THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And now that he is going national with his disastrous copycat Trump immigration pogrom, Wisconsin farmers are afraid of what they started.

With 380 cows, the process would take all morning, before it was time to start all over again for the afternoon and night milkings. Hours of gritty, grueling work would ultimately lead to the production of hundreds of pounds of dairy bound for high-end pizza parlors up and down the East Coast via Bruenig’s buyer, a Wisconsin-based cheese manufacturer.

Bruenig said maintaining a reliable workforce — seven out of nine are immigrants from Latin and Central America — is a critical part to keeping his business afloat.

“I couldn’t do all of this and at the same time, run the business,” he said. “The most important thing is, who’s willing to do the job, willing to train and improve every day, and that’s what my staff really wants. We are always working on getting better.”

These days, Bruenig’s employees look much like the rest of the labor force powering Wisconsin’s $43.4 billion dairy industry, more than 40 percent of which is made up of immigrants, according to a conservative estimate from a 2009 University of Wisconsin-Madison study. Many of them — like Sancristobal and Gonzalez — are undocumented.

The importance of immigrant labor to dairy may come as a surprise to some who have followed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s trajectory on the issue as he’s gone from a swing state governor to a 2016 presidential contender. Critics say Walker’s rightward drift reflects a tendency to capitulate to the whims of the Republican party’s base, particularly on social issues, no matter what the realities on the ground may be.

Once upon a time, the Evil Koch Owned Homunculus Scvott Walker supported a path to citizenship. Now that he has seen how that idea will end all his hopes of the White House he has gone all out to out Trump the Trump. And that scares the farmers who elected him and need their immigrant labor to do the job that the home grown crowd won't do. What ever will they do?