billions in Latin America, potentially sidelining US farmers for decades to come is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Tyler Stafslien is a fourth-generation farmer who’s worked his family’s land in central North Dakota for about 20 years. Roughly half of his 2,500 acres is typically dedicated to soybeans, a major crop in the state and in the Mississippi River Basin. But growing soybeans has become less profitable over the last decade as input costs rose and the Trump administration’s tariff negotiations in 2018 and 2025 destabilized trade and strained farmers’ incomes. 

This year, wary of the precarious export market, Stafslien decreased his soybean acres by half.

“We’ve been experiencing in ag, the last couple of years, a downturn in commodity prices, a lot of that related to just a large supply across the globe of major commodities, but then you add this trade war on top of it, and it’s like the icing on the cake,” Stafslien said.

The administration this month announced a $12 billion fund for one-time payments to row crop farmers to offset a portion of their inflation- and trade-related losses in the 2025 crop year.

Farmers were asking for the federal relief funds and are happy the administration is finally answering, said Stafslien. But he’s still facing uncertainty. The administration has yet to announce how much money per acre eligible growers will be receiving, and the funds will not be distributed until February, further stressing farmers like him with large debt and growing interest.

“Payments announced this week must be followed by additional and expedient efforts to keep farmers on the land and to improve the farm safety net, leaving annual bailouts as cautionary historical context rather than ongoing policy,” David Howard, policy development director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, wrote in a statement earlier in December. 

Farmers and farming associations are looking for longer-term solutions: to diversify trade partners and increase domestic uses for soybeans as export revenues become less certain. Some, like Stafslien, are shifting to other crops, like corn and wheat.

Soybeans are the largest agricultural export in the U.S. The legume covers more than 81 million acres — or 10% — of all U.S. farmland, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in September, and more than 40% of the nation’s soybeans are exported to other countries. 

U.S. farmers received $24.5 billion from soybean exports in 2024, with Chinese purchases accounting for $12.6 billion – roughly twice the amount purchased by the next five largest export partners combined, according to USDA data.

But this year, China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans during tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, instead falling back on its relationships with Brazil and other South American countries to meet its soybean needs. For U.S. soybean farmers, this growing season ends with low prices, unsold harvests, big financial losses and uncertainty going into the next season despite a tentative new deal with China. 

“We learned firsthand that being heavily reliant on China for export sales is only good when things are good,” said Andrew Muhammad, University of Tennessee professor of agricultural and resource economics.

How did we get here?

Soybeans brought by traders and missionaries from Asia first took root in North America in small quantities in the 1700s, but the USDA did not begin tracking soybeans as a crop until the early 1920s. 

Around that time, the USDA, land grant university extension agents and farm groups started to promote the soybean to farmers as a soil-fertilizing crop that yielded high-protein meal for animal feed, oil and even meat replacements for human consumption. The Mississippi River Basin’s flat plains and intermittent rain proved to be ideal conditions for the crop. 

Soybeans gained a foothold on U.S. farms in “fits and starts” over several decades, author Matthew Roth writes in his book, “Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America,” but really took off  as a cash crop after World War I. Its success was later buoyed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act that allowed soy plantings while restricting other commodities as a way to stabilize crop prices during the Great Depression, policies limiting foreign oils, and the growing need for animal feed and oil during World War II, according to Roth.

The crop helped diversify farming in the South and Midwest. By the 1960s, Roth writes, “the soybean had insinuated itself thoroughly into the American diet,” but indirectly – as feed for the country’s livestock, oils for salads and derivatives in processed foods.

At the same time, soybeans proved to be a desirable product for international trade partners. In 1989, U.S. soybean exports totaled around $4 billion, about a fifth of which went to Japan. The Freedom to Farm Act in 1996 allowed farmers to plant single-crop fields, and with rising export demand from China starting in the early 1990s, many farmers chose to plant soybeans, Roth wrote.

In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization and gained better access to globalized trade with the organization’s members, including the U.S., according to Muhammad and the Council on Foreign Relations. From there, growth in China’s tourism economy and middle class spurred increased demand for meat protein, Muhammad said, heightening the country’s need for animal feed in the form of U.S. soybeans. 

By 2000, the crop was planted on more than 74 million U.S. acres, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

“Over time, China has grown, and it seems to be the case that our total export sales have grown with our exports to China,” Muhammad explained. “They’ve sort of driven that rise over the last two decades.”

Brazil’s soybean industry has competed with American exports since the 1970s, but since 2017 has consistently exported more than the U.S. 

When Trump first upped tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, China retaliated, Muhammad said, and began investing more heavily in purchases and transportation infrastructure in Brazil. The turn toward Brazil as a primary provider during trade negotiations in 2025 “represents a return on that investment (for China),” he said.

Farmers in the U.S. are reckoning with the fallout. 

Farming pains and changing plans

Justin Sherlock farms 2,400 acres of corn and soybeans in eastern North Dakota. His dad started farming in the early 2000s and he took over the farm in 2012.

“The last, you know, 13 years that I’ve been going, the last decade, has been pretty tough to really try and get established,” he said. 

For Sherlock, China coming to market very late in the 2025 harvest season was a blow to profits. Nearly one-quarter of the state’s agricultural exports hinge on soybeans, with China serving as the largest market for U.S. grain.

Sherlock was able to sell most of his soybean crop early to North Dakota soybean elevators — facilities that store the beans — which then found domestic processors in Nebraska and Kansas to sell to. But those domestic markets were also absorbing the supply that would typically be exported to China, so prices — around $8.65 per bushel — dropped significantly below Sherlock’s cost of production. He said he will lose “several hundred thousands of dollars” this year, on top of similar losses last year. 

“We just have to find a way to hopefully make it to next year,” he said. “That’s the struggle right now for a lot of producers.” 

Especially for young or beginning producers, said Sherlock, farmers will likely be having “tough financial discussions with their bankers and lenders.” Or, worst case scenario, these losses could mean losing their farms.

“You cannot have a successful agriculture industry in North Dakota without trade,” he said. “It’s so important that we fix these trade relationships and get back to doing business with other countries.” 

Trade uncertainty was keenly felt by soybean farmers in several Mississippi River Basin states, many of which lead the nation in soybean production and exports. 

Illinois accounts for 16% of the country’s total soybean exports, followed by Iowa with 13%, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. North Dakota comprises 5% of national exports.

Even in states that aren’t among the country’s top producers, soybeans can make up a significant portion of the state farm economy. Tennessee ranks 16th in the nation for soybean exports, for example, but soybeans were the highest-ranked agricultural commodity produced in the state in 2023, bringing in more than $990 million in cash receipts. In 2025, soybeans covered nearly 1.5 million acres of Tennessee farmland – the most of any crop in the state – according to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.

The USDA’s Economic Research Service reported in July that more soybeans are being processed domestically. Most of the soybeans that stay in the U.S. are crushed into oil and meal, and a majority of that meal goes toward feeding livestock. The oil is used in biofuels, for industrial uses, and in food. New crush facilities that separate the beans into oil and meal are under construction in North Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Ohio — states that previously shipped soybeans to other countries to be processed. Biofuel has increased domestic demand for soybeans — and crush facilities — since around 2010, providing an alternative for farmers facing lower demand from traditional export partners.

April Hemmes, a fourth-generation farmer in north-central Iowa, said in September that she is fortunate to have nearby options for her beans: There is an ethanol plant and a crush facility that makes soybean meal, biodiesel and food-grade oil, about 10 miles away from her farm. Farmers who don’t have those options will have a harder time adapting to changing export markets, she wrote in an email.

The lack of money in farmers’ pockets is trickling down to other sectors in farming communities, too, said John Bartman, a regenerative farmer working about 850 acres in northern Illinois. He pointed to farm equipment dealers and factories in Illinois and Iowa that are shuttering well-paying jobs because business has been so slow. 

“So it’s more than just farmers who have been affected by this,” Bartman said. 

What comes next? 

In October, China and the U.S. hammered out a trade agreement. China agreed to purchase at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans by the end of the year, according to the White House, and will purchase at least 25 million metric tons each year through 2028. USDA export sales data from Oct. 2 through Dec. 8 shows China made soybean purchases from the U.S. totaling about 2.8 million metric tons.

For comparison, China purchased an annual average of 29 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States between 2020 and 2024, according to The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an international public policy think tank.

The deal “really isn’t much of a trade deal at all,” Bartman said.

“We’ve just gone through this tariff war, which we’re still going through right now, and what did we get out of it? China agreed to buy less soybeans than what we had last year, and we as farmers have suffered the collateral damage from this,” Bartman said.

With low trade prices and higher input costs, he warned, “we have not improved our economic situation for next year.”

Bartman is among farmers who are promoting investment in domestic uses for soybeans, including biofuels and plastics, though he acknowledges that a market the size of China’s will be “very difficult” to replace.

Muhammad said the turbulence in the soybean exports market shows that disruption of stable trade policy has consequences, which can hurt some sectors more than others.

The U.S. agriculture sector is often a political target in trade disputes, he said, because other countries understand the agricultural community’s significance in U.S. politics.

“It’s not a major export in the context of all exports, but it’s a politically viable community, and it carries a lot of heft in the context of trade agreements and trade policy because of the national security nature of food,” Muhammad said.

Farmers who are eligible for the Trump administration’s $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program should expect the USDA to announce payment rates for crops the week of Dec. 22, according to the department. Payments are limited to up to $155,000 per person or legal entity.

The program appears similar to a $10 billion aid package offered to farmers impacted by trade retaliation in 2018. Those subsidies did not cover all of farmers’ losses. 

For many farmers like Sherlock, these subsidies are a necessity for short-term survival. He said any farming subsidies he receives go straight to paying his bills and paying off loans.

“There will be a lot of producers, especially young, beginning producers, who won’t be able to make it and farm next year if we don’t do something to help them pay their bills from this year,” he said.

Even established producers are worried. Stafslien works land that’s been in his family since 1912, but the tough years are piling up. 

“This is my future. This is my retirement. I don’t have a 401k plan. I have a farm,” said Stafslien, who lives on the farm with his wife, Shannon, and their two kids. “If I have to keep burning through this equity, that’s very, very scary for my future and my family’s future.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Soybeans have been a top US ag export for decades. What happens when the top buyer stops buying? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A new vision for passenger rail is on track in southeastern Wisconsin. The MARK Rail project — short for Milwaukee Area-Racine-Kenosha Passenger Rail — has officially launched, replacing the long-discussed KRM commuter rail proposal with a faster, more focused intercity rail plan connecting Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Chicago.

The MARK Passenger Rail Commission held its inaugural meeting on Dec. 5, 2025, at Racine City Hall, where members adopted bylaws, elected officers and approved the next step in seeking federal funding. This marks a fairly significant milestone in a decades-long effort to restore passenger rail to the Lake Michigan shoreline.

“We believe this is a really transformative option for this region,” one project consultant said during the meeting. “It connects Racine, Kenosha and Milwaukee to a world-class economic region and cultural center to jobs, education, redevelopment and attracting new businesses.”

New name, new approach

This is not just a rebranding of the KRM proposal. Instead, MARK Rail is a strategic shift from a commuter model to intercity passenger rail, in line with new federal funding opportunities.

Unlike KRM, which envisioned multiple local stops, MARK Rail will prioritize speed and direct service between urban hubs. This change not only improves travel time but also positions the project for funding through the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification and Development Program, which supports intercity rail.

Federal funding pathway chosen

After reviewing options, the commission chose to pursue funding through the FRA’s Corridor ID program, rather than the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, which had been used in past KRM planning. The Corridor ID program offers a higher federal match, more technical support and a phased development structure.

“The Corridor ID program has a lower local match and allows us to build capacity over time,” said Wendy Messenger of DB Engineering & Consulting. “It’s a better fit for this project and gives us more flexibility with service design and coordination.”

According to documents shared at the meeting, the federal share under the FRA program can reach 90% during early phases, compared to 60% under FTA’s New Starts.

The newly formed MARK Passenger Rail Commission replaces earlier planning bodies such as the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority and the KRM Steering Committee. Its structure and purpose are outlined in the proposed bylaws, which were adopted at the Dec. 5 meeting.

“The purpose of the Commission is to advance the public interest by pursuing the development, implementation, and provision of passenger rail service,” the bylaws state.

The commission is governed by representatives from the cities of Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, with Racine Mayor Cory Mason as chair, former Revenue Secretary Peter Barca as vice chair, and Milwaukee Ald. Bob Bauman as secretary/treasurer. Each seat will be elected annually.

The bylaws allow for both regular and special meetings and permit in-person, virtual or hybrid formats to improve public access.

Partnership with Metra moves forward

Since the proposed rail line would share the Union Pacific corridor currently used by Metra’s UP-North line, coordination with Metra is essential. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the MARK Commission and Metra was introduced at the meeting, laying the groundwork for collaboration on scheduling, fares, equipment and infrastructure planning.

“Metra and the MARK Commission will work together to develop the Operations Plan that is mutually agreeable,” the MOU states. It also specifies that Metra’s support beyond standard duties may require a reimbursement agreement.

The MOU confirms that Metra will not be the operator, but will be a key stakeholder because of its current presence along the corridor and its expertise in rail operations.

Next steps and timeline

The commission voted to authorize preparation of an application for the next Corridor ID grant cycle, expected in early 2026. If selected, the project would then move into the Service Development Plan phase, followed by preliminary engineering, environmental review and, eventually, construction.

“We’re already doing a lot of the work now,” said Clayton Johanson of DB. “There will need to be refinements, but we’re in a really great position to continue to advance.”

The full timeline could stretch over several years, with local match funding becoming necessary starting in Step 2 of the Corridor ID process. Officials have discussed using remaining funds from Racine’s federal planning grant to help meet those needs.

A regional vision focused on cities

One strategic decision behind the project’s current direction is its urban focus. By centering the effort in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, the commission is avoiding the jurisdictional and political complications that kept KRM from becoming a reality.

This includes sidestepping debates over governance authority — particularly since regional transit authorities are no longer permitted under Wisconsin law. The MARK Commission, on the other hand, is legal under state statutes and modeled after similar rail commissions elsewhere in Wisconsin.

This story was originally published by Racine County Eye and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

New vision for passenger rail in southeastern Wisconsin could open job, business markets is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The agricultural industry is feeling the strain from President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, and Republican lawmakers are certainly hearing about it back home.

What elected officials will do about farmers’ frustrations is much less clear — an indication that relief could be far away.

“Members are beginning to talk about it, but it doesn’t feel as though a particular solution is coming into focus yet, and clearly the White House is going to be the most important player in these conversations,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee.

Ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in agricultural centers, from California to Wisconsin to New York, have increased pressure on members of Congress to provide fixes for farmers who say they are facing labor shortages.

In Wisconsin, for example, a 2023 University of Wisconsin study found that 70% of labor on the state’s dairy farms was done by undocumented workers. Many of those farmers have turned to existing temporary visas — like the H-2A visa, a seasonal agricultural visa — to staff their farms. The Trump administration moved to strip back labor protections for farmers hiring workers on the visa earlier this year, in an effort to streamline H-2A visas.

But those visas are inherently limited for year-round work, like at dairy farms.

The program is also associated with high costs and a slow-moving bureaucracy. Democrats and immigrant advocates said the administration’s move put workers at risk of abuse and exploitation. Approximately 17% of agricultural workers have an H-2A visa.

There are currently several proposed reforms floating around the Capitol.

A bipartisan bill introduced in May by Reps. Dan Newhouse and Zoe Lofgren proposes streamlining the H-2A visa process and providing visas for year-round agricultural employers.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden has proposed legislation that would allow undocumented farmworkers to gain legal employment status, as long as they haven’t committed a crime. Both immigrants and their employers would be required to acknowledge the worker’s status and pay a fine.

“We got to understand, at this point these people are our neighbors. Our kids go to school together, and they’re part of our communities,” Van Orden said. “I don’t want these people having to hide underneath a trailer when immigration shows up.”

Van Orden’s bill has no co-sponsors.

Lawmakers formed a task force in 2023 to consider possible reforms to the H-2A visa program and improve the industry’s reliable labor shortage.

The Republican-majority House Committee on Agriculture has readied a bill that largely follows task force recommendations — which include proposals to streamline administrative paperwork, expedite application review by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and change the wage system — to overhaul the H-2A program.

Committee chair Rep. Glenn Thompson said the bill is awaiting “technical assistance” from the Department of Labor. That final step had been delayed by shutdown furloughs, he said. The Department of Labor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We’re very close to introducing a very strong, I’ll call it a tripartisan bill, because that includes Republicans, Democrats and individuals from the industry,” Thompson said.

The bill draft is expected to be ready for public review by early January.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat on the agriculture committee, however, says he hasn’t heard from his Republican colleagues or the White House on the issue.

“There’s been no communication from my colleagues on the other side and from this administration,” he said.

Republicans say the White House is engaged on the issue. Thompson told NOTUS that he’s been in “frequent discussions” with the White House and the Department of Agriculture about immigrant farmworkers.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who also sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said the White House is “in the mood here to engage” on farmworker visas.

“A while back, the president acknowledged in a speech that we got to up the game on having more and simpler processes for having farm workers available. I know we feel that in California with our specialty crops,” LaMalfa said.

Trump in June suggested that farms would get a pass in the deportation crackdown — a statement that senior administration officials seemed to disagree with.

Immigration advocates haven’t been happy with the administration’s visa policy changes thus far.

Alexandra Sossa, the chief executive officer with the Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project, said that her organization is “not in favor” of the H-2A visa program, which it associates with “human labor trafficking and labor exploitation.”

And now, with the ongoing immigration raids, she says, farmworkers who are brought to the country under the visa program fear deportation, and those who are considering coming under the program are apprehensive about doing so.

“We are talking about workers who wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and start working at 5 a.m. and end working around 9 to 10 p.m., Monday to Sunday. So that’s not easy to find, and it’s a difficult job to do. The consequences on the economy are reflected when you go to the grocery store to buy food,” Sossa said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are calling for larger immigration reform to address the dangerous working conditions that the H-2A program has led to, while also giving a bigger pathway to work.

“When people are exploited, we’ve got to crack down on that,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat on the House Committee on Agriculture, said about the concerns regarding H-2A visas. “But I just think the climate that’s been created by this administration makes it difficult for some Republicans to even want to talk about the issue.”

“I hear from farmers all the time about concerns that their labor force will disappear, or that they can’t count on workers,” McGovern said.

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Farmers are feeling the squeeze from Trump’s mass deportations. Congress isn’t close to a fix. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.