Migrants wait throughout the night on May 10, 2023, in a dust storm at Gate 42, on land between the Rio Grande and the border wall, hoping they will be processed by immigration authorities before the expiration of Title 42. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)

It seems absurd to take the time to refute the preposterous claims about immigrants made by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in Wisconsin, including U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Sen. Ron Johnson. But the campaign of slander targeting vulnerable workers who milk our cows, pick our crops, build our roads and prop up our economy is genuinely dangerous.

Trump hit a new low when he claimed during Tuesday’s presidential debate that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Kamala Harris’ bemused reaction, laughing and shaking her head, reflected the feelings of a whole lot of viewers who were appalled to hear the former president spreading a racist internet fable from the debate stage. 

This was not a one-off. Outrageous lies about immigrants are the centerpiece of Republican campaigns this year.

On Monday, as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden held a press conference to turn a single criminal case against a Venezuelan immigrant into fodder for his reelection campaign in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District. 

“American citizens’ human rights are being violated. They’re being kidnapped, raped and murdered by criminal, illegal aliens, and it’s just got to stop,” Van Orden declared.

In reality, an extensive study led by Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky shows that immigrants are significantly less likely to be locked up for serious crimes than people born in the U.S. “From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Abramitzky said.

As dairy farmer John Rosenow, who lives in Van Orden’s district, told Redman, anti-immigrant rhetoric does nothing to help farmers like him, who employ some of the immigrants performing 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of those workers are not here legally and could be deported at any time, because Congress has failed to enact a visa program for year-round farm work. 

“If there’s one thing you can do to help us [it’s to] tone down the rhetoric,” Rosenow said he told Van Orden’s staff. “They’re doing all the work, and why do we select one person that does something wrong that’s an immigrant and make it like all immigrants are like that person?” Rosenow added. “We don’t do that for Americans. We’ve got plenty of bad white people around here that do bad things, and we don’t extrapolate that to everyone else.”

But stirring up white voters with race-baiting stories about immigrants is a vote-getter, Republicans figure. 

On Wednesday, Wisconsin’s Sen. Johnson joined Senate GOP colleagues in a press conference demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act “to protect integrity in U.S. elections and ensure only U.S. citizens can vote.” Republicans are threatening to shut down the U.S. government over the non-issue of alleged voting by undocumented immigrants — something that is already a felony. 

Instances of unauthorized immigrants voting are “so rare as to be statistically nonexistent,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told the Christian Science Monitor — hardly a “crisis” that merits the extreme measures Johnson and his colleagues are calling for.

For the most part, Democrats have responded to Republican alarmism about immigration by sticking to policy and brushing off the fearmongering and grotesque caricatures of immigrants. Taking the high road might be a smart political strategy, particularly for Harris, who is herself the child of immigrants and the first woman of color with a serious shot at the White House. Like Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, Harris has responded to race-baiting attacks by rising above them and encouraging Americans to do likewise, to “turn the page” on ugly, divisive politics, to embrace a big-hearted sense of ourselves as having “more in common than what divides us.” Calling out racism directly is a loser for candidates of color, political consultants advise.

At the same time, Democrats including Harris and Wisconsin’s incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin point out — correctly — that Republicans in Congress abandoned a bipartisan border security deal they’d helped negotiate because Trump told them to let it die so he could use immigration as a campaign cudgel.

It’s true that the incident shows the GOP’s lack of seriousness about tackling the U.S. immigration system they are constantly complaining about. But the border security bill also drew a lot of criticism from immigrant rights groups, particularly for the way it turns the U.S. asylum application process into a game of roulette, allowing a future administration to deny asylum protections, and changing the rules on a day to day basis when border crossings exceed a certain threshold.. Harris has pledged to sign it anyway if she’s elected.

That’s too bad, because the bill does nothing to address the issue she was charged with looking into as vice president: the root causes of mass migration. Nor will it stop people from sneaking across the border to fill jobs while employers are desperate for their labor — including on Wisconsin dairy farms. 

These workers are already vulnerable to exploitation. They come here with no legal protections and work long hours for low pay doing back-breaking jobs Americans won’t take. They pay taxes through wage withholdings into social safety net programs they can never access. 

To a lot of citizens they are invisible. Anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric casts them in an ugly glare, focusing resentment on people who are already living in tenuous circumstances. They are not only doing our dirty work, they are boosting the wages of U.S. workers and making our economy stronger.

The injustice of Republicans’ anti-immigrant libel, set beside immigrant contributions to the U.S. economy, is overwhelming. 

Political point-scoring aside, it would be nice to see Democrats stand up more forcefully on this topic, instead of tacitly agreeing with Republicans’ false claims that immigrants are harming our country. Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Baldwin this year in the U.S. Senate race, claims without evidence that immigrants are causing the lack of affordable housing and driving up the cost of health care. Baldwin has said she supports the bipartisan border security bill and wants to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. 

What we don’t hear enough about is that the big reason migrants pour across our southern border is because employers like the farmers here in Wisconsin demand it. Without those immigrants — if, for example, Trump launched his promised “mass deportation,” sending federal agents door to door to arrest undocumented workers — our dairy industry would go belly-up overnight.  

“Immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell writes in a recent column. “That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.”

Van Orden, in his recent press conference, acknowledged the contributions of immigrants to the dairy industry in his district, along with the construction and hospitality industries, and said that’s why he supports the H-2A visa program, which gives temporary visas to migrants to do seasonal farm work in the U.S.

But the H-2A program “means nothing to dairy farmers,” Rosenow told the Examiner, since it doesn’t apply to workers who labor year-round on dairy farms, as well as in all of the other industries Van Orden mentioned.

Instead of scapegoating, we owe hard-working immigrants a debt of gratitude. And we need to listen to employers like Rosenow, who are asking politicians to show some common decency and come up with policy solutions that acknowledge what they’ve known for decades: Our country benefits tremendously from immigrants.