By Tom Still
MADISON, Wis. – Even the most ardent opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies might agree “open borders” aren’t good for national security, internal crime rates and some sectors of the economy.
Likewise, even solid supporters of President Trump’s crackdown may concede the “one-size-fits-all” approach to rounding up possible illegal immigrants and asking questions later can overshoot the mark.
Let’s put U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, the Republican House member from Wisconsin’s largely rural 3rd Congressional District, into the latter category.
Van Orden is a supporter of much of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. He also knows what side of his bread is buttered … with butter being a key word in a district that is home to almost half as many dairy cows (an estimated 300,000-plus) as it is people.
Cows don’t vote but people do. As Van Orden seeks re-election in 2026, he senses the current realities of farm life in his western and central Wisconsin district. He said so during the recent World Dairy Expo in Madison, which attracted dairy farmers from leading producer states such as California and Wisconsin as well as roughly 2,300 international attendees from about 90 countries.
“If we deported every (undocumented) agriculture worker today, our farms, dairies and construction industries would collapse,” said Van Orden, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee. “We must retain our current ag workforce, or America will become dependent on foreign nations for food – and that is unacceptable.
“I’m saying out loud what no Republican wants to say, that if we don’t retain our current agriculture labor workforce, our farms are going to close,” Van Orden added.
As an alternative, Van Orden is pushing H.R. 4748, the Agricultural Reform Act of 2025. The bill would change the H-2A program – which applies to temporary farm workers – by creating a year-long visa for migrant farm workers not already in the United States.
Anyone currently in the U.S. would need to leave and return. The bill would allow agricultural workers to travel freely between the U.S. and their home countries. Applicants would be required to pay a fee to be determined by the Secretary of Labor.
The program would involve one extra click on the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s app by allowing anyone who participates in the self-deportation program to be granted protected status for a year.
The bill says anyone with a criminal record, or who crossed the border during the Biden administration, would be barred. Workers whose only offense was entering the country without authorization to work, however, could still qualify.
It’s not a perfect fix; Van Orden himself described it as “an 80 percent solution.” One curious provision is the Biden era exclusion. If someone from Guatemala or Mexico arrived here before Inauguration Day 2025 to milk cows and shovel out stalls, it’s unlikely they did so because they favored former President Biden over Trump.
Still, it’s a start for two main reasons: First, not enough native-born Americans want to do the physical and often dirty work that comes with farming. Second, as rural populations age, there are fewer workers of any kind.
That’s why groups such as the American Dairy Coalition, the American Business Immigration Coalition and the Wisconsin Cheese Makers support reforming current law.
Statistics help tell the story: A 2023 survey by the UW-Madison School for Workers found that undocumented workers perform about 70% of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms. The same survey estimated more than 10,000 undocumented workers are employed on these dairy farms. Without them, researchers concluded, the state’s dairy industry would “collapse overnight.”
In a Congress harshly divided by the current shutdown, perhaps this bill is one small step down a more bipartisan path.
The “law of unintended consequences,” popularized by sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 1930s, says actions of people – and especially of government – can have unanticipated or unintended effects. In America’s Dairyland, immigration policies have produced sour milk that could be turned sweet by bipartisan cooperation.
Still is the former president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. He can be reached at tstill@wisconsintechnologycouncil.com.