The Worst Job In New York: Immigrant America

so I'm here at a dairy farm in New York and I am learning how to milk cows the smell right here is it's pretty intense [Music] okay see me when we think about immigration being a controversial issue we usually think of places like Arizona and Texas but actually New York State has become such a hotbed for immigration enforcement and the main reason is that agriculture and dairy farms rely on immigrant labor so much immigrants play a critical role in the American food production system chances are the food you ate today was planted harvested impact by workers who were born in Mexico and Central America Dairy is no exception milking cows is a dirty monotonous job that not a lot of Americans want to do so most u.s. dairy farms rely on foreigners to fill entry-level positions and overnight shifts the problem is dairy farms don't have a way to recruit immigrant workers legally because the government doesn't allow them to participate in the h-2a agricultural guest worker program that program is for seasonal farm work only not year-round work like milking so since they can't get workers legally most dairy farms hired immigrants illy Congress's refusal to create a guest worker program for dairy has New York farmers on edge New York State is the country's top producer of Greek yogurt and third biggest producer of milk but right in the middle of the state's most important dairy producing region is one of the largest immigrant detention facilities outside of Arizona Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ice as the agency is known and the Border Patrol agents who work along the sleepy u.s. Canadian border have made it their mission to make sure that facilities beds stay full and all the undocumented farmworkers in the area make for an easy way to fill their quotas dairy farmers near the immigrant detention facility are irate with prospects for immigration reform dead for the foreseeable future they constantly worry that their workers will be deported and that they won't have enough people to keep their cows milked adding another layer of uncertainty to an already uncertain business we went to upstate New York to try to understand the cat-and-mouse game that's going on between dairy farms and immigration authorities a game that we as taxpayers fund the first thing I wanted to know was whether there's actually any truth to farmers claim that they can't find enough Americans to do entry-level milking work so I decided to conduct a little experiment outside an unemployment office just a few minutes drive from the immigrant detention center and a handful of dairy farms excuse me y'all looking for work kind of doing a little poll are you looking for work right now yeah would you be interested in we're gonna dairy farm bushings for milking or something yeah milking parlor what time - what time - am denude it's a long shift right No okay all right would you be interested in working on a dairy farm by chance thank you no right now it's not my kind of job must e'en I'm at an age where I don't want to do that anymore I'm surprised they don't kind of like a shitload of Mexicans we willing to do that huh they ship the ball back to Mexico hey guys I see a quick question oh that's espanol free see it pays about 19 with dollars plus housing kiddo foreign policy Korean Callaghan naturia okay they've only been these unemployed Americans largely negative reactions to the idea of milking had me curious so I found a farm that would let me work on it as long as I didn't reveal its name and location because it hires an authorized workers and doesn't want to be targeted by ice [Music] when I arrived I quickly realized that I had to forget about the romantic image of the old farmer milking a single cow into a bucket dairy farms these days even family-owned farms have to be big and efficient in order to stay competitive 24 hours a day 365 days a year hundreds if not thousands of cows are being herded into little rooms like this one to be hooked up to machines that pump the milk out as another thing out for kiss on scenario social workers get kicked they get on and they do the same thing over and over again so I've been doing this for about ten minutes so far and be very happy to maybe not be doing it after about six or seven hours of milking hundreds of cows the entire parlour is cleaned out this means using a squeegee to remove all the cow manure from the parlor floor here's a trail of cow manure here that we're gonna sweep down the pony tall fella after a while it just starts so it's like Taco Bell [Music] the guys I worked with that day were good at their jobs some had been on the same farm for more than a decade but they won't be working there much longer many of them are now in the process of being deported because they were rounded up in a nice raid a few months earlier the owner of the farm told me that these guys are like family he spoke to us on the condition of anonymity because he fears retribution from immigration authorities for speaking out I am tired of the inaction in Washington we're trying to run a business today they were the ones that are caught in the cross the crosshairs of the between them the government that makes the laws and the other agency that has to enforce the laws and yeah the dudes he's enforcement they're just doing their job but we're all trying to run a business and the government has not given us a way to legitimately have an act readily access source of laborers that work on the dairy farm so what incentives are to grow our when at any given time all our labor could be taken away the Department of Homeland Security refused our repeated requests for an interview but I spoke to Martin Herren who worked for ice from 1998 until he retired in 2011 he told me that deportation quotas became an increasingly high priority at Isis regional headquarters in Buffalo during his tenure I was the officer in charge at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia now Buffalo were not like a facility down on the border on the southern border Buffalo's on the northern border we don't have the large amount of Hispanic and Mexican populations that they would have down south so it was more difficult for Buffalo to achieve the numbers that they wanted so Buffalo had to work a little harder to get him and bufflehead had become a little more inventive and ways to to get the numbers out there and that's removal numbers how many removed from the country so so they didn't look good I think they wanted big numbers we are the low-hanging fruit it's very easy just to go out into a farm and look for people they have a facility they need to keep full these people are very done not aggressive so if they're asked to go they go the Mexicans yes the Hispanics yeah so yeah it's it's pretty easy to to get them there's been instances airports where people the employer be taking their people with a ticket in their hand maybe go back to their country and the ice picks them up Playboy and puts them in the jail just to get the number just to get the number and who pays for all that you and me and every other taxpayer it's so things like a weird yeah weird way to spend money yes there's an interesting dynamic going on around these farms I think I'd agree I'd agree and I know the farmers would they don't want immigration nosing around um they yeah they just wanna do their you know to do their work and let these people do their work and get their products out but while all of this is annoying to farmers and bad for business the people who really get screwed by Congress's refusal to create a functioning legal immigration system are foreign workers themselves workers are getting stopped and questioned and detained with almost no provocation whatsoever Brandon Mallory is a labor recruiter based out of Rochester New York he's worked closely with the agricultural community in upstate New York for thirty years there's an immigration holding the tension facility right in our backyard one of the largest agricultural producing areas in the state you have a immigration detention center there I'm not sure why was put there but I think they're there they're determined to use it this determination to use the detention center has created a climate of fear among Hispanics in western New York a climate of fear born from how immigration authorities and local police tend to target people while doing the simplest daily activities like grocery shopping going to church or doing the laundry Brian Hughes is an American who works on a dairy farm near Newfane New York the night before our interview six of his Mexican co-workers were picked up by immigration authorities in a grocery store parking lot we have the arrangement where a guy shows up to the vehicle give us a ride to go to a grocery shopping once a week and it's all we were doing I went I went for the first trip and all the way there there's the trip were there and sheriff Aaron I think we didn't think nothing of it we made it all the way back he loads up for a second group of guys to go back and do the same thing he didn't make it back yeah pulled over and he took six guys and I thought they were doings grocery shopping they weren't breaking any laws they have a lot to worry about they just can't go to the store they just like it like what happened last night they just can't go to the store I have to have somebody go for him they can't they can't move freely they can Jose and Inga's is a US citizen who manages a farm in water port New York they go shopping at 11 o'clock at night because they don't put their what they're afraid to go on the day that's when the Border Patrol strikes during the day pretty much because I mean if you go and I mean you don't put much attention one guy go here one guy there but that's not mine but I mean if you go in a car four or five guys you can you know I mean a lot of times they don't even leave the farm anymore those guys somebody I shot for them there's three words sometimes 16 hours and they hate to stay in the farm all the time so I mean somebody great could you bring me groceries so it's happened a lot unlike Arizona and a few other states New York doesn't have a law that allows the local police to ask for the immigration papers of people they suspect of being in the country illegally but a number of people who live near the detention center both undocumented immigrants and native-born citizens of Hispanic descent told us they've been asked for immigration documents during routine traffic stops Tiburcio for example is in the country illegally he doesn't have a driver's license so he and some other Mexican guys pay a licensed driver to take them to work one day the car was pulled over by the local police while on their way to the farm Purcell policías normal meant a condo parole carros is DQ algebra we pronto license here it was L condom toast IV n include this place Passover atrocity ho des papeles yo le digo lo único que tengo simple support american psalmist resolutely in the here Ambati ya miss Pizarro in a donut el carro it was your beta medicine given all of it's not medicine brew Co paid $5,000 to get out of the detention center he's now in the process of being deported back to Mexico after 16 years in the United States he's married and has a child who's a US citizen alexis is an undocumented dairy worker who's been in the US for ten years he's married to Estella a US citizen by birth biked Abruzzo alexis was asked for his immigration papers during a routine traffic stop when he was taken into detention the immigration authorities offered him a deal with stola him to him in a song cue and Rondo may be honest in the preguntas give him the throne ha is any of my amigos he kissing carrion article may use killing three Amish empty even a hurry of liberalism you ever fulfill any video sorry kid you know there is no poor most populous get to make it as REO we are all of these key the positive it's not just undocumented workers who are being targeted while out in the community increasingly aggressive efforts to fill deportation quotas are also affecting Hispanics who are citizens or legal permanent residents being a black American I mean I'm obviously an American I don't ever get stopped you know not in not questioned by immigration officials I think I identified as an American but there's many many Hispanics in this country that are also Americans there is no doubt that there's there's racial profiling going on I mean this this happens quite frequently and of course the people that are doing it would never admit to such I asked investigator Michael meadow of New York State Police in Albion New York if he had any comment on accusations of racial profiling he said quote I don't know if anyone out there who specifically targeting these people ice and Border Patrol wouldn't talk to me but I posed the racial profiling question to Martin Herron since he's been retired from ice for three years I was hoping he could speak about the issue more candidly how can we ever say that we're not profiling you know especially if you're speaking about you know somebody pulling over somebody Hispanic or somebody who has an accent unofficially I believe it would be profiling I I don't know how else you could do it it's a dirty word profiling because we're not we can't profile but you know how do police do their work if they don't have someone kind of an edge so it's not fair to treat them treat them like that and it's not the farmer and it's not the Mexican it's a government they're the ones that set the set this game up the wait to be as it is yeah you're right I'm right yeah it's the government yeah they're the ones that draw the line in the same they're the ones that call him a criminal their supply another supplying they're supplying no more late labor than what's needed I used to complain Isis you know they're taking American jobs they're not taking anything that's not just laying there dan wolf is a dairy farmer who used to employ unauthorized workers a couple years ago the two Mexican guys who worked his overnight milking shift were stopped by the local police the police then called the Border Patrol who detained them Dan suddenly found himself without an overnight milking crew wondering how he was gonna get his cows milked so if you don't have a reliable human labor force what's the alternative it's one go out of business the other one find ways to adopt the equipment and so forth that maybe can help do some of those things dan then showed me exactly how he's adapted to his labor uncertainty problem and the immigration reforms stalemate in Washington just beyond this room is the milking area which is a very different kind of milking area than we've seen at other farms instead of having a milking parlor where all the cows are herded and it wants and there are people putting the suction cups on the udders dad has a fully robotic farm here where the cows come into this area and then the robot sort of works its magic after that yeah once those that the cows in there by her weight on the platform then it starts its process of moving underneath remembering the coordinates of where it found the teats the last time and then attaching the teacups to begin the milking there's a device that scans for off-color and for conductivity of the milk of the milk and and if it's unsaleable the dump site is this running 24 hours a day that shuts down twice a day to wash dan had five Mexican employees before he got the robotic milkers but he's been able to let them go because the robots do just about everything on the farm dan is relieved that he solved his labor uncertainty problem but it came in a pretty high price each robot costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and can only handle about 50 cows per day so to go fully robotic as dan has large farms are looking at an upfront investment of about one to two million dollars which explains why only about 1% of dairy farms in New York State have gone even partially robotic nothing any more satisfying in any job particularly even for us in agriculture great people that want to be part of the action what you're doing but when you can't find them you have to decide is this the business that we want to have the kind of money we've got invested in at risk because if you don't do it right profitability turns around overnight but this is the choice that dairy farms are having to make employ immigrants and risk losing your labor force or mortgage the farm and invest millions in robots neither choice seems ideal but why don't dairy farms just raise wages so they can attract American workers well for one dairy farms have thin margins and milk markets are notoriously unstable so doubling or tripling the wage for milkers from their current level of nine to eleven dollars per hour would put many family-owned farms at risk or in the red doubling or tripling wages paid to entry-level workers would also force farms to raise the salaries of management positions which tend to be held by Americans Farms would need to earn more for their products in order to cover these higher labor costs but dairy farms are what economists call price takers meaning that they have little control over the amount that they're paid for their products meanwhile taxpayers are paying on average twelve thousand five hundred dollars to deport workers who do a dirty smelly job that most of us prefer not to do no matter what it pays once deported some of these people turn right around and return to work illegally in the United States a Vassar - esposa si si tu estas de pata not only another key Gerasimenko puts me familia stanky Frances at Madeira you gotta think of everything perrito como esta la Satoshi on jennamariea sana of all very bizarre places una pregunta muy difícil de responder pero cuando cuando la personas pasen por esto Berta Satoshi on the hablando de tu familia - not important enough eh maintains Jaeger a very familiar name for there was a possum Frances is una gran gran pregunta de facing the responder party you're necessary a pasar en si si puedo hacer you know everything will be a person no second I says anybody that is what everything important my opinion on immigration is it's a battle that cannot be won then it's some at some point we are going to have to come up with whether it's an official or unofficial amnesty this is something that can't be stopped especially with with the Hispanics I feel it's just a migration for these people migration north and if you're standing on one side of the street and you've got nothing and you look over on the other side of the street and they've got everything and to me it's just common sense why can't across the street if we had a legal immigration system that was consistent with our country's economic needs farmers wouldn't have to hide their faces like hardened criminals farm workers wouldn't have to seclude themselves on their farms and we as taxpayers wouldn't have to spend billions of dollars to porting peaceful people to do a job even unemployed Americans don't want to do Congress has the ability to fix all of this in June 2013 two-thirds of the Senate voted in favor of a bipartisan immigration bill that among other things would give American farms a way to recruit foreign workers legally however Republicans in the House of Representatives allowed the bill to die without bringing it up for a vote so for the foreseeable future our milk cheese ice cream butter and yogurt will continue to come from the labor of people who have no way to enter the US legally who essentially have no rights or legal protections and who have to worry about being apprehended any time they leave the house this absurd unjust system is easy enough to fix it will just take a little courage from Congress to do so [Music] [Music]

Channel: VICE News

Views: 2,143,612

Rating: 4.7127085 out of 5

Keywords: dairy farm, VICE, illegal, alien, mexico, Illegal Immigration (Legal Subject), terrorism, guatemala, travel, United States Of America (Country), immigration reform, immigration, deported, farming, undocumented, immigration and customs enforcement, VICE News, news, deporting, VICE Magazine, documentary, interviews, world news, breaking news, happening now, documentaries, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, videos, funny, funny videos, world news 2018, zero tolerance policy, immigrant america

Id: QXUdozfL7iM

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 23 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/arefx]

<3 vice

[u/xzzz]

Just thought this was interesting. I drive by these types of farms a lot when traveling between Rochester and Buffalo (in order to avoid paying I-90 tolls).

[u/mistersaro]

I'm from genesee county and know this exact farm! I've met this family before and they're are good people but illegal work is necessary to keep wages low and milk prices down. Wow it's a small world huh

[u/ninsega]

My biggest problem with this is the attitude of many of these farmers. They are typically staunch conservatives until it comes to making more money and doing less work.

[u/BinaryMn]

Isn't just the dairy farms. I used to work on a farm in college for quick cash.